Dr. Darth: Bastard advisor from hell

Here’s a post-doc who suffered one of those nasty creatures that academic institutions seem to tolerate:

In the course of my weekly meetings with Darth, which often included his research coordinator, I was “diagnosed” as defensive, paranoid, negative, pompous, arrogant, secretive, scheming, learning disordered, and finally, virtually unemployable. He often threatened to fire me, despite the fact that he did not pay my salary and I technically did not work for him. He never once offered me constructive criticism, advice, or encouragement. I could see straight through his tyrannical, narcissistic diatribes. He knew that and it made it worse for me.

The verbal abuse was one thing, but a more destructive trend had started to emerge. He was sitting on my manuscripts. He would tell me I could not attend meetings in my own institution, or give invited talks about my research. He frustrated nearly every attempt I made at original science and wasted my time on side projects for people he wanted to impress. Instead of encouraging collaboration with other scientists, he stated that my duty was to troll his “database” for potential projects, at the rate of one project a week.

It goes on and on, but fortunately, the post-doc saw the lunacy of sticking with Dr. Darth, and took corrective action. And lived to tell the tale.

What did I learn that may be of use to others?

Lesson No. 1: No news is not good news. Investigate your prospective supervisor and if you hear nothing of substance, suspect that perhaps people are clamming up about his lack of people skills. Look elsewhere for a mentor.

Lesson No. 2: Don’t think that being flexible and agreeable will help you deal with bullies. That just stokes them. Working harder does not make things better. Make preparations to leave.

Lesson No. 3: Know that bullies fear exposure. Their entire self-image is based on how their chosen mirrors treat them. That also means that they have deeply ingratiated themselves with anyone with power.

Lesson No. 4: Don’t drink the Kool-Aid. Don’t let them convince you, either explicitly or implicitly to keep silent. Make sure that you tell as many people as possible what is going on. Seek out the people who don’t like or respect your supervisor, and see if they can help.

Finally, realize that you may not win, no matter how just your cause. Fight the good fight as long as possible, in order to rebuild your social capital, then move on.

* * *

Do read the advice (which I summarized here) given by Sean Carroll and Chad Orzel: choosing an advisor is the most important thing for a graduate student. I would go on to add that it is the most important thing for post-docs too. If you are going to be working closely with someone –, in a subordinate position — for the next year or two (or, five!) you better make sure that he/she is someone you can get along with. Such ’social’ research is just as important as the research on that person’s expertise, funding, publications, etc.

Olivia Judson’s agony aunt column

Just take a look at the first Ask Dr. Tatiana column that appeared in the Economist. And, eventually, a book emerged with the same title. From the Economist review:

Olivia Judson’s funny and blissfully original new book …purports to be sex advice offered to the animal kingdom by a universal agony aunt called Dr Tatiana, and amply demonstrates the sheer unyielding ruthlessness of the business of procreation. … She responds with gusto to pleading letters from the Dandy on the Cowpat, a yellow dung-fly who wants to make his sperm more attractive, or Anxious in Amboseli, an African elephant who is diagnosed as possessing SINBAD (Single Income, No Babe, Absolutely Desperate). I-Like-’Em-Headless-in-Lisbon is a praying mantis who asks Dr Tatiana if she also enjoys the thrilling mid-sex spasms of a partner who has just been decapitated; and we are introduced to a female midge who plunges her proboscis into her mates’ heads and turns their innards to a soup “which she slurps up, drinking until she’s sucked him dry…only his manhood, which breaks off inside her, betrays the fact that this was no ordinary meal.” There are several kinds of spiders, we learn further, “where there can be no doubting the females’ intention to take head, not give it.”

All this is from 2002. Just recently, I learnt that Olivia Judson has a blog, but alas, her blog is behind the NYTimes‘ paywall. So, all I can do is to just link to some extended excerpts in Mark Thoma’s blog: here, here, and here.

