Too Many Kids Quit Science Because They Don't Think They're Smart

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/11/too-many-kids-quit-science-because-they-dont-think-theyre-smart/382165/?single_page=true

by tokenadult • 12 years ago

205 134 12 years ago

theatlantic.com

mtbottle• 12 years ago

When students thought of their intelligence as a thing that’s just fixed, they were vulnerable. They were not willing to take on challenges that might test their intelligence, and they weren’t resilient when they came into obstacles.

And this is also why so many gifted children become mediocre adults.

JoeAltmaier6• 12 years ago

The demographic of Mensa members is highly-intelligent non-contributors. Early life (childhood) of praise and 'successes' turned into something harder; they perceive it as failure and back away. That's my take anyway.

Retric3• 12 years ago

I suspect a huge factor is people being smart enough to avoid the fame/money trap. If you can trivially get a 40-45 hour a week 100+k job that's reasonably pleasant shooting for the stars is far less appealing.

a_c_s2• 12 years ago

I know plenty of brilliant people who are now unemployed or severely underemployed (working minimum wage retail jobs despite having a college degree). Despite being academically gifted, they haven't found their way to careers that match their abilities.

I haven't been able to put my finger on what exactly it is that causes these people to "get lost" on their way, but it is common enough that I think we need to be doing something differently with regards to gifted & talented education in the USA.

JoeAltmaier6• 12 years ago

Is it a trap? Or a way to fulfillment? I'm guessing that great intellects are wasted if we cannot inspire them to great contributions. Instead, they avoid 'the trap' and work at a bookstore all their lives.

asolove• 12 years ago

Those who are interested in this will want to read the book "The drama of the gifted child."

sgpl• 12 years ago

The book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck (the psychology professor at Stanford mentioned) also offers great insight into this. It is also a very well written book, and if you are into audiobooks, the narrator for this one does a splendid job.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-Success/dp/...

ivan_ah4• 12 years ago

+1 for "The drama of the gifted child"---my psychiatrist friend recommended it to me, and I learned a lot from it.

ivan_ah4• 12 years ago

The need for external validation is a major pathology for the gifted. "Normal" people get varied feedback about their work/performance from the external world, so they learn not to associate and derive their self-worth from external inputs.

Gifted kids always hear "you're good / you're the best" so they learn to build their self-image based on this external praise. Essentially, since external feedback is always positive, a strong coupling forms between external inputs and one's feeling of self worth.

Later on in life when the world starts to send them not-so-positive feedback about their work, gifted kids take it really badly because the negative feedback hits their core.... whereas a not-so-gifted kids have learned not to take external feedback so seriously long ago.

It's definitely something to watch out for. Remember---you are not your work. Your worth is not connected to what you've achieved or what you own---your worth stems from your human nature, and your unlimited ability to adapt, learn, and do stuff in the future.

andrewflnr• 12 years ago

That last bit is not comforting when you've tried a time or five to adapt and not made it.

jarcane• 12 years ago

Speaking as someone who grew up 'gifted': yes. And I still struggle with it.

Growing up 'smart' made me stupid.

I had tests and things, I was marked for inclusion in the TAG program. I got poor grades not because I wasn't smart enough to do the work, but because the work bored the hell out of me and I refused to do homework and thus allow it to intrude upon fun time away from that tedium (I suspect I also dealt with some undiagnosed ADHD; it runs in the family).

The problem though is that when everything comes easy, and you're never given much opportunity and encouragement to challenge yourself, then you also become prone to getting frustrated and confused whenever something isn't coming easily. You're not accustomed to that kind of failure, to not just knowing off the bat or at least being able to pick it up on the fly.

So you give up on things a lot. When you get out into the real world, you wind up with a complex. That stuff that made you 'smart' isn't actually that useful outside of certain areas, so on a 'regular job' you're still functionally useless.

As a kid in the 90s, at the beginning of the great tech boom, the .com crash still on the horizon, you were inundated with messages that said that because you were smart and knew computers you were somehow just on a free ride to be the next Bill Gates. When the reality is that most of the kids who did go that route wound up broke in '99, and the rest just never got that far in the first place.

I genuinely worry that the current startup culture and the push for 'start an app!' programs in schools are headed the same way. Selling tech and 'being smart' as an automatic win at life, which isn't true at all, and 90% of those kids finishing 'accelerated learning' courses in programming will be lucky to grow up writing backend code for a medical insurance billing provider.

smilefreak• 12 years ago

Growing up 'smart' made me stupid.

I agree and also have faced this problem as I was in the gifted programs all through school, then into university. However, in my third year of University I failed the entire year, owing mostly to the assurance in my ability to just wing it.

This had profound effects on my psyche and over the last two years, I have been trying to reprogram and discover strategies to not fall into this trap. In areas of life where many struggle, I am sharp, but in other areas I really struggle and learning to appreciate the talents of others in this area has been an eye-opener.

One of the major things for me was writing; I just don't find it easy. Possibly the largest change for me was actually facing up to that fact and starting to read and write again, which I hadn't done since high-school.

Now I am enrolled in a MSc program and actively engaged in learning and struggling in the areas I am weak; I believe this change is starting to pay off. The hardest thing was to accept that I wasn't good at everything, and to start working hard like everyone else.

jbob2000• 12 years ago

I really liked this part, and if there's one thing I'm taking away from the article, it's this:

"Actually, praise may not be the optimal way, but we are so praise oriented. We can ask the child questions about the process: “How did you do that? Tell me about it.” As they talk about the process and the strategies they tried, we can appreciate it. We can be interested in it. We can encourage it. It doesn’t have to be outright praise."

aidenn0• 12 years ago

This is one parenting technique that seems to be a part of a lot of different parenting classes, philosophies, &ct. but is, IMO underused.

