Yours is not my field, but to me it appears the issue here is that you're working at a level of the project that is below your competency, and don't have the capacity to influence senior team members on the project's base deficiencies. You wouldn't be the first person in a highly technical position to face this issue. Generally one is left with two options here - first is to go over the bosses heads and report the issue and fight for a resolution, the other is to moan about it at a lower level/privately and learn from it for your own experience. I've never seen the first work out well.
It's not just academia which faces problems of senior people chasing fulfilment of high level criteria to the detriment of actually meeting the low level criteria for success - this issue is present large organisations of all kinds, because the management /lead role is essentially not operating in the same environment as the people doing the stuff.
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.
My advice - figure out how to accept that and how to meet your own needs, or aim for roles where you'll have greater power to avoid those kinds of issues (smaller projects, projects with people you have social power with, or becoming a project leader).
While I appreciate the sympathetic expression of condolences for the misfortune and indicating that it's one of life's many unavoidable tragedies, I think there are some fundamental philosophical issues in the reply that are themselves manifestations of modernity's ills.
"Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence."
I addressed this towards the end. In short, evidence for the presence of malice is unequivocal, and if incompetence is responsible for some of it, this is failing Statistics 101 level of incompetence. That is, a level of incompetence that on its own gives concern as to how it could be given license to be exercised in the first place.
The best piece of advice, that I have taken, is to minimize involvement with people with compromised ethical integrity.
But that's already fairly obvious, and it avoids the bigger questions.
Why do people with flagrantly nefarious agendas and behaviors come to acquire power and influence so easily? Why are there zero consequences for such behavior?
And this leads to the warning that I gave, which at this point is quite clearly just an inevitable prediction: the general public is entirely in the right in distrusting the institutions of science and, unfortunately, entirely in the right for pushing for politicians who intend to reduce funding for it, and this will most certainly happen in Europe.
Your suggestion that these things are not uncommon in other bureacratic organizations is telling and important, though. Bureacracies bloat and this has a systemic structure in itself. The intention of the article, as far as informing the public, is not "look there are evil people out there!" that's not interesting or new. Rather it describes the contours by which malice can interact with institutions and incentives to the detriment of the world at large. By the natural scaling of what is peculiar is really familiar or what is personal is universal, this is obviously happening on a mass scale. Hopefully someone out there with actual influence over the institutions of academic research can learn and nudge things towards a positive direction. If not, at least my conscience is clear that I've done my part in getting the truth out there.
"figure out how to accept that and how to meet your own needs"
The way the statement is phrased is like it's a simple matter of taking box A over box B when presented with choices and being willing to state one's preferences. The problem is not "issues" that I find unpleasant, the problem is that these are manifestations of endemic illness in modern institutions. It's all simply much much deeper than that.
"Needs" is a terrible, even Orwellian, word in modern discourse. We don't "need" anything other than food and some shelter-like thing that offers protection from the elements. There is nothing that is truly a "need" beyond these basic necessities.
Of course surviving and thriving are entirely different planes of existence. And so by "need" you are actually refering to the longing for a sense of meaning in one's life.
In that sense, from the personal level, I can refer to Boethius and even consider the suffering of this experience itself as fundamentally worthwhile, in bringing attention to the stark difficulty of finding meaning in the modern day. That is the topic of an upcoming article. Finding a sense of meaning and purpose is an incredibly challenging thing to do today. Broadly speaking, trying to make a positive contribution to the world by working towards innovation promoting economic development in Africa is a priority. But degrowth within the EU is the priority of the European Commission and so finding funding for this is already very difficult. And thus simultaneously, and as a back up mental health plan, finding meaning through the day to day exerience of the beauty of mathematical abstractions as well as small specific practical inventions, while developing self reliance and disconnecting from larger institutions and entirely giving up on any hope of making a broad positive contribution to the world, is the sensible, if also bittersweetly tragic, necessity that comes with the otherwise mundance phrase of "how to accept that"
I think finding meaning and making sense of life is just as important as food and shelter. I've known people no longer here who only lacked the former, not the latter. It's right to prioritise this. I would discuss finding that meaning more with people you know well.
The practical issues you outline seem to have coalesced into bigger life questions. Similar things happened to me a few years back and it took a lot of reflection and study to find a more comfortable position to live life from.
Morally objectionable people regularly occupy positions of power - at all levels I find. I think some of it is the result of the qualities of people whose primary desire is to seek power and some of it is the result of how power affects people.
