At least it was worth it: my little secret to face tough situations | Academic Writing | Opinions & Experience
Life is not ease. Maybe, interestingly enough, the toughest thing about life is taking decisions, what makes us unique, humans; and what makes us suffer a lot. Recently, researchers found out that decisions is the biggest pain people pointed out on international surveys, when asked to rank their pains, what makes them suffer the most, causes them anxiety. Why decisions are so tough and painful?
I am not a psychologist, neither a philosopher, whatsoever: just a curious guy looking for ways to ease his own pain, with knowledge. In her book “Emotional Agility”, Susan David points:
“Even if your choice turns out to be ‘wrong’, you can at least take comfort in knowing you made the decision for the right reasons [based on your values]. You can show up to yourself with courage, curiosity and self-compassion.”
She is talking about the importance of values on decision making: her thesis is that if one takes decision anchored on their values, even if things go wrong, their pain will be smaller if things do not turn out as expected. I agree completely.
In previous article, in Portuguese, I have talked about a painful decision I had to take, on my academic life; in fact, it was two, but at the time, I wrote about the one I was facing. I am going to briefly present my pain.
I was doing a postdoc, and we were writing a scientific paper: I was the one to propose the paper, as it often happens, then my supervisor send an initial manuscript; so far, so good, normal. The paper was going well, as I expected; some challenges, part of the process. Some details bothered me, e.g., people on the article that I have never seen, but at least they had done something, small, but their contributions could somehow be justified. But, suddenly, another name.
What bothered me the most was the fact that the corresponding author never talked to me about it, just entered the name, showing no concern whether I was okay with that, I was the first author as accepted by all since the beginning. I knew who he was, not by the name, but by guessing: it was his nephew. However, I have decided to ask, with all the care and respect I could have: I received a considerable amount of hostility just for asking, which transformed into a sequence of bad interactions, abused and mistreatments. The story is long, and this is not the focus of the article.
This decision was hard because I value good interaction with my coworkers, in special someone considered higher in hierarchy: he was my supervisor. I tried to reason with him, saying that we should declare this conflict of interest, with no success, more hostility, even a bad phone call, that was the limit to me. I also value integrity in science, before I said anything, I made sure to make a research, and even the journal itself said we had to declare such situations. Maybe, I did the bad move of sending him a paper discussing the issue.
According to my situation, his nephew did not contribute to the paper considerably, giving how fast the guy appeared on the paper, from nowhere, and the kind of argument, in the best scenario, my supervisor presented, the rest was hostility.
It never happened before with me this situation, thus it was new to me. I had a rule I liked to follow: not publishing with people I did not know. Nothing against collaboration: it is important to science. My problem is with creating fake scientists in science: once you publish a paper, in special international, no one will check your credentials: that is one of the bad side effects of the publish or perish; once you published, you are the king, rarely someone will question how you published, or if you are as smart as you may sound. These situations are quite common nowadays. I myself noted this pattern: people that published a high number of high impact papers, but if you try to talk to them, they are shallow.
In other not to lose focus: I had my long valued of science integrity and honesty at risk, and also my long-term concern about good relationship with coworkers at stake. When I approached my supervisor, I had that in mind. I had done that in the past, and things turned out to be fine, this time the hostility was fast; and the relationship went to the wrong side quite fast; I was unable to go on, and gave up, for the first time, an “academic position”. This is how, in my life, a conflict of values made me take a tough decision; which I have to say, I feel no regret, since I had my values at heart. The pain a feel now is more generic, regarding the fact that what happened with me is the law in science, not the exception.
If an academic reads this article, most likely they will rationalize, just to make me wrong and justify the fact that most likely, they play the same game. Susan David gives another example, which I will invite you to read, about the tough decision of a Sargent to let their superiors know about abuses to prisoners, to a point that the Sargent slept with a gun on his pillow. As I like to say:
“It is easy to make the right decision when you are being paid for that, I want to see when you have all to lose when deciding it. This is the difference between Bolsonaro e Marina Silva”