Most kids crave attention from the adults they look up to. Merely paying attention to something and expressing an interest can be hugely rewarding without needing to praise.

The flip side of this is why parents who have busy schedules for one reason or another often have kids with behavioral issues; the only reliable way for the kid to get attention is to piss off their parents.

WhitneyLand• 12 years ago

This seems like a problem made worse by the similar appearance of intelligence and experience. Growing up it can be hard to understand how the skills of others can be acquired given enough time and effort.

navait• 12 years ago

Should we be encouraging people to stay the science course? There are a glut of science phd's in the workforce. I dropped out of my phd program to just do an MS because I found I simply wasn't smart enough to hack it. My research wasn't going anywhere, and I was barely holding on with my grades. After school, I will stay in engineering. I wish someone had told me I wasn't good enough rather than spending 3 years here.

Science is hard, soul-crushing and not that well-paying. Better to quit before they go into grad school than to waste years to be me. Only the truly dedicated and brilliant will survive.

wtallis• 12 years ago

The article is talking about the much broader STEM category. It's not taking sides in any pure vs. applied or academia vs. industry debate. Your decision to get an engineering MS wasn't an exit from the category.

InclinedPlane• 12 years ago

Studying science doesn't mean pursuing a science degree or a job in a scientific field. For myself I've always been enthusiastic about science, I learned on my own, I took pretty much every science class available in my high school and took AP tests in physics, chemistry, and biology. In college I got a degree in math and pursued another degree in chemistry before finding a career as a software developer.

I'm a huge critic of the flaws in the educational system, but I wouldn't give up my experience studying science in school for anything. It's molded who I am, it's made me a better person and a better developer, and I wish that more people would share that experience.

There are many people who defend studying "the humanities" as something universally valuable and universally desirable, and I think there's truth in that. I think there's just as much truth that studying science is universally valuable and universally desirable, regardless of ones eventual career aspirations.

Torgo• 12 years ago

The expert in this article is very subtly suggesting that parenting that does not acknowledge a biological difference in behavior between boys and girls is a factor in fewer women in the sciences.

autism_hurts• 12 years ago

Yes, yes -- this is a good comment.

shoots your comment into the all-consuming hellfire of the sun

bardot• 12 years ago

fewer women, actually. is that biological, too?

ps4fanboy2• 12 years ago

The unfortunate reality is that boys and girls are different, radicals would have you believe otherwise, but if you care about your children you should learn about these differences and nurture them to their fullest potential.

simmons3• 12 years ago

If education is anything like it was in my school years, I wonder if children are actively discouraged from pursuing science by educators that find the subject difficult or impractical to teach within their provided constraints.

I have a very clear memory of an after-school workshop I attended in early high school to prepare students for the ACT, a college entrance exam that was common in that time and place. This exam tested students on math, English, reading, and science reasoning. When it came time for the teachers to provide advice on science reasoning, they basically told the students to not bother, and just guess as best they can. I was completely floored at this extraordinarily defeatist attitude. Sure, this school had science classes, but they mostly taught science memorization (what does ATP stand for?) and not science reasoning.

dblarons• 12 years ago

To be fair, the science section of the ACT is testing the ability to understand graphs and read short passages on scientific topics. In this sense, it is more of a reading comprehension section than a science section. In my opinion, this is more fair than testing specific science topics that a student might not have been taught in their high school.

simmons3• 12 years ago

My memory on the test itself may be a bit hazy (~24 years ago) and my interpretation at that age may not have been accurate, but I do seem to recall some amount of reasoning was required. E.g., looking at a graph and drawing a conclusion from it. Not any great feat of reasoning, but still one that the school faculty felt was beyond the reach of their students.

nagrom6• 12 years ago

Tangential to the article, I have two hypotheses:

1) There is not a shortage of scientists.

There's loads of kids going to graduate school to become servants for mediocre, yet politically-connected scientists. Then, once they have spent the X years and $Y in opportunity costs to get a PhD, they have to figure out a career for themselves. This is a bad, not a good, thing. It reduces early-stage career experimentation and encourages low-quality science.

2) You don't need to be smart to be a scientist; you need to be stubborn.

This is similar to the argument that ideas don't matter for entrepreneurship. There are loads of theories and ideas in any given field about the way that things may be. What you need, as a minimum, is the ability to stick the course to figure out a way of testing those theories and ideas and do the (extraordinarily boring) legwork to get it done. I know a lot of scientists (physicists and mathematicians) and all of them are stubborn, but not particularly brilliant. 99% of physics and mathematics are made up of people who will do drudge work for years with very little recognition or reward. Very, very occasionally, one of them hits the jackpot. It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation.

ANTSANTS3• 12 years ago

I agree, but you can apply your second hypothesis to pretty much any pursuit or career. "It's not brilliance that defines a professional artist; it's a willingness to draw constantly for very little compensation." "It's not brilliance that defines a professional athlete; it's a willingness to be bored, exercise a lot, grind out drills, and play many games." "It's not brilliance that defines a professional programmer..."

Everything in life boils down to perspiration at some point.

eli_gottlieb6• 12 years ago

Professional programmers actually receive quite a lot of compensation, though.

nagrom6• 12 years ago

Hm. I'm not convinced - there are plenty of professional programmers (who make maybe $60k, which is a good salary) working at Java shops who do 8am-5pm and think a monad is an itinerant who lives in the desert.

