A reminder for those trainees all hopped up on the #UCStrike right now. This exists. Would be a great place to publish your thoughts on how the business of science should be run. sciencepolicyjournal.org/about.html It explicitly is for earlier career folks.

The US is generously endowed with poor people who vote Republican, Trump humpers, Elon stans and Michael Moore haters. The notion that pointing out structural compensation pyramids in academia is going to move the general public opinion on worker compensation is absurd. 351 times $50,000 equals $17,550,000. epi.org/publication/ce…

It may surprise you, given my tweetering, but it takes a lot for me to lose my shit in regular old academic bullshittery situations. It turns out that systemic refusal to acknowledge NIH MPI arrangements for local score keeping purposes is one of those things. The ENTIRE reason for NIH adopting MPI was to allow credit to be appropriately distributed to the deserving. Because promotions, pay, accelerations, space, job opportunities, etc etc often depended, and depend now, on how many extramural dollars are attributed to a person.

Interesting to look at NIH success rates for RFAs against the unsolicited ones. report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/re… NIDA had a 12% success rate for unsolicited RPG proposals versus 28% for those funded via RFA. NIAAA ran 16%/15%. NIGMS, wait for it, 28%/90%. NIA 22%/38%. NINDS 18%/26%. NIMH 20%/27%

I say this with regularity but a lot of biomedical scientists really fucked up by not taking enough classes from the Psychology Department as undergraduates. Knowing something about the many ways our stupid brains fool us should be foundational knowledge for a BA/BS degree. Experimental Psych education covers a lot of “counter-intuitive” (🤷‍♂️) findings that illustrate how what seems to us to be correct really isn’t. It also spends a bit of time showing why even when the “intuitive” result is true, we need to generate evidence for it.

We do need to talk just a little bit about Snidely Whiplash in the context of NIH grant award disparity and the thinking of our white colleagues who are gradually realizing just how they are a part of white supremacy this week. The Gither and Hoppe findings seem new to at least some of you so I'm going to tread what is old ground for others of you.

The initial reaction to Ginther was hot denial.

So now we’ve arrived : ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P… This is the systemic racism you have known about *in your profession* since 2011, my dear white handwringing friends. The systemic racism that you benefit from. Professionally and therefore financially. Wealth buildingly.

NIH Grant writers: If you are adopting a style variant to save space so that you can jam more words into the page limits you are almost certainly decreasing your application’s chances. Acronym Abuse: At a minimum, make sure you redefine them once per section, perhaps even once per page.

I can’t remember ever not knowing that college Professors had PhDs and that they earned that degree by going to graduate school after finishing college. Imagine what a difference that made versus folks who put this together while undergraduates. Academia is a family tradition for many of us.

Republicans are broken. They don’t believe in rule of law. They don’t believe in any of their principles they’ve bleated about for decades. They believe only in power and winning. They cannot be reached or persuaded. They can only be defeated. Beaten back at the ballot box. Shamed across the public sphere. From your family and neighbors to your elected representatives. We are at war for the soul of this country and decency is losing.

New Atheists are indeed jerks but this doesn’t make religious people harmless or the victims here.

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I’ve found it useful, in trying to understand the fury of New Atheist types, to reflect on my accidental privileges.