Category: opinion

No, it’s not The Incentives—it’s you

There’s a narrative I find kind of troubling, but that unfortunately seems to be growing more common in science. The core idea is that the mere existence of perverse incentives is a valid and sufficient reason to knowingly behave in an antisocial way, just as long as one first acknowledges the existence of those perverse incentives. The way this dynamic usually unfolds is that someone points out some fairly serious problem with the way many scientists behave—say, our collective propensity to p-hack as if it’s going out of style, or the fact that we insist on submitting our manuscripts to publishers that are actively trying to undermine our interests—and then someone else will say, “I know, right—but what are you going to do, those are the incentives.”

As best I can tell, the words “it’s the incentives” are magic. Once they’re uttered by someone, natural law demands that everyone else involved in the conversation immediately stop whatever else they were doing, solemnly nod, and mumble something to the effect that, yes, the incentives are very bad, very bad indeed, and it’s a real tragedy that so many smart, hard-working people are being crushed under the merciless, gigantic boot of The System. Then there’s usually a brief pause, and after that, everyone goes back to discussing whatever they were talking about a moment earlier.

Perhaps I’m getting senile in my early middle age, but my anecdotal perception is that it used to be that, when somebody pointed out to a researcher that they might be doing something questionable, that researcher would typically either (a) argue that they weren’t doing anything questionable (often incorrectly, because there used to be much less appreciation for some of the statistical issues involved), or (b) look uncomfortable for a little while, allow an awkward silence to bloom, and then change the subject. In the last few years, I’ve noticed that uncomfortable discussions about questionable practices disproportionately seem to end with a chuckle or shrug, followed by a comment to the effect that we are all extremely sophisticated human beings who recognize the complexity of the world we live in, and sure it would be great if we lived in a world where one didn’t have to occasionally engage in shenanigans, but that would be extremely naive, and after all, we are not naive, are we?

There is, of course,  an element of truth to this kind of response. I’m not denying that perverse incentives exist; they obviously do. There’s no question that many aspects of modern scientific culture systematically incentivize antisocial behavior, and I don’t think we can or should pretend otherwise. What I do object to quite strongly is the narrative that scientists are somehow helpless in the face of all these awful incentives—that we can’t possibly be expected to take any course of action that has any potential, however small, to impede our own career development.

“I would publish in open access journals,” your friendly neighborhood scientist will say. “But those have a lower impact factor, and I’m up for tenure in three years.”

Or: “if I corrected for multiple comparisons in this situation, my effect would go away, and then the reviewers would reject the paper.”

Or: “I can’t ask my graduate students to collect an adequately-powered replication sample; they need to publish papers as quickly as they can so that they can get a job.”

There are innumerable examples of this kind, and they’ve become so routine that it appears many scientists have stopped thinking about what the words they’re saying actually mean, and instead simply glaze over and nod sagely whenever the dreaded Incentives are invoked.

A random bystander who happened to eavesdrop on a conversation between a group of scientists kvetching about The Incentives could be forgiven for thinking that maybe, just maybe, a bunch of very industrious people who generally pride themselves on their creativity, persistence, and intelligence could find some way to work around, or through, the problem. And I think they would be right. The fact that we collectively don’t see it as a colossal moral failing that we haven’t figured out a way to get our work done without having to routinely cut corners in the rush for fame and fortune is deeply troubling.

It’s also aggravating on an intellectual level, because the argument that we’re all being egregiously and continuously screwed over by The Incentives is just not that good. I think there are a lot of reasons why researchers should be very hesitant to invoke The Incentives as a justification for why any of us behave the way we do. I’ll give nine of them here, but I imagine there are probably others.

1. You can excuse anything by appealing to The Incentives

No, seriously—anything. Once you start crying that The System is Broken in order to excuse your actions (or inactions), you can absolve yourself of responsibility for all kinds of behaviors that, on paper, should raise red flags. Consider just a few behaviors that few scientists would condone:

  • Fabricating data or results
  • Regulary threatening to fire trainees in order to scare them into working harder
  • Deliberately sabotaging competitors’ papers or grants by reviewing them negatively

I think it’s safe to say most of us consider such practices to be thoroughly immoral, yet there are obviously people who engage in each of them. And when those people are caught or confronted, one of the most common justifications they fall back on is… you guessed it: The Incentives! When Diederik Stapel confessed to fabricating the data used in over 50 publications, he didn’t explain his actions by saying “oh, you know, I’m probably a bit of a psychopath”; instead, he placed much of the blame squarely on The Incentives:

I did not withstand the pressure to score, to publish, the pressure to get better in time. I wanted too much, too fast. In a system where there are few checks and balances, where people work alone, I took the wrong turn. I want to emphasize that the mistakes that I made were not born out of selfish ends.

Stapel wasn’t acting selfishly, you see… he was just subject to intense pressures. Or, you know, Incentives.

Or consider these quotes from a New York Times article describing Stapel’s unraveling:

In his early years of research — when he supposedly collected real experimental data — Stapel wrote papers laying out complicated and messy relationships between multiple variables. He soon realized that journal editors preferred simplicity. “They are actually telling you: ‘Leave out this stuff. Make it simpler,'” Stapel told me. Before long, he was striving to write elegant articles.

…

The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his hypothesis was valid. “I said — you know what, I am going to create the data set,” he told me.

Reading through such accounts, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Stapel’s self-narrative is strikingly similar to the one that gets tossed out all the time on social media, or in conference bar conversations: here I am, a good scientist trying to do an honest job, and yet all around me is a system that incentivizes deception and corner-cutting. What do you expect me to do?.