There are loads of professional teachers, professional medics, professional sanitation workers, etc. who just turn up, do the job and go home. Some may and do work long hours for little reward, but a lot don't. There is a culture in academia that you may, sometimes, when you really need to, you may take the weekend off. Or Sunday, at least.

johnminter• 12 years ago

I tend to agree. I would frame the key traits as persistence and a view for the long term payoff. I did a stint as an Industrial Fellow in an NSF-funded center at U. of Minn. in the early '90s. My sponsor was chair of the Chem. E. dept. They had enough B. S. graduates to have a dept. graduation. They had the department valedictorian speak. She mentioned that along the way she questioned whether it would be worth it - especially on evenings walking home after yet another study session working on a problem set from hell. She would see her friends enjoying themselves in one of the local diners or pubs. But at the end, she realized that she had opportunities they would never have. Here both the persistence and the long term view paid off.

That said, we are producing far more Ph. D.s than we can employee. I have had a 30+ year career in industry. I have watched margins tighten and good friends get laid off as more and more is offshored. I doubt that this will end well for the next generation. Not everyone will be a "winner." But those who invest in developing their skills will, on average, do much better than those who do not.

shas3• 12 years ago

Implicit to your comment is the assumption that "going into science" = "becoming a physical sciences professor." This is unfounded! Only a really small minority of STEM majors (aka 'kids') go into academia! The number of industry opportunities for students (at all levels: undergrad to PhD!) in STEM majors is orders of magnitude larger than students in non STEM majors.

nagrom6• 12 years ago

I agree that STEM makes you more employable. But how many of those jobs are in science? There's a lot of engineers, accountants, actuaries, teachers, etc. out there who got a degree in physics, maths or biology.

tjradcliffe2• 12 years ago

I know a lot of people in the biosciences with under-graduate degrees. They also have technologist's diplomas because an under-grad degree in biology is almost completely worthless in the job market.

No one should go into most sciences (including physics) if they a) intend to stop at the undergrad level and b) expect it to be of non-trivial value in the job market.

Engineering degrees are economically useful at the undergrad level. Science degrees are not, at least not any moreso than English or philosophy degrees. So there is absolutely no need to promote STEM degrees as a career choice. They are a very bad one, outside of engineering (and even there it depends on field and timing).

eli_gottlieb6• 12 years ago

Graduate student here. Would love to talk about this stuff.

There's loads of kids going to graduate school to become servants for mediocre, yet politically-connected scientists.

The first part is true, but the mediocre scientists aren't necessarily politically-connected. More often, they're just busy, so consistently busy doing their own research and supervising their own students that one day some new and improved methodology, instrument, or statistical tool leaves them in the dust. This happens because, frankly, nobody pays them to keep their methodology, instruments, and statistical tools up to date, and it's not like anyone will refuse to publish their papers if they don't keep up-to-date. They get grants because they publish papers, and they publish papers because they keep doing experiments and/or proving theorems -- the fact that they could be learning more and quicker by working some other way isn't built into any incentive structure except their personal hopes and dreams (which are the first thing any young scientist learns to repress).

There is especially no shortage of scientists in the sense that, simply put, there are not enough permanent jobs for the PhDs and post-docs we already train. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd030909s.gif

Then, once they have spent the X years and $Y in opportunity costs to get a PhD, they have to figure out a career for themselves. This is a bad, not a good, thing. It reduces early-stage career experimentation and encourages low-quality science.

This is quite true. I find the advising structure in graduate school strange with respect to its stated purposes. The definitional requirement of a PhD is that it be a large piece of original research (stereotypically, about three papers' worth) that charts the course for the young scientist's early career. The best PhD dissertations open up whole new subfields, and those are the young scientists who get the good jobs. But how do we allocate labor to produce these "brilliant new ideas"? Largely by assigning the graduate student to work on their adviser's existing research program, which they can slowly transform into something at least partially their own depending on their level of supervision.

(The worst PhD dissertations are basically just longer MSc dissertations: fully supervised research work done in total peonage with little to no original input by the apprentice graduating to become a real scientist.)

There are loads of theories and ideas in any given field about the way that things may be. What you need, as a minimum, is the ability to stick the course to figure out a way of testing those theories and ideas and do the (extraordinarily boring) legwork to get it done. I know a lot of scientists (physicists and mathematicians) and all of them are stubborn, but not particularly brilliant. 99% of physics and mathematics are made up of people who will do drudge work for years with very little recognition or reward. Very, very occasionally, one of them hits the jackpot. It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation.

clap clap clap http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6odkq8jNo1qbolbn.gif

Absolutely, completely, entirely, 100% true. The vast majority of professional science is legwork. Theoreticians can spend plenty of time constructing models or proving theorems to feel brilliant, but ultimately, they mostly just do legwork as well. Experimentalists and engineering researchers have to actually do experiments and actually produce artifacts. Mind, many of us find even the drudgery and legwork plenty fascinating to set-up and do, but almost never so much that we'd object to your taking it away somehow.

Also mind: some scientists are brilliant. They're just not the mode, or even always the shining stars of the field, since professional scientists are mostly selected (and therefore optimized) for tenacity (being bored and working weekends for very little compensation) and consistency (producing 110% the desired results, from elementary school through grant applications).

