Foxconn, located on the coast of China, is the largest electronics manufacturer in the world. They make iPhones, Wiis, and many other famous products. You may have read about the epidemic of suicide that has broken out among its employees. There were two in the last few days, for example. The count now stands at something like a dozen suicides in about a month. The factory complex involved is gigantic, with perhaps 300,000 workers, but no question this is a terrible thing. The victims are all or mostly men in their early twenties. The median length of employment at Foxconn might be about a year.

Foxconn has appealed to my university (Tsinghua) and in particular my department (Psychology) for help. I’m told their assembly line was designed at Tsinghua. In any case, several people from my department (faculty and graduate students) have gone to the factory and tried to do something.

At a department meeting we discussed our department’s involvement. I said it’s really hard to make progress on such problems for reasons that might not be obvious. When I had trouble waking up too early, I started to study the problem via self-experimentation. All I cared about was solving the problem. Any answer was acceptable. I would spend as long as it took to find it. It took me 10 years to make visible progress. The first thing I figured out was that the problem was partly due to eating breakfast — which sleep researchers had failed to discover.
Consider the Foxconn suicides. It would be incredibly helpful to figure out what’s causing them. But few professors want to study a problem that they have no idea if they can solve nor how long it will take. They don’t want to wait ten years to write a paper. By then their funding will have run out. If funding is assured regardless of progress, then how does the funder ensure they are actually doing something? And few professors have total academic freedom. Their graduate school advisor, their academic friends, the people who control their career have certain beliefs. About which theories are good and which are bad. About which methods are “correct”. If their results contradict these beliefs, if they use a “wrong” method, they will suffer, just as all heretics suffer. So there is pressure to come up with an acceptable answer using proper methods. This gets in the way of coming up with the actual answer.

This doesn’t mean academic research is useless, but it does mean that professors work in shackles that outsiders are, in my experience, unaware of. I wrote about this in my Medical Hypotheses paper. It is a big reason my self-experimentation found new and surprising answers to old questions: I had total freedom. All I cared about was finding the answer. I didn’t care about publications. I didn’t worry about funding. I had as much time as it took.