Curiously, I’ve never heard any of my peers—including many of the same people who are quick to invoke The Incentives to excuse their own imperfections—seriously endorse The Incentives as an acceptable justification for Stapel’s behavior. In Stapel’s case, the inference we overwhelmingly jump to is that there must be something deeply wrong with Stapel, seeing as the rest of us also face the same perverse incentives on a daily basis, yet we somehow manage to get by without fabricating data. But this conclusion should make us a bit uneasy, I think, because if it’s correct (and I think it is), it implies that we aren’t really such slaves to The Incentives after all. When our morals get in the way, we appear to be perfectly capable of resisting temptation. And I mean, it’s not even like it’s particularly difficult; I doubt many researchers actively have to fight the impulse to manipulate their data, despite the enormous incentives to do so. I submit that the reason many of us feel okay doing things like reporting exploratory results as confirmatory results, or failing to mention that we ran six other studies we didn’t report, is not really that The Incentives are forcing us to do things we don’t like, but that it’s easier to attribute our unsavory behaviors to unstoppable external forces than to take responsibility for them and accept the consequences.

Needless to say, I think this kind of attitude is fundamentally hypocritical. If we’re not comfortable with pariahs like Stapel blaming The Incentives for causing them to fabricate data, we shouldn’t use The Incentives as an excuse for doing things that are on the same spectrum, albeit less severe. If you think that what the words “I did not withstand the pressure to score” really mean when they fall out of Stapel’s mouth is something like “I’m basically a weak person who finds the thought of not being important so intolerable I’m willing to cheat to get ahead”, then you shouldn’t give yourself a free pass just because when you use that excuse, you’re talking about much smaller infractions. Consider the possibility that maybe, just like Stapel, you’re actually appealing to The Incentives as a crutch to avoid having to make your life very slightly more difficult.

2. It would break the world if everyone did it

When people start routinely accepting that The System is Broken and The Incentives Are Fucking Us Over, bad things tend to happen. It’s very hard to have a stable, smoothly functioning society once everyone believes (rightly or wrongly) that gaming the system is the only way to get by. Imagine if every time you went to your doctor—and I’m aware that this analogy won’t work well for people living outside the United States—she sent you to get a dozen expensive and completely unnecessary medical tests, and then, when prompted for an explanation, simply shrugged and said “I know I’m not an angel—but hey, them’s The Incentives.” You would be livid—even though it’s entirely true (at least in the United States; other developed countries seem to have figured this particular problem out) that many doctors have financial incentives to order unnecessary tests.

To be clear, I’m not saying perverse incentives never induce bad behavior in medicine or other fields. Of course they do. My point is that practitioners in other fields at least appear to have enough sense not to loudly trumpet The Incentives as a reasonable justification for their antisocial behavior—or to pat themselves on the back for being the kind of people who are clever enough to see the fiendish Incentives for exactly what they are. My sense is that when doctors, lawyers, journalists, etc. fall prey to The Incentives, they generally consider that to be a source of shame. I won’t go so far as to suggest that we scientists take pride in behaving badly—we obviously don’t—but we do seem to have collectively developed a rather powerful form of learned helplessness that doesn’t seem to be matched by other communities. Which is a fortunate thing, because if every other community also developed the same attitude, we would be in a world of trouble.

3. You are not special

Individual success in science is, to a first approximation, a zero-sum game—at least in the short term. many scientists who appeal to The Incentives seem to genuinely believe that opting out of doing the right thing is a victimless crime. I mean, sure, it might make the system a bit less efficient overall… but that’s just life, right? It’s not like anybody’s actually suffering.

Well yeah, people actually do suffer. There are many scientists who are willing to do the right things—to preregister their analysis plans, to work hard to falsify rather than confirm their hypotheses, to diligently draw attention to potential confounds that complicate their preferred story, and so on. When you assert your right to opt out of these things because apparently your publications, your promotions, and your students are so much more important than everyone else’s, you’re cheating those people.

No, really, you are. If you don’t like to think of yourself as someone who cheats other people, don’t reflexively collapse on a crutch made out of stainless steel Incentives any time someone questions your process. You are not special. Your publications, job, and tenure are not more important than other people’s. The fact that there are other people in your position engaging in the same behaviors doesn’t mean you and your co-authors are all very sophisticated, and that the people who refuse to cut corners are naive simpletons. What it actually demonstrates is that, somewhere along the way, you developed the reflexive ability to rationalize away behavior that you would disapprove of in others and that, viewed dispassionately, is clearly damaging to science.

4. You (probably) have no data

It’s telling that appeals to The Incentives are rarely supported by any actual data. It’s simply taken for granted that engaging in the practice in question would be detrimental to one’s career. The next time you’re tempted to blame The System for making you do bad things, you might want to ask yourself this: Do you actually know that, say, publishing in PLOS ONE rather than [insert closed society journal of your choice] would hurt your career? If so, how do you know that? Do you have any good evidence for it, or have you simply accepted it as stylized fact?

Coming by the kind of data you’d need to answer this question is actually not that easy: it’s not enough to reflexively point to, say, the fact that some journals have higher impact factors than others, To identify the utility-maximizing course of action, you’d need to integrate over both benefits and costs, and the costs are not always so obvious. For example, the opportunity cost of submitting your paper to a “good” journal will be offset to some extent by the likelihood of faster publication (no need to spend two years racking up rejections at high-impact venues), by the positive image you send to at least some of your peers that you support open scientific practices, and so on.

I’m not saying that a careful consideration of the pros and cons of doing the right thing would usually lead people to change their minds. It often won’t. What I’m saying is that people who blame The Incentives for forcing them to submit their papers to certain journals, to tell post-hoc stories about their work, or to use suboptimal analytical methods don’t generally support their decisions with data, or even with well-reasoned argument. The defense is usually completely reflexive—which should raise our suspicion that it’s also just a self-serving excuse.

5. It (probably) won’t matter anyway

This one might hurt a bit, but I think it’s important to consider—particularly for early-career researchers. Let’s suppose you’re right that doing the right thing in some particular case would hurt your career. Maybe it really is true that if you comprehensively report in your paper on all the studies you ran, and not just the ones that “worked”, your colleagues will receive your work less favorably. In such cases it may seem natural to think that there has to be a tight relationship between the current decision and the global outcome—i.e., that if you don’t drop the failed studies, you won’t get a tenure-track position three years down the road. After all, you’re focusing on that causal relationship right now, and it seems so clear in your head!