I would add only one quality: a professional scientist is defined not only by religious devotion to doing loads and loads of legwork for little compensation, but also by an emotional ability to withstand being constantly graded, measured, and stack-ranked against everyone else in your field, in time periods ranging from each semester to every few years. From the beginning of undergrad through tenure and up until you move from doing research to mostly teaching or administrating, you basically never stop having to pass yet another set of exams (each one calibrated to fail some percentage at the bottom, forcing them to find other careers) to continue doing your existing job or to receive a promotion that other skilled professionals would usually get by virtue of experience alone.

While I've heard that many decades ago, funding and positions were plentiful, and so the system was not nearly so burdensome as today, now I am always a little amazed that scientific advancement manages to happen at all, since almost everything a scientist does professionally is connected to keeping his job instead of actually getting and sharing research results.

noobermin• 12 years ago

So, what do we do?

From one graduate student to another, do we decide to keep sucking toes and complain about it later or do we actually do something about it?

nagrom6• 12 years ago

The first part is true, but the mediocre scientists aren't necessarily politically-connected.

I got my PhD at an international research lab. I was a research fellow in nuclear physics at a Russell Group (i.e. top-16) university in the UK for 7 years. I was a guest scientist at CERN. I know whereof I speak ;-)

[EDIT: Let's assume that if you are mediocre and not politically-connected, you don't get tenure and you don't stay long. You don't supervise students in an official fashion. This is mostly true, I think.]

I can assure you that when (if!) you come to apply for tenure, it will matter more who your friends are and whose bags you carried than the papers that you produced or the students that you mentored. I agree that most scientists are incredibly busy. Sadly, because they are all incredibly busy, it's the extra stuff (the handshakes, the dinners, etc.) that come to matter. The technical stuff (the tooling, the methods) don't matter precisely because the group heads don't understand them - but they do understand who they had dinner with last week, or who gave a nice talk at that pleasant conference. They do understand that their friend was their prospective employee's supervisor, and they do understand the concept of political favours. They understand prestige and status and how to obtain it, almost by definition. That speaks to your last point too.

Also mind: some scientists are brilliant. They're just not the mode, or even always the shining stars of the field, since professional scientists are mostly selected (and therefore optimized) for tenacity (being bored and working weekends for very little compensation) and consistency (producing 110% the desired results, from elementary school through grant applications).

I disagree slightly, with the benefit of experience. The most brilliant people I knew all left science. They (we, now) went to draw larger salaries in industry, working half the hours and with more pleasant colleagues. The people that were left were those without brilliance but with the tenacity to hold on and without the skills to get a decent job in a mid-career switch. That's not to say that there aren't exceptions, but they're rare (again, only in my experience).

up until you move from doing research to mostly teaching or administrating

Well, at this point you've failed, you see - you've given up doing science :-) But you still get graded - there are departmental quotas and budget forecasts and student surveys and now you're a middle manager. But you get paid less.

jofer• 12 years ago

On a completely unrelated note, is M.S. work in the CS world really: "fully supervised research work done in total peonage with little to no original input"?

For us, an M.S. thesis was supposed to be largely independent, publishable work. Is it that different in different fields?

At least in the geosciences, M.S. research is basically your adviser saying "Here's an idea/interesting problem that I haven't thought much about but looks promising. Have at it."

You do your M.S., publish, switch schools and start a Ph.D. (Or go into industry... An M.S. is a very common working degree in geology.)

A Ph.D. is "Come up with three different, relevant, original ideas that work* and see them through". (*Obviously, most don't work, so it's largely an exercise it trying different things until something does.)

I know we have a different academic culture than CS (and a wildly different industry culture), but is it really that different at the M.S. level?

scottlocklin3• 12 years ago

I almost stopped reading the article after the sentence, "A self-esteem expert offers a way out of the conundrum." I should have. This is psychobabble rubbish, written by people who have not done science, and who do not know the life histories of people who have studied science to any degree. The main encouragement I had from my parents was to visit the library. They definitely discouraged me from taking apart the blender and refrigerator when I was in the 3rd grade. They did eventually buy me and my sisters a radio shack computer; there was no special encouragement for me to hack assembler as a kid, but I did, and my sisters used it to play video games. Curiosity comes from within. The blank slate theory is as rubbish as the theory of reincarnation.

I share your two hypotheses to the point I consider them ansatzes. Most of my peers have Ph.D.'s in hard sciences or engineering as I do. Most of them wasted their time on their thesis research; it's just a certificate meaning "certifiably smart, persistent, and able to do self guided study." I don't particularly regret getting my underwear drawer liner autograph from the governator. It was a poor financial decision, but I had fun playing with big toys, and it provided enough meaning to my life I avoided ending up a glue sniffer or drunkard.

Attempting to convince more people to do this is a fool's errand: we can't even employ the ones we have. I've been lucky in that I have mostly worked on interesting things and been reasonably well paid for it, but doubling or tripling the number of science people in the world is foolish unless you give them something useful to do. My last job hunt, I ended up talking to an awful lot of people who thought a good use of my time would be building data pipelines to some Hadoop atrocity. You don't need a Ph.D. in physics or machine learning to do that. Yet a lot of Ph.D. types are doing this sort of plumbing for a living, because there are not enough jobs doing actual science.

abc_lisper• 12 years ago

I can't agree more. One thing I noticed is that, when dealing with large entities like university education, your apartment, home, job etc., the risk is optimized out of the system, and placed on the individual. Take a close look at the contracts you sign on, next time, if you don't believe me.

