[emanuelev]

I quite agree that the post PhD job market is kind of challenging as there are few companies tackling big questions.

However, if you forget the job market, the argument the guy is making is absolutely spot on. There's a solid trend in academia that is "publish early, publish fast". Although one might argue that it actually makes sense (career-wise or whatever), it is intrinsic in such a system to penalise pursuing big, risky ideas. Considering that the PhD (and the few years after) are the most productive in a researcher's life, it is a shame that students are not actively encouraged to think bigger.

[lmm]

> There's a solid trend in academia that is "publish early, publish fast".

With an increasing number of researchers isn't that a great thing? If you publish your little incremental innovations then everyone can build on them. If you try to build your giant all-encompassing framework before you publish any of it, you'll have to do it all yourself (if it even amounts to anything).

[Fede_V]

It would be if what got published were plenty of incremental papers. That's the case in certain fields (deep learning comes to mind) - but in other fields, such as the life sciences, you instead get a bunch of results that claim to be groundbreaking and novel - but in practice end up being very difficult to reproduce (like the STAP controversy).

Why? Because small incremental improvements cannot get published in high impact journals, and high impact journals are the currency to scientific prestige/grants/tenure.

[jamesrcole]

You're assuming that all important innovations are incremental. Historically that is clearly not the case.

[mattkrause]

This implicitly "punishes" subfields that move more slowly. It can take over a year to train a monkey to perform complicated behavioral tasks. In the same time period, you could breed 50+ generations of fruit flies, or ~25,000 generations of bacteria. Furthermore, the monkey researcher will have fairly little interim data, whereas the bacteria or fruit fly work may have something interesting within a few weeks.

This could be normalized within fields, but in practice it's not. For example, the NIH K-awards have a fixed eligibility period, which seems to keep shrinking.

[rhaps0dy]

>the PhD (and the few years after) are the most productive in a researcher's life

Source? I'm curious.

[4ad]

Not a "real" study, but it appears to be true: https://youtu.be/Mpsc-BxAiHs?t=1537

[emanuelev]

I'm sorry, I don't really have a source. My observation is based on the fact that during PhD/PostDoc years you have more time to spend on actual research. As you climb the academic ladder it is very probable that administrative/supervising/teaching duties become central to your job (unless you really don't want to).

Incidentally I remember also reading [1] that in certain fields, in this case mathematics, most of the groundbreaking research comes from younger mathematicians. Great contributions to the field from people over 40 are extremely rare.

[1] Simon Singh, Fermat's Last theorem. Ok, not great source but still!