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?), reality doesn’t operate that way. Outcomes in academia are multiply determined and enormously complex. You can tell yourself that getting more papers out faster will get you a job if it makes you feel better, but that doesn’t make it true. If you’re a graduate student on the job market these days, I have sad news for you: you’re probably not getting a tenure-track job no matter what you do. It doesn’t matter how many p-hacked papers you publish, or how thinly you slice your dissertation into different “studies”; there are not nearly enough jobs to go around for everyone who wants one.

Suppose you’re right, and your sustained pattern of corner-cutting is in fact helping you get ahead. How far ahead do you think it’s helping you get? Is it taking you from a 3% chance of getting a tenure-track position at an R1 university to an 80% chance? Almost certainly not. Maybe it’s increasing that probability from 7% to 11%; that would still be a non-trivial relative increase, but it doesn’t change the fact that, for the average grad student, there is no full-time faculty position waiting at the end of the road. Despite what the environment around you may make you think, the choice most graduate students and postdocs face is not actually between (a) maintaining your integrity and “failing” out of science or (b) cutting a few corners and achieving great fame and fortune as a tenured professor. The Incentives are just not that powerful. The vastly more common choice you face as a trainee is between (a) maintaining your integrity and having a pretty low chance of landing a permanent research position, or (b) cutting a bunch of corners that threaten the validity of your work and having a slightly higher (but still low in absolute terms) chance of landing a permanent research position. And even that’s hardly guaranteed, because you never know when there’s someone on a hiring committee who’s going to be turned off by the obvious p-hacking in your work.

The point is, the world is complicated, and as a general rule, very few things—including the number of publications you produce—are as important as they seem to be when you’re focusing on them in the moment. If you’re an early-career researcher and you regularly find yourself strugging between doing what’s right and doing what isn’t right but (you think) benefits your career, you may want to take a step back and dispassionately ask yourself whether this integrity versus expediency conflict is actually a productive way to frame things. Instead, consider the alternative framing I suggested above: you are most likely going to leave academia eventually, no matter what you do, so why not at least try to see the process through with some intellectual integrity? And I mean, if you’re really so convinced that The System is Broken, why would you want to stay in it anyway? Do you think standards are going to change dramatically in the next few years? Are you laboring under the impression that you, of all people, are going to somehow save science?

This brings us directly to the next point…

6. You’re (probably) not going to “change things from the inside”

Over the years, I’ve talked to quite a few early-career researchers who have told me that while they can’t really stop engaging in questionable research practices right now without hurting their career, they’re definitely going to do better once they’re in a more established position. These are almost invariably nice, well-intentioned people, and I don’t doubt that they genuinely believe what they say. Unfortunately, what they say is slippery, and has a habit of adapting to changing circumstances. As a grad student or postdoc, it’s easy to think that once you get a faculty position, you’ll be able to start doing research the “right” way. But once you get a faculty position, it then turns out you need to get papers and grants in order to get tenure (I mean, who knew?), so you decide to let the dreaded Incentives win for just a few more years. And then, once you secure tenure, well, now the problem is that your graduate students also need jobs, just like you once did, so you can’t exactly stop publishing at the same rate, can you? Plus, what would all your colleagues think if you effectively said, “oh, you should all treat the last 15 years of my work with skepticism—that was just for tenure”?

I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions. I’m sure there are. But I can think of at least a half-dozen people off-hand who’ve regaled me with me some flavor of “once I’m in a better position” story, and none of them, to my knowledge, have carried through on their stated intentions in a meaningful way. And I don’t find this surprising: in most walks of life, course correction generally becomes harder, not easier, the longer you’ve been traveling on the wrong bearing. So if part of your unhealthy respect for The Incentives is rooted in an expectation that those Incentives will surely weaken their grip on you just as soon as you reach the next stage of your career, you may want to rethink your strategy. The Incentives are not going to dissipate as you move up the career ladder; if anything, you’re probably going to have an increasingly difficult time shrugging them off.

7. You’re not thinking long-term

One of the most frustrating aspects of appeals to The Incentives is that they almost invariably seem to focus exclusively on the short-to-medium term. But the long term also matters. And there, I would argue that The Incentives very much favor a radically different—and more honest—approach to scientific research. To see this, we need only consider the ongoing “replication crisis” in many fields of science. One thing that I think has been largely overlooked in discussions about the current incentive structure of science is what impact the replication crisis will have on the legacies of a huge number of presently famous scientists.

I’ll tell you what impact it will have: many of those legacies will be completely zeroed out. And this isn’t just hypothetical scaremongering. It’s happening right now to many former stars of psychology (and, I imagine, other fields I’m less familiar with). There are many researchers we can point to right now who used to be really famous (like, major-chunks-of-the-textbook famous), are currently famous-with-an-asterisk, and will in all likelihood, be completely unknown again within a couple of decades. The unlucky ones are probably even fated to become infamous—their entire scientific legacies eventually reduced to footnotes in cautionary histories illustrating how easily entire areas of scientific research can lose their footing when practitioners allow themselves to be swept away by concerns about The Incentives.

You probably don’t want this kind of thing to happen to you. I’m guessing you would like to retire with at least some level of confidence that your work, while maybe not Earth-shattering in its implications, isn’t going to be tossed on the scrap heap of history one day by a new generation of researchers amazed at how cavalier you and your colleagues once were about silly little things like “inferential statistics” and “accurate reporting”. So if your justification for cutting corners is that you can’t otherwise survive or thrive in the present environment, you should consider the prospect—and I mean, really take some time to think about it—that any success you earn within the next 10 years by playing along with The Incentives could ultimately make your work a professional joke within the 20 years after that.

8. It achieves nothing and probably makes things worse

Hey, are you a scientist? Yes? Great, here’s a quick question for you: do you think there’s any working scientist on Planet Earth who doesn’t already know that The Incentives are fucked up? No? I didn’t think so. Which means you really don’t need to keep bemoaning The Incentives; I promise you that you’re not helping to draw much-needed attention to an important new problem nobody’s recognized before. You’re not expressing any deep insight by pointing out that hiring committees prefer applicants with lots of publications in high-impact journals to applicants with a few publications in journals no one’s ever heard of. If your complaints are achieving anything at all, they’re probably actually making things worse by constantly (and incorrectly) reminding everyone around you about just how powerful The Incentives are.