Now, as some one poorly paid and pursuing science you would be particularly vulnerable to this risk. The bad thing is you have worked yourself into a corner, and there is nothing that you can immediately do, to improve your situation, should you fall into bad times. If you are working for a contractor for a big IT company, you can work long hours for increased pay. You, as a scientist, will not find a similar outlet.

Personally, I think the whole thing sucks. It is not that we need more people in science, rather, we need more investment in science; People/Institutions with big money taking big risks. Like Elon Musk.

weeksie• 12 years ago

Carol Dweck hasn't done science? Why would you say that? Do you say that because you don't feel that psychology is a science or is it because of something about her work in particular?

In any case my impression is that the article was about different strategies for improving achievement. I'm not a psychologist, but I've seen some pretty convincing articles that show that praise for how smart a kid is versus praise for how hard they work affects how they handle failure. Increasing perseverance would be a good way to be more successful in academia, I would imagine.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

My last job hunt, I ended up talking to an awful lot of people who thought a good use of my time would be building data pipelines to some Hadoop atrocity.

What would you rather be doing with your higher education credentials? What is the hiring process for doing that?

javert• 12 years ago

I almost stopped reading the article after the sentence, "A self-esteem expert offers a way out of the conundrum." I should have. This is psychobabble rubbish, written by people who have not done science, and who do not know the life histories of people who have studied science to any degree.

If you want to back up this claim, back it up. The entire rest of your comment is totally orthogonal.

The claim being made by the self-esteem expert is not "psychobabble." It's simple enough for you to think about directly. It's not a langauge you can't understand, written in abstract terms you can't understand.

Having experienced firsthand what happens when people treat intelligence as an "innate talent," I actually know that what he is saying is correct, from personal experience.

imgabe3• 12 years ago

It doesn't sound like you know the first thing about Carol Dweck's work. You heard the term "self esteem expert", which incidentally is about as misleading as possible, and went off on what you imagine that to be.

Nowhere in the article does it say anything about PhDs. A Bachelor's degree is more than sufficient to do the sort of "plumbing" you mention. And it is exactly that sort of thing where the employers are chronically complaining that they can't find any qualified candidates without getting more H1B visas.

Someone may not need a PhD to do this sort of thing, but they DO need more than the remedial Algebra II class that qualified as a math prerequisite for their Communications degree, which they went into because they were told in 2nd grade that they're "not a math person".

corysama3• 12 years ago

You don't need to be smart to be a scientist; you need to be stubborn.

Are there any good ways to teach stubbornness to very-non-stubborn kids in a student-teacher relationship?

Too often stubbornness is attributed to some quirk in the child's history/family life that leads them down a self-reinforcing path of self-motivated stubbornness. That's not useful for the vast majority of kids who are surrounded by constant, quick distractions and have parents who lack the knowledge/motivation to instill stubbornness into them.

clebio• 12 years ago

Maybe? But do we need to? Is there some inherent reason why we should try to change a student or kid's nature?

nagrom6• 12 years ago

I think that you missed point 1) ;-)

Osmium• 12 years ago

This is similar to the argument that ideas don't matter for entrepreneurship.

I've long believed doing a PhD is very similar to being an entrepreneur. Discipline and maintaining motivation are by far the hardest things. Little pay and no guarantee of reward. You have an idea and you have to do your best to see it through, but it's tough, utterly exhausting and very isolating. It's a wonder anyone manages it at all really.

tjradcliffe2• 12 years ago

I've done a PhD and been an entrepreneur. The former is much harder, although "success" is almost certain if you're persistent.

It is very difficult for people to appreciate how grueling an academic career can be, from grad school on. I put together this list to make the point: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1588 (needs to be read to the end to see what I mean.)

yodsanklai• 12 years ago

I know a lot of scientists (physicists and mathematicians) and all of them are stubborn, but not particularly brilliant.

My experience is that professors in "pure maths" are very bright and showed exceptional reasoning skills from an early age.

It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation.

That's quite a generalisation! obviously, not all professional scientists are geniuses and it takes perseverance to get a decent permanent position. But to get a position in a decent institution isn't only a matter of political connections and stubbornness. Look up some coursera classes for instance. The people teaching those classes aren't just there because they're the only ones willing to do some "extraordinarily boring" legwork.

analog312• 12 years ago

>>> Very, very occasionally, one of them hits the jackpot.

That's the definition of a jackpot.

freyr2• 12 years ago

Good point. The opportunity cost of getting a PhD can generally be pretty soul crushing if measured in terms of dollars, years, and rungs on the career ladder (although a lot of things can be soul crushing if measured by those metrics).

All that effort to do some research that, at the end of the day, probably won't matter to anyone. I don't take that as a huge personal failure, because most research doesn't really change the world. That's the nature of research. It's like the world of startups, where most of the time you fail to make an impact, and occasionally you succeed.

But unlike in the start-up world, success isn't measured in $XM IPOs or buyouts. It means getting your foot in the door as a non-tenured professor, so you can work fiendishly at a below-market salary for the next few years trying to secure tenure. Or taking a job at an industrial research lab, and possibly discovering you don't actually enjoy working at industrial research labs.

