Re: A very personal video from Sabine Hossenfelder

Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:

On 2024-04-07 10:09:20 +0000, LDagget said:

jillery wrote:
 

Some T.O. posters have expressed appreciation for Sabine Hossenfelder.
After watching the following video, and assuming she isn't just
pimping for Youtube likes, my appreciation of her has ratcheted up
several notches:

 

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8>

 

As a non-academic, all I can say is I had no idea it was that bad.  I
can only hope this video doesn't make things worse for her.

 

--
To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge

  I watched it a couple of days ago. It's worth a watch but I have
some quibbles.

I don't doubt the truth of what she says about her own experience in physics in Germany, but she generalizes too much to other other countries and other disciplines. I don't think I suffered much from my lack of interest in getting a large grant, or even a small one. More important, my wife doesn't feel that the fact that she is a woman interfered much with her academic progress.

Just one anecdote-ish point. After Brexit, I started to apply
for jobs in Germany again, something I had not considered before, Some of the interviews felt as if I'd been fallen into a vortex
and reappeared in the 1950s - or the Twilight Zone. That or someone
in the genetics department has seriously gone off the ethics
rails and cloned me without consent. Seriously, it was like looking
at 8 versions of myself: balding white German male with an ill-fitting suit
and around 5kg too much around the waist. Felt like telling them there
and then "don't hire me, you have me already, 8 times over".
I'm coming from a department that has had parity on Chair-level for the last decade or so, at the time my Head of School and Dean of College, my direct line managers, were both female. And over a third of us are
immigrants. Very little seems to have changed in Germany from the system that  I fled with good reasons 28 years ago, it is still as feudal as
it was.
The Chairs all too often treat their institute like their private fiefdom
where normal rules don't apply - there were numerous scandals
about abusive managerial practices just in the last two years.
Not that I want to paint too rosy a picture of the UK - we also had recently a favour share of scandals, and in particular
sexual predators seem still to be remarkably common. Discrimination
won't be overt any longer, but our recent statistics showed that academia is doing worse than the private sector in terms of pay gap, and there are still lots of more subtle ways to limit the chances of female academics, including overloading
them with the "caring admin" stuff (equality director,
senior tutor etc - I was for ages the only man on the disability committee e.g.) It's not quite "shoot the women first", as a senior German
security forces official once said, but I do have the  distinct impression that women still have to be 10% better
to reach the same position as their male counterparts, especially in the science subjects  Mind you, that was not in

Germany, but in Chile, one of the first countries in the world to open its universities to women on an equal basis with men (much earlier than the UK, for example). My late mother-in-law and her three sisters (born from 1904 to 1912) all went to university, and all graduated with professional qualifications (law, medicine, dentistry and one that I don't remember). Their father thought was important, and anyway the system didn't prevent it.

 She makes multiple comments about what she saw in her colleagues
and what they were doing and how she wanted to be a scientist to.
 What's missing is a confession about how she ignored all the examples
of all of the other people who have been experiencing essentially
the same thing she complained about.
There is absolutely nothing new about the cycle of having to write
grants toward topical things as decided politically rather than scientifically. The Golden Rule of Arts and Sciences is that he
who has the gold makes the rules. That describes the situation
since before the Age of Enlightenment began and hasn't changed.
 Why didn't she know this? As a wanna-be scientist you are supposed
to be training to objectively observe. Why not apply that to all
of those people from 10 to 20 years before her that suffered similar
fates. I saw and listened to those people when I was an undergrad,
and more when I worked as a research assistant at a university, and still more when I was a grad student. What she described has
been the essential pattern. Why did it come as a surprise to her?
 Not that she's unique in that. It too repeats.
The problem, as I see it, is the extent to which the academic system
markets itself as something different, and takes advantage of nerds
by telling them they're pretty (smart).
The other thing is, there are ways to succeed if you have your eyes
open. There's an oft repeated line about being able to do your own
research as long as you do it in the 20% of your time beyond the 60
hours a week you spend on the other stuff. That was the joke back
in the 70s. And it's often been discussed about how that's especially
unfair to women (and other potential parents).
When your eyes are open to it, then you can use some of your smarts
to work the system rather than have it work you. Now that can be
done cynically and abandon the good science to work the topical
science, or it can be done to squeeze in some good science while
paying the bills. But why is the latter so bad? Why should a
scientist think that they get to just do the good stuff when all
over the rest of the world people spend much of their day shoveling
shit for most of their day so that they can spend some time
doing the stuff they want to do, or that is at least satisfying?
 Now I am being a bit harsh in that I'm sure she was more aware
of these things than I seem to be suggesting, but her story in
her video avoided admitting it and focused on cursing the broken
system. Yes, he who has the gold makes the rules is not ideal.
If you really hate it, take some time to get a bunch of gold and make your own rules.
(I toyed with the idea of changing my nym to Elon for this
post because Sabina would probably laugh)