Here’s a suggestion: maybe try not talking about The Incentives for a while. You could even try, I don’t know, working against The Incentives for a change. Or, if you can’t do that, just don’t say anything at all. Probably nobody will miss anything, and the early-career researchers among us might even be grateful for a respite from their senior colleagues’ constant reminder that The System—the very same system those senior colleagues are responsible for creating!—is so fucked up.

9. It’s your job

This last one seems so obvious it should go without saying, but it does need saying, so I’ll say it: a good reason why you should avoid hanging bad behavior on The Incentives is that you’re a scientist, and trying to get closer to the truth, and not just to tenure, is in your fucking job description. Taxpayers don’t fund you because they care about your career; they fund you to learn shit, cure shit, and build shit. If you can’t do your job without having to regularly excuse sloppiness on the grounds that you have no incentive to be less sloppy, at least have the decency not to say that out loud in a crowded room or Twitter feed full of people who indirectly pay your salary. Complaining that you would surely do the right thing if only these terrible Incentives didn’t exist doesn’t make you the noble martyr you think it does; to almost anybody outside your field who has a modicum of integrity, it just makes you sound like you’re looking for an easy out. It’s not sophisticated or worldly or politically astute, it’s just dishonest and lazy. If you find yourself unable to do your job without regularly engaging in practices that clearly devalue the very science you claim to care about, and this doesn’t bother you deeply, then maybe the problem is not actually The Incentives—or at least, not The Incentives alone. Maybe the problem is You.

whether or not you should pursue a career in science still depends mostly on that thing that is you

I took the plunge a couple of days ago and answered my first question on Quora. Since Brad Voytek won’t shut up about how great Quora is, I figured I should give it a whirl. So far, Brad is not wrong.

The question in question is: “How much do you agree with Johnathan Katz’s advice on (not) choosing science as a career? Or how realistic is it today (the article was written in 1999)?” The Katz piece referred to is here. The gist of it should be familiar to many academics; the argument boils down to the observation that relatively few people who start graduate programs in science actually end up with permanent research positions, and even then, the need to obtain funding often crowds out the time one has to do actual science. Katz’s advice is basically: don’t pursue a career in science. It’s not an optimistic piece.

My answer is, I think, somewhat more optimistic. Here’s the full text:

The real question is what you think it means to be a scientist. Science differs from many other professions in that the typical process of training as a scientist–i.e., getting a Ph.D. in a scientific field from a major research university–doesn’t guarantee you a position among the ranks of the people who are training you. In fact, it doesn’t come close to guaranteeing it; the proportion of PhD graduates in science who go on to obtain tenure-track positions at research-intensive universities is very small–around 10% in most recent estimates. So there is a very real sense in which modern academic science is a bit of a pyramid scheme: there are a relatively small number of people at the top, and a lot of people on the rungs below laboring to get up to the top–most of whom will, by definition, fail to get there.

If you equate a career in science solely with a tenure-track position at a major research university, and are considering the prospect of a Ph.D. in science solely as an investment intended to secure that kind of position, then Katz’s conclusion is difficult to escape. He is, in most respects, correct: in most biomedical, social, and natural science fields, science is now an extremely competitive enterprise. Not everyone makes it through the PhD; of those who do, not everyone makes it into–and then through–one more more postdocs; and of those who do that, relatively few secure tenure-track positions. Then, of those few “lucky” ones, some will fail to get tenure, and many others will find themselves spending much or most of their time writing grants and managing people instead of actually doing science. So from that perspective, Katz is probably right: if what you mean when you say you want to become a scientist is that you want to run your own lab at a major research university, then your odds of achieving that at the outset are probably not very good (though, to be clear, they’re still undoubtedly better than your odds of becoming a successful artist, musician, or professional athlete). Unless you have really, really good reasons to think that you’re particularly brilliant, hard-working, and creative (note: undergraduate grades, casual feedback from family and friends, and your own internal gut sense do not qualify as really, really good reasons), you probably should not pursue a career in science.

But that’s only true given a rather narrow conception where your pursuit of a scientific career is motivated entirely by the end goal rather than by the process, and where failure is anything other than ending up with a permanent tenure-track position. By contrast, if what you’re really after is an environment in which you can pursue interesting questions in a rigorous way, surrounded by brilliant minds who share your interests, and with more freedom than you might find at a typical 9 to 5 job, the dream of being a scientist is certainly still alive, and is worth pursuing. The trivial demonstration of this is that if you’re one of the many people who actuallyenjoy the graduate school environment (yes, they do exist!), it may not even matter to you that much whether or not you have a good shot of getting a tenure-track position when you graduate.

To see this, imagine that you’ve just graduated with an undergraduate degree in science, and someone offers you a choice between two positions for the next six years. One position is (relatively) financially secure, but involves rather boring work of quesitonable utility to society, an inflexible schedule, and colleagues who are mostly only there for a paycheck. The other position has terrible pay, but offers fascinating and potentially important work, a flexible lifestyle, and colleagues who are there because they share your interests and want to do scientific research.

Admittedly, real-world choices are rarely this stark. Many non-academic jobs offer many of the same perceived benefits of academia (e.g., many tech jobs offer excellent working conditions, flexible schedules, and important work). Conversely, many academic environments don’t quite live up to the ideal of a place where you can go to pursue your intellectual passion unfettered by the annoyances of “real” jobs–there’s often just as much in the way of political intrigue, personality dysfunction, and menial due-paying duties. But to a first approximation, this is basically the choice you have when considering whether to go to graduate school in science or pursue some other career: you’re trading financial security and a fixed 40-hour work week against intellectual engagement and a flexible lifestyle. And the point to note is that, even if we completely ignore what happens after the six years of grad school are up, there is clearly a non-negligible segment of the population who would quite happy opt for the second choice–even recognizing full well that at the end of six years they may have to leave and move onto something else, with little to show for their effort. (Of course, in reality we don’t need to ignore what happens after six years, because many PhDs who don’t get tenure-track positions find rewarding careers in other fields–many of them scientific in nature. And, even though it may not be a great economic investment, having a Ph.D. in science is a great thing to be able to put on one’s resume when applying for a very broad range of non-academic positions.)