Ah, now I'm too old to work as a programmer at your social media company? Sweet.

emotionalcode• 12 years ago

What is brilliance, to you, then?

jiggy2011• 12 years ago

More likely they are quitting science because they know it's a lot of work for not very much pay and it's definitely not a sexy profession.

arbutus• 12 years ago

If you replace 'sexy' with 'viable', this could make sense for pure sciences. Given the size of a student loan it can take to pay for a degree (especially if you need more than just a Bachelor's), pure sciences could be losing some kids to engineering over potential salary. Those kids would still fall within the scope of this article though (STEM in general).

simmons3• 12 years ago

I see this sentiment elsewhere in the thread, but my thinking upon reading the article was that these children are not just abandoning science research jobs by quitting science, but also relatively well-paying jobs in fields for which science is prerequisite -- medicine, engineering, etc.

amelius• 12 years ago

Indeed. And I suspect that a change in culture (or at least perception) could possibly be the best way to give science a boost.

yen2232• 12 years ago

Seeing what PhDs get paid, I think the intersection of people smart enough to qualify for a PhD, and the people idealistic enough to forgo better pay in other industries is shrinking.

mi3law• 12 years ago

Science these days is mostly done in institutions of higher learning, where 1) it is a pretty rigid process with slightly counter productive incentives (publish papers! Any papers!), and 2) it is available only to a select few who've made it through a rigid and ivory-tower-esque formula (i.e. the universities themselves).

I think that's a big problem, and one that makes the self esteem issue worse (if you don't fit the formula, you'll feel inferior).

I always wanted to be a scientist, but then gravitated towards entrepreneurship because it's less rigid and defined.

forkandwait• 12 years ago

Public education is about imposing class structure, not encouraging excellence. If we decided to execute for real, we could be swimming in young engineers.

sjs382• 12 years ago

I'm currently work as a full-time developer, and I love it.

I never thought I'd be a developer, though.

I was beginning to learn programming around 8th-9th grade, but I was only creating webpages, simple CRUD apps, and other things that weren't very "serious".[1]

At this time, I knew I didn't want to be a programmer because I knew the job equated to sitting around doing math problems all day. It's not that I didn't think I was smart enough—I was a very good math student. I just couldn't think of anything less appealing than doing math problems all day, every day for the rest of my life. I didn't know what the job actually entailed, but I thought I did.

[1] I thought of "programmers" as people who built 3D engines, used complex math to render interfaces (shapes, colors, animations, etc). By that standard, I'm still not a programmer. :)

tn13• 12 years ago

This is how I interpret "not smart".

- If I have to be scientist, I have to demonstrate certain level of competence in science and maths.

- I can achieve that in 2 ways. 1. I am so brilliant that I reach that level without breaking a sweat. 2. I will have to put in more efforts to reach that level.

- Kids are not interested in putting those efforts, neither do their parents put in necessary efforts to convince them.

- Kids are getting lazy, running away from personal responsibility and ambitions. This is bad because eventually they will end up living on welfare money taxed from the hardworking students.

JoeAltmaier6• 12 years ago

So, actually smarter than the kids putting in all the work!

seanflyon• 12 years ago

I will have to put in more efforts to reach that level.

I think that is a valid point for some students, but for others I think it is more: "I don't want to put in all that effort only to fail because I'm not smart enough"

westoncb• 12 years ago

I've read a couple of Dweck's books and highly recommend them—probably "Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development" for the crowd here. Her other book is branded like a self-help book, and it's still good though I imagine many won't like the style.

Her theory hinges on the concept of a 'declarative knowledge system' as a component of cognition, which could be described (in an over-simple manner) as "beliefs are significant determinants of behavior." This structure is also at the heart of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is the dominant paradigm for treating anxiety, depression, ocd, and others. It also works by correcting problematic beliefs in patients.

The belief in question in Dweck's work, which has so much impact on people's learning efficacy, is whether intelligence is changeable or not. If someone thinks it's changeable, they work hard to change it, and value effort. If they think it's something fixed that they're born with, they hold out hope that they might be brilliant for as long as possible, trying to make sure they and others think that's the case. You can imagine how this impacts people responses to failures in intellectual domains: if you think intelligence is changeable, you are glad to be given information on a weakness that you can now improve; if you think it's fixed, you become scared and discouraged.

I think this article focuses on the praise aspect, because it's easy to communicate the idea to lots of people; but the reason the type of praise matters is because one type or the other leads (on average) to the formation of one belief or another on the question of intelligence mutability. If you're not a parent, but someone interested in being able to learn more effectively, the praise aspect is probably less relevant to you—but the books are good.

The thing to keep in mind though, is that the only way to reap the benefits of what she's talking about is to understand that intelligence is changeable (to deeply believe it—that's where it's going to impact your behavior). Reading her books can help instill the idea—I'm still looking for other ways to prove it to myself and have had some success.

qwerta• 12 years ago

Perhaps the solution is to make science 'easier'. Works just fine with arts.

xorcist• 12 years ago

I don't understand the American fixation with being "smart".

I have worked 15 years and coded low-level, applications and ops. I've always kept an interest in this and keep a few side projects.

But I am not smart. Anyone could do this, given the right training.

If what you want in life is a science PhD, go get it. Anyone can do it. You may have to work more for it, but that's it.

Dewie2• 12 years ago

You may have to work more for it, but that's it.

Fortunately getting a doctorate doesn't have a hard deadline, or at least that's my impression (of course it may vary).

jmtame• 12 years ago

To my fellow hackers/programmers out there: I worked as a mentor on a startup for a while that taught people how to program. One thing that's really frustrating to a beginner to hear is "it's really not that hard." Actually I would argue this is the single biggest deterrent to people learning, and it's completely avoidable. Hackers like to say this to encourage people to learn how to code, I've seen it happen in casual conversations, but it has the unintended consequence of making the beginner think if it's hard, then they must be stupid because this other person told them it's not hard. It's actually really hard to learn to program, we just easily forget about that. And we also forget that we had other people help us along the way, we didn't learn it inside of a vacuum.