I can see how your experience has spun out into questioning science as a social institution. I don't think the political logic follows though.
Every large project in history has had morally disgraceful and self-serving people involved. It's the nature of people.
Large scale projects don't all pan out how you've experienced - yet even if only a minority of them become socially useful then supporting large projects in general can pay off for all. We can clearly observe progress in science and other large scale projects over the last 100 years, and I don't believe we're any more morally decrepit today as a species, so I think the answer is these things do pay off as a whole. The political project of tearing away at all large scale scientific projects will successfully reduce some waste but at the cost of eliminating all chance for scientific progress.
Building knowledge on the realities of social dynamics may help ground you, but I think your friend observing your "mania" to achieve the unachievable is of much greater importance for you. Slava's value is much more than the sum of Slava's work and it doesn't sound like you've treated yourself well here.
I don't doubt the stark existential criticality of meaning, but it is a higher order need, like employment. One can theoretically live homeless or live off the land, but it's pretty damn hard, and one can theoretically numb oneself with pleasures or meditate your way into living in pure celebration of the profound now irrespective of life surroundings, but it's pretty damn hard.
Check out the references towards the end of the article. Yes, Science has been an outstanding contribution to humanity in the 20th century. But in recent times it has been plagued by the replication crisis, and the marginal return in innovation relative to dollar spent on research has precipitously dropped to being negligible. This is consistent with my suspicion that my experience with this project as well as a second one I wrote about on this blog are becoming the norm, rather than exception, unfortunately. And it seems the issues are systemic, that is economic and socio-political developments have altered the structure of incentives within scientific research to the point of more easily enabling nefarious actors, and also leading to a lot of just plain narrow specialized sub-sub-domain navelgazing and other more benign but still socially useless research endeavors.
Indeed, while seizing any potential opportunity to make a positive practical contribution in understanding that such would be few and far between, can remain, turning to the ancient wisdom of Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy appears to guide the "answer". That is, in an uncertain and chaotic world, one best turn inwards for meaning, fulfillment, and ultimately an approach to life characterized by vigor. More detail in an upcoming blog post, but my future should best be characterized by a pursuit of personal excellence in skills, not for public glory, but a day-to-day breathing celebration of the human will and capacity, while also taking time to relish in the raw absurdity of it all in jest and merriment.
Yours is not my field, but to me it appears the issue here is that you're working at a level of the project that is below your competency, and don't have the capacity to influence senior team members on the project's base deficiencies. You wouldn't be the first person in a highly technical position to face this issue. Generally one is left with two options here - first is to go over the bosses heads and report the issue and fight for a resolution, the other is to moan about it at a lower level/privately and learn from it for your own experience. I've never seen the first work out well.
It's not just academia which faces problems of senior people chasing fulfilment of high level criteria to the detriment of actually meeting the low level criteria for success - this issue is present large organisations of all kinds, because the management /lead role is essentially not operating in the same environment as the people doing the stuff.
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence.
My advice - figure out how to accept that and how to meet your own needs, or aim for roles where you'll have greater power to avoid those kinds of issues (smaller projects, projects with people you have social power with, or becoming a project leader).
While I appreciate the sympathetic expression of condolences for the misfortune and indicating that it's one of life's many unavoidable tragedies, I think there are some fundamental philosophical issues in the reply that are themselves manifestations of modernity's ills.
"Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence."
I addressed this towards the end. In short, evidence for the presence of malice is unequivocal, and if incompetence is responsible for some of it, this is failing Statistics 101 level of incompetence. That is, a level of incompetence that on its own gives concern as to how it could be given license to be exercised in the first place.
The best piece of advice, that I have taken, is to minimize involvement with people with compromised ethical integrity.
But that's already fairly obvious, and it avoids the bigger questions.
Why do people with flagrantly nefarious agendas and behaviors come to acquire power and influence so easily? Why are there zero consequences for such behavior?
And this leads to the warning that I gave, which at this point is quite clearly just an inevitable prediction: the general public is entirely in the right in distrusting the institutions of science and, unfortunately, entirely in the right for pushing for politicians who intend to reduce funding for it, and this will most certainly happen in Europe.
Your suggestion that these things are not uncommon in other bureacratic organizations is telling and important, though. Bureacracies bloat and this has a systemic structure in itself. The intention of the article, as far as informing the public, is not "look there are evil people out there!" that's not interesting or new. Rather it describes the contours by which malice can interact with institutions and incentives to the detriment of the world at large. By the natural scaling of what is peculiar is really familiar or what is personal is universal, this is obviously happening on a mass scale. Hopefully someone out there with actual influence over the institutions of academic research can learn and nudge things towards a positive direction. If not, at least my conscience is clear that I've done my part in getting the truth out there.