The bottom line is that whether or not you should pursue a career in science has as much or more to do with your goals and personality as it does with the current environment within or outside of (academic) science. In an ideal world (which is certainly what the 1970s as described by Katz sound like, though I wasn’t around then), it wouldn’t matter: if you had any inkling that you wanted to do science for a living, you would simply go to grad school in science, and everything would probably work itself out. But given real-world constraints, it’s absolutely essentially that you think very carefully about what kind of environment makes you happy and what your expectations and goals for the future are. You have to ask yourself: Am I the kind of person who values intellectual freedom more than financial security? Do I really love the process of actually doing science–not some idealized movie version of it, but the actual messy process–enough to warrant investing a huge amount of my time and energy over the next few years? Can I deal with perpetual uncertainty about my future? And ultimately, would I be okay doing something that I really enjoy for six years if at the end of that time I have to walk away and do something very different?

If the answer to all of these questions is yes–and for many people it is!–then pursuing a career in science is still a very good thing to do (and hey, you can always quit early if you don’t like it–then you’ve lost very little time!). If the answer to any of them is no, then Katz may be right. A prospective career in science may or may not be for you, but at the very least, you should carefully consider alternative prospects. There’s absolutely no shame in going either route; the important thing is just to make an honest decision that takes the facts as they are and not as you wish that they were.

A couple of other thoughts I’ll add belatedly:

  • Calling academia a pyramid scheme is admittedly a bit hyperbolic. It’s true that the personnel structure in academia broadly has the shape of a pyramid, but that’s true of most organizations in most other domains too. Pyramid schemes are typically built on promises and lies that (almost by definition) can’t be realized, and I don’t think many people who enter a Ph.D. program in science can claim with a straight face that they were guaranteed a permanent research position at the end of the road (or that it’s impossible to get such a position). As I suggested in this post, it’s much more likely that everyone involved is simply guilty of minor (self-)deception: faculty don’t go out of their way to tell prospective students what the odds are of actually getting a tenure-track position, and prospective grad students don’t work very hard to find out the painful truth, or to tell faculty what their real intentions are after they graduate. And it may actually be better for everyone that way.
  • Just in case it’s not clear from the above, I’m not in any way condoning the historically low levels of science funding, or the fact that very few science PhDs go on to careers in academic research. I would love for NIH and NSF budgets (or whatever your local agency is) to grow substantially–and for everyone get exactly the kind of job they want, academic or not. But that’s not the world we live in, so we may as well be pragmatic about it and try to identify the conditions under which it does or doesn’t make sense to pursue a career in science right now.
  • I briefly mention this above, but it’s probably worth stressing that there are many jobs outside of academia that still allow one to do scientific research, albeit typically with less freedom (but often for better hours and pay). In particular, the market for data scientists is booming right now, and many of the hires are coming directly from academia. One lesson to take away from this is: if you’re in a science Ph.D. program right now, you should really spend as much time as you can building up your quantitative and technical skills, because they could very well be the difference between a job that involves scientific research and one that doesn’t in the event you leave academia. And those skills will still serve you well in your research career even if you end up staying in academia.

 

what Ben Parker wants you to know about neuroimaging

I have a short opinion piece in the latest issue of The European Health Psychologist that discusses some of the caveats and limits of functional MRI. It’s a short and (I think) pretty readable piece; I touch on a couple of issues I’ve discussed frequently in other papers as well as here on the blog–namely, the relatively low power of most fMRI analyses and the difficulties inherent in drawing causal inferences from neuroimaging results.

More importantly, though, I’ve finally fulfilled my long held goal of sneaking a Spiderman reference into an academic article (though, granted, one that wasn’t peer-reviewed). It would be going too far to say I can die happy now, but at least I can have an extra large serving of ice cream for dessert tonight without feeling guilty*. And no, I’m not going to spoil the surprise by revealing what Spidey has to do with fMRI. Though I will say that if you actually fall for the hook and go read the article just to find that out, you’re likely to be sorely disappointed.

 

* So okay, the truth is, I never, ever feel guilty for eating ice cream, no matter the serving size.

what the arsenic effect means for scientific publishing

I don’t know very much about DNA (and by ‘not very much’ I sadly mean ‘next to nothing’), so when someone tells me that life as we know it generally doesn’t use arsenic to make DNA, and that it’s a big deal to find a bacterium that does, I’m willing to believe them. So too, apparently, are at least two or three reviewers for Science, which published a paper last week by a NASA group purporting to demonstrate exactly that.

Turns out the paper might have a few holes. In the last few days, the blogosphere has reached fever delirium pitch as critiques of the article have emerged from every corner; it seems like pretty much everyone with some knowledge of the science in question is unhappy about the paper. Since I’m not in any position to critique the article myself, I’ll take Carl Zimmer’s word for it in Slate yesterday:

Was this merely a case of a few isolated cranks? To find out, I reached out to a dozen experts on Monday. Almost unanimously, they think the NASA scientists have failed to make their case.  “It would be really cool if such a bug existed,” said San Diego State University’s Forest Rohwer, a microbiologist who looks for new species of bacteria and viruses in coral reefs. But, he added, “none of the arguments are very convincing on their own.” That was about as positive as the critics could get. “This paper should not have been published,” said Shelley Copley of the University of Colorado.

Zimmer then follows his Slate piece up with a blog post today in which he provides 13 experts’ unadulterated comments. While there are one or two (somewhat) positive reviews, the consensus clearly seems to be that the Science paper is (very) bad science.