If you're a hacker, you owe it to a beginner to let them know it's difficult but if they persist they can overcome the learning curve (for some people it's steeper or wider, but it's still not easy no matter how you look at it). We're very honest about how difficult starting a startup is, so we should be equally honest when it comes to learning to code. Hope this helps anyone out there interested in learning.

iharhajster• 12 years ago

there is no boring subject, just boring teacher.

someone smarter than me said: teaching is not filling a cup. teaching is lighting a fire.

i still remember how some teachers sucked at knowledge, and/or knowledge transmission to students. math is actually pretty easy if it is explained to you in a words you understand. i think feynman said it.

some of best teaching i've seen is walter lewins mit 801 and 802. it's available on mit ocw. it's not just about teaching but also lighting a fire of students' willingness to start to learn for themselves . and always teach via example (sokrat, i think).

ivan_ah4• 12 years ago

As a math writer (math entrepreneur?) I talk to a lot of people about math and I'm often shocked by the reactions I encounter. Introducing math into a conversation has a consistent effect of making 30-40% of people very uncomfortable, and they usually try to quickly change the subject.

I was perplexed by this, until I realized what is going on. Many people are convinced of the implication:

   person is smart  -->  person is good at math

So if you're not good at math (e.g. bad grades in high school), the rules of logic (specifically modus tollens) implies that you're not smart! Since nobody wants to feel unsmart, or recall painful math experiences from their schooling, they avoid the subject as much as possible.

In the light of this, the first few chapters of my book[1] serve to help readers get over their math fears. Honestly, I feel I need to learn about psychology to help people with their math phobia... Once you get rid of fear, math can become an amazing source of knowledge buzz.

[1] http://minireference.com/

freyr2• 12 years ago

Science is hard work, and not always high reward. If a kid has a natural aptitude for numerical thinking, logical thinking, etc., but no strong affinity for science, they may just be smart enough not to enter that field.

Very often, being really "smart" in a subject is dependent on having a sustained high level of interest in that subject. Not at the grade school or high school level, but at the graduate or professional level. It's possible to fake it, relying on raw intelligence and forcing yourself to perform well in a mentally-demanding field that you're not genuinely interested in, but it's way, way more work.

estatemanjoe• 12 years ago

Kind of niche comment BUT this starts in kindergarten. I'm a fan of staving off kindergarten until a kid is 6. If they feel smarter than the other kids at that young age, it'll become how they view themselves. They'll step up to their own self-perception.

threatofrain• 12 years ago

I think there may be a realistic perception of the difficulty of academic competition, as well as the number of open positions and the compensation. And there are definitely a lot of smart and hard working people there.

It's one thing to ask, "How smart do you have to be to do useful science?", and it's quite another to ask, "Do you think you can make it in the field of competition?"

jamesash• 12 years ago

Chemist here. If there's one thing that being in a research lab does to you, it's that you feel dumb almost all of the time - and it's generally not because of your coworkers, it's because the vast majority of experiments fail. There are rare feelings of success, and many moments of feeling that you are in a dark hole trying to climb out. To make significant headway you need a thick skin, and even then it can be extremely hard dealing with failure after failure. My unpopular opinion is that, given that there is currently not a shortage of scientists in the USA, it is not a travesty that many people who feel "dumb" in the early stages of learning science opt out of a scientific career that will only exacerbate these feelings, and thus save themselves considerable opportunity costs by seeking a profession that is easier on the ego.

seanmcdirmid• 12 years ago

I would agree, but only to the extent that our society doesn't value science enough to effectively use all the scientists we produce already. Rather, it values more business and pushing money around, of maybe building things.

If there was some kind of crisis (say cold war) and we needed new inventions to survive, things might be really different. But right now, we are just comfortable with the world as it is with not much demand for radical transformation.

dqdo• 12 years ago

Too many adults quit science because it does not pay enough.

digital-rubber• 12 years ago

"I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing." - Socrates

Maybe they are all little socrates'es

known• 12 years ago

Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.-- Leo Tolstoy

sqd• 12 years ago

The entering of people who are unable to do meaningful research into the science field is a blatant waste of social resources.

netcan• 12 years ago

The crux seems to be this:

"They often praise the ability, the talent, or the intelligence too much. The opposite of this is the good process praise"

I've been hearing variations for this for years, often in the context of comparing educational traditions of Asia to Europe-US. It seems each has their advantage. I haven't heard any smashingly convincing evidence that there is some insight which can be applied across the board. It mostly sounds like people picking a preference and arguing for it. I don't see whay science is special here.

If I was to pick my own bias and go with it, it's that education at some point (I don't know if it's at 5 or 25) needs to get students to really internalize the actual process of learning and practice. Spend a quality hour a day on piano and you will get good at piano. Same goes for maths, painting, fiction writing, foreign languages and lucha libre.

They needs to realize that they can get good at stuff. They need to realize how much work it is and they need to internalize that they (specifically) can do it.

I have another pet peeve here. These discussions start with a problem and the immediate assumption is that the educational establishment needs to fix it. Well, the educational establishment is a huge lumbering giant and it's not necessarily the right man for the job. What about the ballet instructor, mother or godfather.

We're talking more about child psychology than science education here. Raising kids better is certainly an admirable goal, but is this best addressed at a humanity-as-a-whole level? Do you have a daughter, nephew or godson? Can you make a difference as an adult in their life? Why not start there. At least it's something most of us can do something about.

nevergetenglish• 12 years ago

"They needs to realize that they can get good at stuff".

