Power: a wee quiz

Jonah Lehrer blogged about a finding also reported in The Economist: that powerful people tend to exhibit less empathy for others than the powerless do.

The UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner has found that, in many social situations, people with power act just like patients with severe brain damage. "The experience of power might be thought of as having someone open up your skull and take out that part of your brain so critical to empathy and socially-appropriate behavior," he writes. "You become very impulsive and insensitive, which is a bad combination."

Let us consider how these traits of the powerful may translate to the scientific community. Check all that apply to your PI:

Lack of empathy for others/Impulsivity indicators
___ Lets manuscripts languish untouched for months
___ ...or years
___ Brings Famous Visiting PI around the lab, showing her the equipment but failing to introduce any of the trainees
___ Or introduces her to other trainees, but not to you
___ Doesn't send in recommendation letters on time
___ Doesn't respond to emails asking whether recommendation letters have been submitted
___ Doesn't answer emails regarding conference abstracts, despite urgent deadline
___ Shows up 10 minutes late for lab meeting
___ Shows up 30+ minutes late for lab meeting
___ Cancels lab meeting by virtue of being out of town, without telling anyone about plans
___ Suggests you help write a review....two days before it's due
___ Then turns it in late anyhow, after letting it sit on his desk for two weeks
___ Expects you to interpret cryptic cuneiform handwritten comments on drafts
___ "Oh, yeah, everyone, this is our new postdoc. I forgot he was coming."

Of course, I'm sure that PIs can make their own impulsivity/lack of empathy checklist for deans.

And let's not get started on the Glamour editors...

Social parenting 101

Small and I were at the playground recently when a woman who was there with her daughter and granddaughter struck up conversation, as playground adults are wont to do.

She assumed Small was a girl, which many people do (on account of his ridiculous cuteness, I think). Normally I just respond, "Oh, actually he's a boy" or similar, but I wasn't in that chatty a mood and just let it go. Besides, who cares?

When Small and I were leaving the playground, the woman smiled and waved. "Bye," she called. "What's your daughter's name?"

I panicked. Correcting her this late in the game would be an admission that I had let her prattle on about how cute my "little girl" was without having the decency to let her know it was a little boy. But the other option was....

"Smallette," I called back.

"Bye, Smallette!" she called out. "Bye!"

I now live in dread of seeing her at the playground again.

Dear Mrs. Google

You know how I can google the whole everlivin' web, or just, say, one domain name?

I want to be able to google with the search restricted to all sites in my search history.

A week or two ago I read a post, or something like that, on PI handwriting. But where? If I could just aim my google-box to "Sites I've frequented lately" we would be all set. Hop to it.

Yours,
Dr. Jekyll

ps) Found it at doubledoc's! But jeez, I had to work. What's the fun in that?

The least unique

My department is in the middle of a faculty search right now, with the result that we’ve had several job candidates deliver talks in the last couple of months. The talks have been uniformly clear, well-delivered, and polished. Based on the research and future directions, most of the candidates seem to be well-positioned to start up research programs and land a couple of grants. This is all very impressive.

But in one respect I have found the talks slightly disappointing. By and large, the candidates have not described future directions that were surprising. By that I mean that no one has carved out a scientific niche for him or herself that seems distinct from the territory occupied by other people in the field.

For example, one speaker alluded to papers that had come out from competing groups around the same time as his most recent paper. These competing groups had been studying marginally different types of cells, so nobody was technically scooped, but it struck me that if this candidate were to have a piano land on his head tomorrow, there would still be plenty of people pursuing the types of questions that he plans to pursue.

I voiced this concern to some lab colleagues who told me that I was being too critical, and that nobody occupies unique scientific space and therefore this was an impossible standard. And of course a PI can compete with others in the field and still excel--and it’s even a mark of the importance of the field, in some respects, that there's so much interest in it.

Yet when I think about faculty whose work I consider singularly exciting, many of them have either developed techniques that let them answer questions no one else in their field has been able to attack, or they have devised a research program that addresses questions--frequently at the intersection of two separate fields--that nobody else is pursuing.

There’s still time for these junior candidates to grow into those shoes, but I’m left wondering if their feet are going to get any larger.