Of course, scientists (yes, even Science reviewers) do occasionally make mistakes, so if we’re being charitable about it, we might chalk it up to human error (though some of the critiques suggest that these are elementary problems that could have been very easily addressed, so it’s possible there’s some disingenuousness involved). But what many bloggers (1, 2, 3, etc.) have found particularly inexcusable is the way NASA and the research team have handled the criticism. Zimmer again, in Slate:

I asked two of the authors of the study if they wanted to respond to the criticism of their paper. Both politely declined by email.

“We cannot indiscriminately wade into a media forum for debate at this time,” declared senior author Ronald Oremland of the U.S. Geological Survey. “If we are wrong, then other scientists should be motivated to reproduce our findings. If we are right (and I am strongly convinced that we are) our competitors will agree and help to advance our understanding of this phenomenon. I am eager for them to do so.”

“Any discourse will have to be peer-reviewed in the same manner as our paper was, and go through a vetting process so that all discussion is properly moderated,” wrote Felisa Wolfe-Simon of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. “The items you are presenting do not represent the proper way to engage in a scientific discourse and we will not respond in this manner.”

A NASA spokesperson basically reiterated this point of view, indicating that NASA scientists weren’t going to respond to criticism of their work unless that criticism appeared in, you know, a respectable, peer-reviewed outlet. (Fortunately, at least one of the critics already has a draft letter to Science up on her blog.)

I don’t think it’s surprising that people who spend much of their free time blogging about science, and think it’s important to discuss scientific issues in a public venue, generally aren’t going to like being told that science blogging isn’t a legitimate form of scientific discourse. Especially considering that the critics here aren’t laypeople without scientific training; they’re well-respected scientists with areas of expertise that are directly relevant to the paper. In this case, dismissing trenchant criticism because it’s on the web rather than in a peer-reviewed journal seems kind of like telling someone who’s screaming at you that your house is on fire that you’re not going to listen to them until they adopt a more polite tone. It just seems counterproductive.

That said, I personally don’t think we should take the NASA team’s statements at face value. I very much doubt that what the NASA researchers are saying really reflect any deep philosophical view about the role of blogs in scientific discourse; it’s much more likely that they’re simply trying to buy some time while they figure out how to respond. On the face of it, they have a choice between two lousy options: either ignore the criticism entirely, which would be antithetical to the scientific process and would look very bad, or address it head-on–which, judging by the vociferousness and near-unanimity of the commentators, is probably going to be a losing battle. Shifting the terms of the debate by insisting on responding only in a peer-reviewed venue doesn’t really change anything, but it does buy the authors two or three weeks. And two or three weeks is worth like, forty attentional cycles in the blogosphere.

Mind you, I’m not saying we should sympathize with the NASA researchers just because they’re in a tough position. I think one of the main reasons the story’s attracted so much attention is precisely because people see it as a case of justice being served. The NASA team called a major press conference ahead of the paper’s publication, published its results in one of the world’s most prestigious science journals, and yet apparently failed to run relatively basic experimental controls in support of its conclusions. If the critics are to be believed, the NASA researchers are either disingenuous or incompetent; either way, we shouldn’t feel sorry for them.

What I do think this episode shows is that the rules of scientific publishing have fundamentally changed in the last few years–and largely for the better. I haven’t been doing science for very long, but even in the halcyon days of 2003, when I started graduate school, science blogging was practically nonexistent, and the main way you’d find out what other people thought about an influential new paper was by talking to people you knew at conferences (which could take several months) or waiting for critiques or replication failures to emerge in other peer-reviewed journals (which could take years). That kind of delay between publication and evaluation is disastrous for science, because in the time it takes for a consensus to emerge that a paper is no good, several research teams might have already started trying to replicate and extend the reported findings, and several dozen other researchers might have uncritically cited their paper peripherally in their own work. This delay is probably why, as John Ioannidis’ work so elegantly demonstrates, major studies published in high-impact journals tend to exert a disproportionate influence on the literature long after they’ve been resoundingly discredited.

The Arsenic Effect, if we can call it that, provides a nice illustration of the impact of new media on scientific communication. It’s a safe bet that there are now very few people who do anything even vaguely related to the NASA team’s research who haven’t been made aware that the reported findings are controversial. Which means that the process of attempting to replicate (or falsify) the findings will proceed much more quickly than it might have ten or twenty years ago, and there probably won’t be very many people who cite the Science paper as compelling evidence of terrestrial arsenic-based life. Perhaps more importantly, as researchers get used to the idea that their high-profile work is going to be instantly evaluated by thousands of pairs of highly trained eyes, any of which might be attached to a highly prolific pair of typing hands, there will be an increasingly strong disincentive to avoid being careless. That isn’t to say that bad science will disappear, of course; just that, in cases where the badness reflects a pressure to tell a good story at all costs, we’ll probably see less of it.

will trade two Methods sections for twenty-two subjects worth of data

The excellent and ever-candid Candid Engineer in Academia has an interesting post discussing the love-hate relationship many scientists who work in wet labs have with benchwork. She compares two very different perspectives:

She [a current student] then went on to say that, despite wanting to go to grad school, she is pretty sure she doesn’t want to continue in academia beyond the Ph.D. because she just loves doing the science so much and she can’t imagine ever not being at the bench.

Being young and into the benchwork, I remember once asking my grad advisor if he missed doing experiments. His response: “Hell no.” I didn’t understand it at the time, but now I do. So I wonder if my student will always feel the way she does now- possessing of that unbridled passion for the pipet, that unquenchable thirst for the cell culture hood.

Wet labs are pretty much nonexistent in psychology–I’ve never had to put on gloves or goggles to do anything that I’d consider an “experiment”, and I’ve certainly never run the risk of  spilling dangerous chemicals all over myself–so I have no opinion at all about benchwork. Maybe I’d love it, maybe I’d hate it; I couldn’t tell you. But Candid Engineer’s post did get me thinking about opinions surrounding the psychological equivalent of benchwork–namely, collecting data form human subjects. My sense is that there’s somewhat more consensus among psychologists, in that most of us don’t seem to like data collection very much. But there are plenty of exceptions, and there certainly are strong feelings on both sides.