Each time I begin to learn something new, as a new programming language, the beginnings are very hard and you feel dumb, this is the most difficult part. Once you have practice a lot, then all goes smoothly.

Add to this that everyone seems to forget quickly how hard was to give the first steps. When you are learning something new people take for granted that you should be ready, but may times you are in that stage in which progress is hard and slow. So we should emphasize this point when we start learning.

nshepperd• 12 years ago

I don't think the main problem is what sort of praise these kids are being given.

I remember being told, at a seminar on exactly this sort of thing, that more than half of students entering high school here (Australia) still did not understand fractions.

The high school curriculum then steamrollers on to try and teach these kids about algebra, calculus, trigonometry. Not once do we stop to check that the students grasp the prerequisites necessary to understand the material, rather than just faking enough to get 50% on a test.

Is it surprising that people develop learned helplessness about mathematics?

hedgew• 12 years ago

Forcing people who genuinely are not smart enough into sciences is sure to cause a lot of suffering and wasted time, though.

Many of us here have social circles that consists only of the highly educated; in these bubbles it's easy to forget that many people simply are not capable of higher level mathematics, and are not capable of becoming even mediocre scientists. It's likely that the average child - and the vast majority of all children - would be happier and more productive in other professions.

It's harsh, but try to judge your child's talents objectively, then encourage them to do what best for them.

geebee• 12 years ago

Can I be really cynical here? I might rephrase this "Too many kids quit science because they're wise as well as smart".

I've been on this hobby horse for a while here on HN, and I'm worried people are getting tired of me. But seriously, think about it. I don't have attrition rate numbers for typical undergraduate STEM degrees, but I do know that undergrads don't drop out of Economics or Poly Sci or Literature to major in CS, Engineering, Physics, and so forth. Where I do have data, look at attrition rates for graduate schools, especially at the elite level. A typical attrition rate for an elite Law or Medical school is below 1%. A typical attrition rate for an elite Engineering or Science PhD program is 35-50%! MS programs aren't s studied, but nation wide, attrition rates are about 33% (I'd have to dig though my HN comments to find the cite for that one, and it was behind a paywall).

So, considering how difficult all this is, outcomes must be much better for those STEM grads, right? Well, no, not really. CS is a good major at the undergrad level, and grads do pretty well. But again, at the elite level, top software developers, even from elite CS schools with grad degrees, just don't pull it in like dermatologists or radiologists. I read a pretty heartbreaking story about a woman who was denied the right to use sick leave for maternity leave from her grad program. My cousin, a radiologist, worked part time (20 hour weeks) for a while when she had a kid, and she still pulled down more than my salary as a developer. I know another woman who is an emergency medicine physician who did the same thing. They are so, so, so much better off not going into science. A RAND study found that the American aversion to STEM graduate degrees in favor of professional degrees is economically rational and shouldn't be a head scratcher. The head scratcher is why people still act like the only thing we need to do to get more people into science is "make it cool", or "improve middle school math", and so forth.

We have got to stop acting like there's something surprising here. Science gets kids who are very smart and utterly devoted but perhaps lacking in wisdom, and who just can't believe that they might be in the bottom half of a cohort with high grades in STEM coursework and test scores above 95%ile. Or, alternatively, they are students who don't have these other options (US med and law schools are not nearly as accessible to international students as engineering and science PhD programs are). So if the "professions" are cut off to you because you aren't a US citizen, your decision to go into a graduate STEM program (especially if it fast tracks you to US residency) may be rational in a way that wouldn't hold for someone who already possesses US citizenship (who typically shun science PhD programs).

sporkenfang• 12 years ago

Dweck's last comment really got struck me. By virtue of being taught to place authority and trust in the parent, the child generally wants to do what the parent says is "right". Some children, by virtue of their nature or peer pressure in their surroundings or whatever in addition to parental disapproval, begin to feel that negativity toward their interests reinforced. Had my exceedingly conservative grandparents and parents actually been able to "okay" my early interest in engineering and the sciences at the very least instead of telling me it was unfeminine (as well as my brother's early interests in fashion and mathematics, which were strongly labelled both at home and among our peers as faggy and uncool) I think both of us would have had less anguish and self-doubt and emotional issues as teens and in our early twenties.

If children are stubborn enough, they can overcome this kind of negative reinforcement at home of the societal norms they see expressed at school and throughout much of whatever culture they belong to. However, as is the case with other people I grew up with who had similar backgrounds, without stubbornness and the willingness to recognize where one would be most happy and useful it is possible to drift for a long time without understanding why everything about one's identity is orthogonal to how it feels it should be, or even to just end up in a mediocre paper shuffling job forever.

Imo it isn't about encouragement or positive reinforcement, but rather (as a parent) helping your children to figure out what they want to do and what they are interested in without projecting your own hopes and aspirations on them. Regardless of if your kid wants to live in a garage in Monterey and make sculptures of feet (or, hell, move to India and build water treatment plants, or study blue whales, or whatever), even if you think they'd make an amazing neurosurgeon/NFL player/xyz, don't push them to be something they're not. They get enough backlash from their peers and the rest of the world as it is.

Too many kids don't just quit STEM (or never start) because they're pushed out of it or excluded for one reason or another, too many kids go into what seems socially acceptable because they aren't allowed space to grow into whatever the hell they are.

Too Many Kids Quit Science Because They Don't Think They're Smart

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