"figure out how to accept that and how to meet your own needs"
The way the statement is phrased is like it's a simple matter of taking box A over box B when presented with choices and being willing to state one's preferences. The problem is not "issues" that I find unpleasant, the problem is that these are manifestations of endemic illness in modern institutions. It's all simply much much deeper than that.
"Needs" is a terrible, even Orwellian, word in modern discourse. We don't "need" anything other than food and some shelter-like thing that offers protection from the elements. There is nothing that is truly a "need" beyond these basic necessities.
Of course surviving and thriving are entirely different planes of existence. And so by "need" you are actually refering to the longing for a sense of meaning in one's life.
In that sense, from the personal level, I can refer to Boethius and even consider the suffering of this experience itself as fundamentally worthwhile, in bringing attention to the stark difficulty of finding meaning in the modern day. That is the topic of an upcoming article. Finding a sense of meaning and purpose is an incredibly challenging thing to do today. Broadly speaking, trying to make a positive contribution to the world by working towards innovation promoting economic development in Africa is a priority. But degrowth within the EU is the priority of the European Commission and so finding funding for this is already very difficult. And thus simultaneously, and as a back up mental health plan, finding meaning through the day to day exerience of the beauty of mathematical abstractions as well as small specific practical inventions, while developing self reliance and disconnecting from larger institutions and entirely giving up on any hope of making a broad positive contribution to the world, is the sensible, if also bittersweetly tragic, necessity that comes with the otherwise mundance phrase of "how to accept that"
I think finding meaning and making sense of life is just as important as food and shelter. I've known people no longer here who only lacked the former, not the latter. It's right to prioritise this. I would discuss finding that meaning more with people you know well.
The practical issues you outline seem to have coalesced into bigger life questions. Similar things happened to me a few years back and it took a lot of reflection and study to find a more comfortable position to live life from.
Morally objectionable people regularly occupy positions of power - at all levels I find. I think some of it is the result of the qualities of people whose primary desire is to seek power and some of it is the result of how power affects people.
I can see how your experience has spun out into questioning science as a social institution. I don't think the political logic follows though.
Every large project in history has had morally disgraceful and self-serving people involved. It's the nature of people.
Large scale projects don't all pan out how you've experienced - yet even if only a minority of them become socially useful then supporting large projects in general can pay off for all. We can clearly observe progress in science and other large scale projects over the last 100 years, and I don't believe we're any more morally decrepit today as a species, so I think the answer is these things do pay off as a whole. The political project of tearing away at all large scale scientific projects will successfully reduce some waste but at the cost of eliminating all chance for scientific progress.
Building knowledge on the realities of social dynamics may help ground you, but I think your friend observing your "mania" to achieve the unachievable is of much greater importance for you. Slava's value is much more than the sum of Slava's work and it doesn't sound like you've treated yourself well here.
I don't doubt the stark existential criticality of meaning, but it is a higher order need, like employment. One can theoretically live homeless or live off the land, but it's pretty damn hard, and one can theoretically numb oneself with pleasures or meditate your way into living in pure celebration of the profound now irrespective of life surroundings, but it's pretty damn hard.
Check out the references towards the end of the article. Yes, Science has been an outstanding contribution to humanity in the 20th century. But in recent times it has been plagued by the replication crisis, and the marginal return in innovation relative to dollar spent on research has precipitously dropped to being negligible. This is consistent with my suspicion that my experience with this project as well as a second one I wrote about on this blog are becoming the norm, rather than exception, unfortunately. And it seems the issues are systemic, that is economic and socio-political developments have altered the structure of incentives within scientific research to the point of more easily enabling nefarious actors, and also leading to a lot of just plain narrow specialized sub-sub-domain navelgazing and other more benign but still socially useless research endeavors.
Indeed, while seizing any potential opportunity to make a positive practical contribution in understanding that such would be few and far between, can remain, turning to the ancient wisdom of Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy appears to guide the "answer". That is, in an uncertain and chaotic world, one best turn inwards for meaning, fulfillment, and ultimately an approach to life characterized by vigor. More detail in an upcoming blog post, but my future should best be characterized by a pursuit of personal excellence in skills, not for public glory, but a day-to-day breathing celebration of the human will and capacity, while also taking time to relish in the raw absurdity of it all in jest and merriment.