More generally, I’m perpetually amazed at the wide range of opinions people can hold about the various elements of scientific research, even when the people doing the different-opinion-holding all work in very similar domains. For instance, my favorite aspect of the research I do, hands down, is data analysis. I’d be ecstatic if I could analyze data all day and never have to worry about actually communicating the results to anyone (though I enjoy doing that too). After that, there are activities like writing and software development, which I spend a lot of time doing, and occasionally enjoy, but also frequently find very frustrating. And then, at the other end, there are aspects of research that I find have little redeeming value save for their instrumental value in supporting other, more pleasant, activities–nasty, evil activities like writing IRB proposals and, yes, collecting data.

To me, collecting data is something you do because you’re fundamentally interested in some deep (or maybe not so deep) question about how the mind works, and the only way to get an answer is to actually interrogate people while they do stuff in a controlled environment. It isn’t something I do for fun. Yet I know people who genuinely seem to love collecting data–or, for that matter, writing Methods sections or designing new experiments–even as they loathe perfectly pleasant activities like, say, sitting down to analyze the data they’ve collected, or writing a few lines of code that could save them hours’ worth of manual data entry. On a personal level, I find this almost incomprehensible: how could anyone possibly enjoy collecting data more than actually crunching the numbers and learning new things? But I know these people exist, because I’ve talked to them. And I recognize that, from their perspective, I’m the guy with the strange views. They’re sitting there thinking: what kind of joker actually likes to turn his data inside out several dozen times? What’s wrong with just running a simple t-test and writing up the results as fast as possible, so you can get back to the pleasure of designing and running new experiments?

This of course leads us directly to the care bears fucking tea party moment where I tell you how wonderful it is that we all have these different likes and dislikes. I’m not being sarcastic; it really is great. Ultimately, it works to everyone’s advantage that we enjoy different things, because it means we get to collaborate on projects and take advantage of complementary strengths and interests, instead of all having to fight over who gets to write the same part of the Methods section. It’s good that there are some people who love benchwork and some people who hate it, and it’s good that there are people who’re happy to write software that other people who hate writing software can use. We don’t all have to pretend we understand each other; it’s enough just to nod and smile and say “but of course you can write the Methods for that paper; I really don’t mind. And yes, I guess I can run some additional analyses for you, really, it’s not too much trouble at all.”

Coyne on adaptive rumination theory (again)

A while ago I blogged about Andrews and Thomson’s *adaptive rumination hypothesis* (ARH) of depression, which holds that depression is an evolutionary adaption designed to help us solve difficult problems. I linked to two critiques of ARH by Jerry Coyne, who is clearly no fan of ARH. Coyne’s now taken his argument to the [pages of Psychiatric Times|http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/depression/content/article/10168/1575333], where he tears ARH to shreds for a third time. The main thrust of Coyne’s argument is that Andrews and Thomson employ a colloquial definition of adaptation (i.e., something that’s useful) rather than the more appropriate evolution definition:
Andrews and Thomson consider depression an “adaptation“ because it supposedly helps the sufferer solve problems. But an evolutionary adaptation is more than something that is merely useful. Biologists consider a trait adaptive only if that behavior, and the genes producing it, enhance an individual’s fitness—the average lifetime output of offspring. It is this genetic advantage, and the evolutionary changes in behavior it promotes, that is the essence of adaptation by natural selection. To demonstrate that depression is an evolved adaptation, then, we must show that it enhances reproduction.
Andrews and Thomson don’t do this, or even try. And if they did try, they probably wouldn’t succeed, for everything we know about depression suggests that rather than enhancing fitness, it reduces it. The most obvious issue is suicide, a word that, curiously, does not appear in Andrews and Thomson’s text. Statistics show that those with major depression are 20 times more likely to kill themselves than are individuals in the general population. Evolutionarily speaking, this is a strong selective penalty. Depression also appears to reduce libido and may make one unattractive as a sexual partner. Andrews and Thomson point out depression’s “adverse effect on women’s fertility and the outcome of pregnancy.“ Other health problems are comorbid with depression, although it’s not clear whether depression is the cause or consequence of these problems. Finally, studies show that depressed mothers provide poorer care of their children.
As Coyne notes, this is a problem not only for ARH, but also for a number of other evolutionary psychological accounts of depression–essentially, all those theories that posit that the depressive state *itself* is adaptive (as opposed to balancing selection/heterozygote advantage models which allow for the possibility that some genes that contribute to depression may be selected for under the right circumstances, without implying that depression itself is advantageous).

A while ago I wrote about Andrews and Thomson’s adaptive rumination hypothesis (ARH) of depression, which holds that depression is an evolutionary adaption designed to help us solve difficult problems. I linked to two critiques (1, 2) of ARH by Jerry Coyne, who is clearly no fan of ARH. Coyne’s now taken his argument to the pages of Psychiatric Times, where he tears ARH to shreds for a third time. The main thrust of Coyne’s argument is that Andrews and Thomson employ a colloquial definition of adaptation (i.e., something that’s useful) rather than the more appropriate evolution definition:

Andrews and Thomson consider depression an “adaptation” because it supposedly helps the sufferer solve problems. But an evolutionary adaptation is more than something that is merely useful. Biologists consider a trait adaptive only if that behavior, and the genes producing it, enhance an individual’s fitness—the average lifetime output of offspring. It is this genetic advantage, and the evolutionary changes in behavior it promotes, that is the essence of adaptation by natural selection. To demonstrate that depression is an evolved adaptation, then, we must show that it enhances reproduction.

Andrews and Thomson don’t do this, or even try. And if they did try, they probably wouldn’t succeed, for everything we know about depression suggests that rather than enhancing fitness, it reduces it. The most obvious issue is suicide, a word that, curiously, does not appear in Andrews and Thomson’s text. Statistics show that those with major depression are 20 times more likely to kill themselves than are individuals in the general population. Evolutionarily speaking, this is a strong selective penalty. Depression also appears to reduce libido and may make one unattractive as a sexual partner. Andrews and Thomson point out depression’s “adverse effect on women’s fertility and the outcome of pregnancy.“ Other health problems are comorbid with depression, although it’s not clear whether depression is the cause or consequence of these problems. Finally, studies show that depressed mothers provide poorer care of their children.

