I wanted to answer this with a mini-thread of an example of what I mean by brain rot, and how I think it manifests. Take with a pinch of salt - I've been in academia for 10 years now, but I'm considered young/early career by academic standards... https://twitter.com/samuelthomson/status/1384873861997547520

Academia is littered with metrics that measure various things: how many PhDs have you graduated? What scores did your students give your last course? How many patents have you filed? Citations, funding, number of football sticker albums completed as a child, you name it.

Everyone (correctly) acknowledges that these don't really reflect how good you are, but also will tell you "we have to use something". Anyone not living on the moon will also know that metrics only optimise for one thing: scoring highly on the metrics.

This is where most bad behaviour in academia comes from - salami slice publishing, for example, where you chop a result up into lots of smaller papers to publish more often. There'd be no point to this if we weren't measuring papers, citations, conference rankings, etc.

One major metric is funding. If you write research grants this hits a load of metrics all at once, *and* the university takes a % of the money you raise (close to 50% in some cases!) So writing grants is rewarded well. This selects for people who can write grants well.

Often these people are also good at research, but it's not explicitly something selected for. In fact, as the size of the funding grows it arguably becomes immaterial, because the project is so large that the primary role of the people running it is simply to manage others.

The problem is that as projects become larger their success is easier to launder or fudge, which means at a certain point the metrics become self-fulfilling, and are no longer serving the (already broken) purpose that put this person there in the first place.

Also at this point, assigning cause to any success is a lot harder. If I secure funding for 100 people and they do a lot of research, am I a good research leader? Or am I just lucky? If you're already seeing comparisons to management elsewhere, this is not a coincidence.

Everyone in academia knows of terrible managers whose careers are sustained by brilliant PhDs and postdocs. And everyone also knows that action taken against those people is vanishingly rare, because many academic systems (including the metrics that put them there) protect them.

Quite commonly this seems to lead to people believing that large academic projects succeeded because of brilliant top-down leadership and out of the box thinking - which I'm sure is true in some cases (please do not @ me), but in my experience is almost exclusively not.

In my experience this success is often off the backs of underpaid, underappreciated and underemployed project members who sacrifice a lot to do great work they would've done anyway, which other people then take credit for making happen. Many of these people leave due to burnout.

(I imagine these vicious cycles and survivorship bias at the top also neatly dovetails with the fact that university administration mostly understands problems through the lens of management, and thus elevating 'good' managers therefore makes sense to them.)

This is not to say that I think all senior academics are managers. This tweet thread is not about you, you there, reading this. But there is an atrocious level of waste through overmanagement in academia, often delivered to those below in the most patronising ways.

I also don't want any young researchers reading this to be disheartened. For one thing: *we're going to destroy all of it*, so don't worry. For another: I still feel lucky and privileged to have this job and to be able to positively affect the world and the people around me.

But I do want us to talk about this stuff more, so we can eventually band together to find ways to dismantle it and resist it. This thread isn't to deter you - it's to acknowledge the problems we need to fix, like any career has. I want you to come and make this better, with me.

If you're concerned about doing a PhD or an academic career, especially in game AI, my DMs are always open.

to everyone hurt by this stuff, and especially to those who helped me get through it.

Thanks for reading this thread! Here's a pic of something I'm working on.