Punishment and altruism

An interesting paper in Science (a publicly available summary is here; link via Brain Ethics) shows that human beings’ propensity to punish (unfair acts by others) is correlated with their altruism. This finding is based on a pretty large scale study involving populations in no less than 15 different societies or tribes. The implication is that these two cultural traits co-evolved. Here’s a key quote:

A hallmark of humanity is that people help other people–not just relatives and friends but even complete strangers. Such altruism, which goes beyond the mere exchange of favors and forms the scaffolding of large-scale cooperation in human societies, has long been an evolutionary mystery. On page 1767, anthropologist Joseph Henrich of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and his colleagues take a crack at solving the puzzle, concluding that such helpful behavior may have arisen as a result of punishment.

Reporting on experiments they conducted in 15 different societies on five continents, the researchers argue that altruism evolved hand in hand with a willingness to punish selfish behavior. Their results lend support to models of gene-culture coevolution that propose that cultural norms such as the punishment of unfair actions drive the selection of genes favoring altruism.

What was interesting (to me, at least) was the use of three fairly simple prototype games that allowed the researchers to assess the participants’ inclination towards “costly punishment” and “altruism”. For assessing punishment, they used the Ultimatum Game and Third Party Punishment Game; for assessing altruism, they used the Dictator Game. In case you are not able to access the paper from the Science website, Brain Ethics has a description of the three games (with links).

Over at Reason Online, Ronald Bailey has an article explaining this ‘punishment-and-altruism’ research, and this is his concluding paragraph:

The results are intriguing. It turns out that the societies in which the player ones in the dictator game were willing to give more to the player twos are also the societies in which people were more willing to punish less generous players in the other two games. In other words, societies that punished strongly were also the most likely to have strong altruistic impulses. The moral of the story is that if you want to live in a world of caring generous cooperative people, make sure that you thoroughly thrash all the greedy, chiseling scoundrels you come across. It may cost you, but the world will be a better place. [bold emphasis added]

Corruption and New Delhi’s dangerous drivers

An academic paper by Marianne Bertrand, Simeon Djankov, Rema Hanna, Sendhil Mullainathan examines this issue with drivers in New Delhi. Here’s the abstract:

We follow 822 applicants through the process of obtaining a driver’s license in New Delhi, India. To understand how the bureaucracy responds to individual and social needs, participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: bonus, lesson, and comparison groups. Participants in the bonus group were offered a financial reward if they could obtain their license fast; participants in the lesson group were offered free driving lessons. To gauge driving skills, we performed a surprise driving test after participants had obtained their licenses. Several interesting facts regarding corruption emerge. First, the bureaucracy responds to individual needs. Those who want their license faster (e.g. the bonus group), get it 40% faster and at a 20% higher rate. Second, the bureaucracy is insensitive to social needs. The bonus group does not learn to drive safely in order to obtain their license: in fact, 69% of them were rated as “failures” on the independent driving test. Those in the lesson group, despite superior driving skills, are only slightly more likely to obtain a license than the comparison group and far less likely (by 29 percentage points) than the bonus group. Detailed surveys allow us to document the mechanisms of corruption. We find that bureaucrats arbitrarily fail drivers at a high rate during the driving exam, irrespective of their ability to drive. To overcome this, individuals pay informal “agents” to bribe the bureaucrat and avoid taking the exam altogether. An audit study of agents further highlights the insensitivity of agents’ pricing to driving skills. Together, these results suggest that bureaucrats raise red tape to extract bribes and that this corruption undermines the very purpose of regulation.

There is some commentary by Brad DeLong and Alex Tabarrok. In particular, Mark Thoma has quite a few links in his discussion of the question: “Does corruption improve economic efficiency?”.

Scientific misconduct can land you in jail!

From this story about an academic researcher being sent to jail for using fabricated and falsified data in grant applications:

[Former University of Vermont professor of medicine Eric Poehlman] was accused of falsifying research in applications and papers for several projects, including the effect of menopause on women’s metabolism, the impact of aging, the study of metabolism in Alzheimer’s patients and the effect of endurance training on metabolism.

In a deal with prosecutors last year, Poehlman pleaded guilty in connection with one $542,000 grant. The government said he defrauded federal agencies out of nearly $3 million.

The Boston Globe reports Poehlman is only the second academic “charged with a federal crime for falsifying research results to get a federal grant”; the first was a “a University of Pittsburgh professor who was convicted in 1988 but did not serve time in jail.”