As Coyne notes, this is a problem not only for ARH, but also for a number of other evolutionary psychological accounts of depression–essentially, all those theories that posit that the depressive state itself is adaptive (as opposed to balancing selection/heterozygote advantage models which allow for the possibility that some genes that contribute to depression may be selected for under the right circumstances, without implying that depression itself is advantageous).

in defense of three of my favorite sayings

Seth Roberts takes issue with three popular maxims that (he argues) people use “to push away data that contradicts this or that approved view of the world”. He terms this preventive stupidity. I’m a frequent user of all three sayings, so I suppose that might make me preventively stupid; but I do feel like I have good reasons for using these sayings, and I confess to not really seeing Roberts’ point.

Here’s what Roberts has to say about the three sayings in question:

1. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Øyhus explains why this is wrong. That such an Orwellian saying is popular in discussions of data suggests there are many ways we push away inconvenient data.

In my own experience, by far the biggest reason this saying is popular in discussions of data (and the primary reason I use it when reviewing papers) is that many people have a very strong tendency to interpret null results as an absence of any meaningful effect. That’s a very big problem, because the majority of studies in psychology tend to have relatively little power to detect small to moderate-sized effects. For instance, as I’ve discussed here, most whole-brain analyses in typical fMRI samples (of say, 15 – 20 subjects) have very little power to detect anything but massive effects. And yet people routinely interpret a failure to detect hypothesized effects as an indication that they must not exist at all. The simplest and most direct counter to this type of mistake is to note that one shouldn’t accept the null hypothesis unless one has very good reasons to think that power is very high and effect size estimates are consequently quite accurate. Which is just another way of saying that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

2. Correlation does not equal causation. In practice, this is used to mean that correlation is not evidence for causation. At UC Berkeley, a job candidate for a faculty position in psychology said this to me. I said, “Isn’t zero correlation evidence against causation?“ She looked puzzled.

Again, Roberts’ experience clearly differs from mine; I’ve far more often seen this saying used as a way of suggesting that a researcher may be drawing overly strong causal conclusions from the data, not as a way of simply dismissing a correlation outright. A good example of this is found in the developmental literature, where many researchers have observed strong correlations between parents’ behavior and their children’s subsequent behavior. It is, of course, quite plausible to suppose that parenting behavior exerts a direct causal influence on children’s behavior, so that the children of negligent or abusive parents are more likely to exhibit delinquent behavior and grow up to perpetuate the “cycle of violence”. But this line of reasoning is substantially weakened by behavioral genetic studies indicating that very little of the correlation between parents’ and children’s personalities is explained by shared environmental factors, and that the vast majority reflects heritable influences and/or unique environmental influences. Given such findings, it’s a perfectly appropriate rebuttal to much of the developmental literature to note that correlation doesn’t imply causation.

It’s also worth pointing out that the anecdote Roberts provides isn’t exactly a refutation of the maxim; it’s actually an affirmation of the consequent. The fact that an absence of any correlation could potentially be strong evidence against causation (under the right circumstances) doesn’t mean that the presence of a correlation is strong evidence for causation. It may or may not be, but that’s something to be weighed on a case-by-case basis. There certainly are plenty of cases where it’s perfectly appropriate (and even called for) to remind someone that correlation doesn’t imply causation.

3. The plural of anecdote is not data. How dare you try to learn from stories you are told or what you yourself observe!

I suspect this is something of a sore spot for Roberts, who’s been an avid proponent of self-experimentation and case studies. I imagine people often dismiss his work as mere anecdote rather than valuable data. Personally, I happen to think there’s tremendous value to self-experimentation (at least when done in as controlled a manner as possible), so I don’t doubt there are many cases where this saying is unfairly applied. That said, I think Roberts fails to appreciate that people who do his kind of research constitute a tiny fraction of the population. Most of the time, when someone says that “the plural of anecdote is not data,” they’re not talking to someone who does rigorous self-experimentation, but to people who, say, don’t believe they should give up smoking seeing as how their grandmother smoked till she was 88 and died in a bungee-jumping accident, or who are convinced that texting while driving is perfectly acceptable because they don’t personally know anyone who’s gotten in an accident. In such cases, it’s not only legitimate but arguably desirable to point out that personal anecdote is no substitute for hard data.

Orwell was right. People use these sayings — especially #1 and #3 — to push away data that contradicts this or that approved view of the world. Without any data at all, the world would be simpler: We would simply believe what authorities tell us. Data complicates things. These sayings help those who say them ignore data, thus restoring comforting certainty.

Maybe there should be a term (antiscientific method?) to describe the many ways people push away data. Or maybe preventive stupidity will do.

I’d like to be charitable here, since there very clearly are cases where Roberts’ point holds true: sometimes people do toss out these sayings as a way of not really contending with data they don’t like. But frankly, the general claim that these sayings are antiscientific and constitute an act of stupidity just seems silly. All three sayings are clearly applicable in a large number of situations; to deny that, you’d have to believe that (a) it’s always fine to accept the null hypothesis, (b) correlation is always a good indicator of a causal relationship, and (c) personal anecdotes are just as good as large, well-controlled studies. I take it that no one, including Roberts, really believes that. So then it becomes a matter of when to apply these sayings, and not whether or not to use them. After all, it’d be silly to think that the people who use these sayings are always on the side of darkness, and the people who wield null results, correlations, and anecdotes with reckless abandon are always on the side of light.

My own experience, for what it’s worth, is that the use of these sayings is justified far more often than not, and I don’t have any reservation applying them myself when I think they’re warranted (which is relatively often–particularly the first one). But I grant that that’s just my own personal experience talking, and no matter how many experiences I’ve had of people using these sayings appropriately, I’m well aware that the plural of anecdote…