Closed vs. Open Doors, Whining for Sympathy etc.

Indexed blog had a wonderful entry yesterday, that about summarizes my attitude towards some whiners:


There's a lot of whiners in academia. On one hand, I am quite sympathetic to how difficult academic research career is - especially for young people - graduate students and postdocs. But at some point if I have to hear yet another whining story about how your collaborators are all jerks, PI doesn't care for your projects and doesn't provide mentorship, how job search is exhausting, job market doesn't look good this year and your pay is too low - at some point my sympathy response is reaching the point of diminishing returns. I agree with everything complainers (most of them are my good friends so I can't tell them to shut up) like to complain about, I know - been there done that - but complaining about unfairness of life for hours day after day after day is not terribly productive.

Speaking of productivity - 43 folders had an interesting post on Closed Office Doors and distractions Open-Door policy presents (Coup d'attention). I try to keep my door open, but occasionally I feel that this makes me very unproductive, especially when I need to do some writing, editing or reading. So recently I have been closing my office door for hours at a time - which made my grant writing and manuscript editing far more productive. So I was glad to discover I am not alone and other people do it too. It's not just my own visitors - students, colleagues etc. - but also people randomly hanging around or walking by my office door talking loudly on their cell phones.

Overcoming bias - a new addition to my blog reader - had an interesting post on planning phallacy - the fact that we humans are terrible at correctly estimating how long a given project will take. Also see Hofstadter's law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account."

I usually estimate how long something will take if everything goes according to "perfect" plan, and then double or triple it. And I still end up underestimating the time it will take.

If you ever asked a student how long it will take them to write up a paper or a thesis, you know what I am talking about. "I will finish my thesis defend my PhD in about 3 months". 6 months later: "I will finish my thesis defend my PhD in about 3 months - I swear this time". A year later: "I will finish my thesis defend my PhD in about 3 months".


Overcoming Bias had another recent interesting post - on predictions in physics, in particular with respect to LHC results. I don't agree with the underlying assumptions that physicists should predict precisely WHAT experiment will find before funding agencies agree to spend any money - the whole point of science is that we DON'T KNOW what we will find - otherwise why do an experiment?

But there is another, valid point - people who will surely say "told ya so, my theory predicted it all along" should not be allowed to gloat unless they actually *did* tell us so. In case of LHC, it means clearly identifying that result X will imply that theory A is correct and theory B is not.

In case of condensed matter physics, I would like to see people who do simulations or theory tell experimenters: make material X and do experiment Y, my theory (if correct) predicts a property or outcome Z.

Instead, I see a lot of "first principle calculations" that follow the logic of:
Experimenter - "I made compound X and it has superconducting temperature Y".
Theorist - "Here we present ab-initio calculations that demonstrate that compound X must have superconducting temperature Y"
Experiment - "Oops, the compound X was contaminated, it turns out superconducting temperature for high-quality crystal is Z, not Y".
Theorist - "Here we present ab-initio calculations that demonstrate that compound X must have superconducting temperature Z, rather than Y"

Other types of "predictions" are along the lines of "at pressures of X terrapascals hydrogen will become both superconducting and superfluid. And since nobody will ever reach those pressures in the lab (or at least not in our lifetimes), you just have to take our word for it".