Jolie (@joliegans) / X

Jolie

494 posts

Jolie

@joliegans

Distressed scientist | joliegan.com

SF & Canada

distressedscientists.substack.com

Joined September 2023

Pinned
Jolie
@joliegans
Jun 28, 2025
Announcing The Distressed Scientists Department - a living notebook to make research a playground again. And because knowledge is more than the PDF. I turned down a “safe” PhD this year when I internalized that grants truly do take longer than experiments and that 5 years in
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Jolie
@joliegans
Jul 6, 2025
When I tell you I inhaled this book, I mean I read it in one sitting, then 7 times over again. I've recommended it 57 times, gifted 12 copies, and lovingly annotated it on 6 flights. Donald Braben's Scientific Freedom is an eulogy to scientific discovery, autopsied while it was
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Jolie
@joliegans
Aug 27, 2025
If I were academia, I’d be very scared right now. Tucked away in a corner of SF, a new kind of independent research is brewing: > 3 months of nonstop work → papers, demos, publications > A co-living, co-working community of peers that replaces the lab > Backed by serious
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Jolie
@joliegans
May 21, 2025
Introducing Analogue What I've been cultivating for the last few months & the most aligned I've ever felt In Jan I was about to commit to my PhD and the subsequent pipeline: 1. spend 5-10 years in someone else's lab for the permission to 2. maybe do my own research 3. then
aishwarya🍎
@aishdoingthings
May 18, 2025
introducing @analoguegroup
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Jolie
@joliegans
Jul 19, 2025
My mom really said we have nature at home
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Jolie
@joliegans
May 20, 2025
So somehow I'm graduating -- and walking away with reflections on a very broken system. Wrote up my thoughts (highlights below) on what worked, what didn't, and why traditional institutions are crumbling. This is the reality check I wish someone had given me when I was 18
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Jolie
@joliegans
Jul 21, 2025
Spoiler: the next Bell Labs might already exist — hiding inside OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepMind. In 1925, Bell Labs poached 1,300 of the world's best researchers from academia with the promise of research flexibility, high impact, and financial breathing room. These AI companies
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Jolie
@joliegans
Jul 9, 2025
Biggest unlearning this year: being in challenging environments doesn’t mean the work itself is challenging, or more legitimate. The craft and context overlap, but they are not one of the same. (The starving artist route is romanticized but you don’t actually have to commit to
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Jolie
@joliegans
Jul 4, 2025
The only way to consume written text in 2025 Paper forces friction, and friction is thinking. Digital reading is fast food for your mind. You're scrolling, not absorbing. You don't revisit your highlights. Your notes app is where thoughts go to die. My favourite people have
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Jolie
@joliegans
Jun 18, 2025
Ex-biotech researchers on a Tuesday afternoon after the funding got cut, circa June 2025, colourized
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Jolie
@joliegans
May 24, 2025
NYC Arc 2 begins > recs for who/where to co-read/co-write very welcome
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Jolie
@joliegans
Jul 10, 2025
The conversations you're about to read (first reply) have never been shared publicly before. For 3 months, I've been collecting conversations from inside the research funding cuts. There are thousands of headlines, but they've become faceless. I hope this serves as a reminder
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Jolie
@joliegans
Jun 29, 2025
For centuries, scientists kept logbooks - messy, brilliant, unfinished. You can still find Einstein's. Feynman's. Curie's. This is a digital logbook for the 21st century. Entry 000: Welcome to the Logbook. ↓
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Jolie
@joliegans
Aug 12, 2025
Could we ever run out of researchers? What happens if we do? I wrote a new piece outlining what I call the Researcher Fertility Rate (RFR) - we have more PhD students than ever, but those staying to become PIs themselves is shrinking rapidly. Just like the population crisis, we
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