Scientific Conceit.

I have – usually by my sisters, but certainly not exclusively by them – been called conceited in my life. And it’s true. That’s only one of my many character defects. I can present myself as being absolutely certain of things. Certain that my opinions are facts, that those who would disagree are either stupid or uneducated. It’s a vile attitude, and one which I have come as an adult to choose to battle rather than embrace. There are simply too many variables for my opinion to always be correct. There are too many competing interests for my perspective to be untrammeled. And, most importantly, perhaps, was my realization that I didn’t really like people who acted like I did, but who had different opinions. But I also couldn’t see how they were different from me.

Science has an image problem. My experience is that non-scientists generally have one of two reactions when they discover that I am a researcher and an academic. They either are impressed and think I am probably a genius, or they think I am an arrogant, ivory-tower  egg head. I think most of the public (often distributed along political lines) takes one of these two attitudes. There are additionally a few who assume that scientists are the bought-and-paid-for nefarious operands of the Evil Corporate Overlords. And depending on whether their issue is bio-medical or global climate, they may be on either side of the political spectrum.

And this image problem is largely our own fault. If I may speak in generalities, you will find scientists who say that being a “genius” is not a job requirement, or that people far smarter than they never pursued academics. And those are true. But it is difficult to find a person anywhere who doesn’t enjoy being called smart. And academics have made a life out of being the best at being smart. I don’t bow to the silly stereotype that “so many of us were social outcasts” or “we sucked at sports”, so we now overcompensate by being conceited about our brains. Most of the scientists I know are socially adept and most are even sporty to one extent or another. The “nerd” trope is simply untrue. But we are happy to condescend to the little people who can’t fathom the massive implications of our utterly groundbreaking blah blah blah.

And it’s difficult. I get that it’s difficult not to condescend to people who are simply wrong and yet remain shrill in their promotion of falsehoods. Like Jenny McCarthy and her insane, murderous lies about vaccinations. Children are dying because of her, and her co-religionists. They tell lies on TV, and people who don’t know better believe them, and as a result, children are dying of measles and whooping cough who by rights should be living fat, pink little lives. That’s her conceit: the belief that she must know better than people who’ve dedicated their lives to eradicating disease. But I don’t know that we can fight lies with sneers.

There is also an enormous amount of conceit that we scientists direct at one another. Look at the advertisement for NatureJobs from a recent edition of Nature. (Thank you to @rxnm_ for alerting me.)

The very idea that non-professorial jobs are “alternative” is ridiculous. For me, my search for a professorial position is my alternative job. My goal, while studying for my doctorate, was to become an operational engineer in healthcare, perhaps as a business owner. My path to a research position was an unintentional one. My skills as a simulationist in health care have turned out to be in less demand than I imagined – or I’m not so good at pointing out the need for it – and as a result, I have ended up in a soft-money research position. Doing the work I want to do may end up requiring several  years as a researcher until the industry side of healthcare catches up to the research side, and recognizes the value of what I’m doing. Though, of course, I’ve applied for a job doing exactly what I hope to do at PECMC. Hopefully, I won’t have to do too much more obscure academic work, and can set about making a difference in actual patients’ lives.

I see conceit over hours worked, and the assumption that a person who doesn’t win a bunch of grants or publish five papers a year is lazy. There’s luck involved. There are personal choices. I’ve seen conceit associated with having children, as if people serious about science (usually they mean, but won’t say, women) wouldn’t waste their productive years having babies. Or vice versa, condescension about children: the childless scientists are required to spend more time in the lab, covering for those who go home to take care of children. As if the time of people without progeny is less valuable to them than the time of a persons’ with children is to them.

We all want to be valued. We want to be seen as important, and making an important contribution. Science is competitive, and that forces us, in many ways, to set up hierarchies. It’s not dissimilar at all from sporting success. Except that we can’t really have head-to-head competitions. So we have all these proxy battles and metrics to separate us and hoard glory. Metrizable prestige. The absurdity of it would be laughable if it weren’t the guiding factor in people’s livelihoods.

The undercurrent of all this conceit and condescension is the fact that all of us, to a person, struggle with Imposter Syndrome. We fear so deeply that we don’t belong. We are ashamed of our best work in the same breath we’re proud of it. We look at others, we measure them, and we find ourselves lacking in comparison. I do. And thanks to our relentless obsession with measuring productivity and impact, I can prove it. I have an h-index lower than anyone else I know on twitter. Fewer citations. Papers in worse journals. I came to the academic side of science late. My first paper was published in 2006, my next in late 2010. I haven’t had a lot of time to accrue citations. Though, obviously, I’ve had time to accrue excuses.

I think the vast majority of us vascillate between feelings of brilliance and excellence, and feelings of shame and fear and outsider-status. And in that respect, I think scientists are very much like everyone else. All of us search for a place we feel welcomed, accepted, and part of the group. All of us fear from time to time that we don’t belong. I feel that way most of the time. And then, when we do find that group, we end up jockeying for position, trying to find exactly where we belong, and then figuring out how to ascend above the next person.

I hope that we can find ways to be mutually supportive that take priority over the ways we are self-interested. The twitter science community does a pretty good job of that. I’ve found more support there than anywhere else, when it comes to learning how to do science, and survive in the cutthroat world of academia. I hope that the public can see scientists as supporting each other, rather than undercutting each other. I hope we scientists and academics can let go of the idea that the only worthy goal of getting a PhD is to become a professor. That choosing another path represents failure in some way. Besides which, why on earth do we despise failure so much? Truthfully, failing is the best way I’ve ever learned.

When I look at myself, I see someone who still struggles with conceit. Yes, I want to be smart. I want people to know it. I want people to be impressed with my work and my efforts. And I want to then be humble about it, so that people are dutifully impressed with that grounding too. But I have abandoned the idea that I am always right. Because when I look at people who think they are always right, I don’t like what I see. So I assume that that’s what people feel when they see me acting like I’m always right.

And maybe this is its own sort of conceit, but when other people insist their opinions are facts, and that those who disagree must be stupid or uneducated, or evil, I assume that their behavior is driven by what mine was: fear; shame; pain. I became engulfed in the fear that I was nothing. The shame that my best efforts were worthless. The pain that I didn’t belong. So I tried to condescend my way out. It didn’t work. I think it can’t work. We cannot elevate ourselves by digging pits for others to fall into.