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Cat Hicks

Had brunch with a scientist friend who's an expert in one of the more exciting emerging areas of applied biology. She said:

"People are like why are you so tired. People don't understand that our brains are on FIRE for at least eight hours a day. This is biology's heyday and yet the worst time to be a scientist because we're expected to know a million new things a day and discarded if we don't. All the tools none of the humanity."

I felt the software developers I work with can relate

14 April at 19:01 | Open on mastodon.social
6 comments
RacerX
Luke
cuan_knaggs

@grimalkina and then, as a dev, when i say "no. i don't want the new thing because look, it makes everything worse!" some how i'm being difficult

14 April at 19:07 | Open on freeradical.zone
Sevoris

@grimalkina I want to be poetic and say something along the lines of how we‘re exchanging understanding the world to tell better stories for better understanding the world as a mechanical endeavor without A Point but that also feels like missing the margin by a mile.

But even so: when did become understanding and knowledge such a… dehumanized process, when arguably understanding and improvement and self-reflection is so very human?

14 April at 19:09 | Open on mastodon.social
David Nash

@grimalkina It was starting to head that way in scientific reasearch many years ago (late 90s) after getting a Ph. D. in chemistry.

There were many reasons I left that career, but one of the big ones was simply that in the first year of my first post-Ph. D. job, I felt that I had to learn twice as much that year as I did in any one prior, including one of the toughest STEM undergrad curricula in the country and the traditional "really rough first fscking year" of a Ph. D. program.

And had absolutely no time to stop, think, and rest.

I bailed out into software development, where that trend (amazingly enough) was fairly muted by comparison.

@grimalkina It was starting to head that way in scientific reasearch many years ago (late 90s) after getting a Ph. D. in chemistry.

There were many reasons I left that career, but one of the big ones was simply that in the first year of my first post-Ph. D. job, I felt that I had to learn twice as much that year as I did in any one prior, including one of the toughest STEM undergrad curricula in the country and the traditional "really rough first fscking year" of a Ph. D. program.

14 April at 19:33 | Open on c.im
Jimmy Havok

@grimalkina It was a lot easier to be a Renaissance person when the sum total of knowledge was much smaller.

14 April at 20:25 | Open on mastodon.social
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