7 ms·

I love this idea. Not sure if this is driving your thinking but this would open a desperately needed alternative to Academia if you can scale this idea as succ

by aresant 11y ago

I love this idea. Not sure if this is driving your thinking but this would open a desperately needed alternative to Academia if you can scale this idea as successfully as you've scaled startups. I've watched my genius brother-in-law (PhD Materials Science & Chemistry / Biomimicry) be consumed by a very broken UC system over the past decade. Started with an exceptionally bright, curious, and inventive man who created breakthrough science in self-healing materials for the "benefit of the world" 10 years of grant fights, personnel struggles, under-served licensing resources, conflicting lab-vs-student priorities, etc has put him out the other end hopeless and disenfranchised. The world will probably lose one of their best "public" researchers to the bowels of commercial science as a result. Go for it Sam, good luck and excited to see what your first projects are.

biswaroop 11y ago
Seconded. This is brilliant. As a physics PhD student at MIT who's leaving to build a startup, I'm finding it a relief to leave a broken system. The academic community is fraught with politics, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Researchers are driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Impact is currently measured by citation pagerank, and broader impact is undervalued. Outreach efforts (blogging, education) are consistently stigmatized [1]. This needs to change. I would love to see more transparency and accountability in research. I've seen Nature papers continue to be cited despite completely wrong conclusions (the 'erratum' was published as a separate paper in PRL). The arXiv was a great first step at opening up access to papers, but the large publishers continue to hold cartel-levels of control over scientific knowledge. I'm super excited about YC research. Would love to see a quantum computation division! [1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/how-to-get-tenure-at-a-major-research-university/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/...
- matheweis 11y ago
  Wow, I knew things were bad, but the education system must be well and truly broken when the students at one of the world's top research universities are leaving to build startups, and calling it a broken system on their way out. (No sarcasm intended; I couldn't find a way to say this better).
  - ISL 11y ago
    Leaving to do something interesting in industry is a time-honored tradition, particularly at the fancier schools. Academia is but one fruitful track for a smart grad student.
  - gone35 11y ago
    It's so common it's a whole genre in of itself nowadays: "quit lit". [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/09/essays-academics-fed-higher-ed-mark-resurgence-quit-lit https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/09/essays-academ...
    - webnrrd2k 11y ago
      Thanks -- good essay -- I just lost an hour or so reading it and following links.
  - cossatot 11y ago
    It's not necessarily the 'brokenness' of the system that forces people out but the consequence of producing PhDs faster than new positions are being created. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here". No one expects that all high school students will become high school teachers. Why should it be the same for PhDs? A lot of what is wrong with the academic system is this expectation, which is bewilderingly prevalent in both the student and faculty bodies despite abundant evidence of arithmetic skills. Faculty are often quite unaware of what happens outside their building, and students are, well, students and absorb a lot of the mindset of their role models. So there becomes a glut of post-post-docs applying for a scant few professorship, which makes getting hired and then getting tenure ultracompetitive and stressful--so many people want the jobs that the administration can ask just about anything out of them, including pretty unrealistic expectations, bad working conditions (80 hr/weeks for 75 k/yr in the sciences at many good schools) and so forth. The conditions of tenure-track professorships (when professors are still young enough to be most creative and energetic, and are still skeptical of their fields' dogma) are poorly suited to creativity and focus, so their grad students are tasked with the actual science while the professors become managers. This isn't to say that academia is actually 'broken'. If my coffeemaker is broken, it doesn't make coffee. Academia is still making the things it is supposed to, but never in the amounts or quantities or prices that everybody wants (as it turns out everybody's wants are wildly divergent). So for this and other off-topic reasons, it's not exactly broken but definitely not optimal. I'm of the opinion that a more optimal academy would do more to prepare grad students to find their own path, be it in academia, industry, or elsewhere. Sort of like what the US liberal arts education is supposed to be, but at a higher level and with the requisite specialization as is fitting a PhD. The critical, analytical, creative, scholarly, and technical skills that grad school can (and often does) bestow or hone are a great fit for a variety of pursuits, including entrepreneurial ones. But there is little guidance here, in part because the faculty themselves have little idea how to go about doing anything but what they do 80 hours a week. I left the academic track after a post-doc to become an independent researcher (doing funded and unfunded research as well as R&D consulting) and it's been really surprising to see how many professors think it's an unworkable idea. Not an idea that many people try and flame out, but one so unthinkably scary that no one has seen anybody try. Which smelled like an opportunity to me, and still does...
- emanuelev 11y ago
  Totally agree. Just wanted to stress how the grant funding systems is totally nonsensical. While as a PhD you could get funding for your entire 3/4 year program (at least here in the UK), if you decide to go for a post-doc things get dramatically complicated as your employment is (usually) tied to a particular grant. When the grant expires, you're out if there isn't another source of money. Is that a decorous situation for a highly skilled person who devoted much of his life to studies? Not sure about that.
- rcthompson 11y ago
  I've been wondering if academia is really fundamentally broken, or whether it's just horribly distorted due to some combination of underfunding and overpopulation, resulting in way too much competition for scarce resources.
  - fsloth 11y ago
    I would claim it's culture is just polluted by scientific management. Too much haste.
- noobermin 11y ago
  I was reading the article, and it made my blood simmer, as articles like this do. Then, I looked at the comments which referred to Sean Carroll, and I couldn't believe it. The fact he claims his textbook, a fantastic intro to GR and now a standard accessible text, was a mistake with regards to his life in academe is so disheartening, it makes you wonder how science actually continues in the present, hideous environment.
- biswaroop 11y ago
  Since this is getting some attention, I want to point out that I had a great experience at MIT, and physics research hasn't stopped working. YCR is a great idea because there are issues in academia that need resolving. It's certainly not completely broken.
snake117 11y ago
Very well put. I remember seeing a post last month about the researcher from Duke University who resigned for similar reasons: https://www.facebook.com/jfgariepyneuro/posts/466442776860755 https://www.facebook.com/jfgariepyneuro/posts/46644277686075.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177775 It really is nice to see an organization like YC take an interest in research. I applaud Sam for making that considerable donation and hope the outcome is better than expected.
selimthegrim 11y ago
The amount of financial and administrative skullduggery within the UC system 2009 (after the financial crisis)-present (I was at UCSB as a grad student 2009-2011) is almost uncommunicable to people who weren't there. People simply refuse to believe some of the stories I tell them. e: Here's some hard facts - http://universityprobe.org http://universityprobe.org
- shas3 11y ago
  The best story I heard about this was from a math grad student / instructor about how you had to jump through multiple hoops to even re-up on chalk for the blackboard.
  - cossatot 11y ago
    When I was at Michigan, if someone brought cookies for a seminar and wanted reimbursement then anyone who wanted a cookie had to sign a sheet and the cookie bringer had to enter it all into Concur.
shas3 11y ago
I think there is a bit of exaggeration on the non-availability of grant money for research in applied science/technology. @sama acknowledges the adequacy of funds for applied research explicitly, "[1] Funding for technological development is actually relatively high, but funding for fundamental research keeps getting cut. Investors want to fund incremental progress—and the world has gotten very good at delivering that. This is more valuable than it sounds; incremental progress compounds quickly." This is true of industrial research and to an extent, academia. It conforms with my experience. That said, the skills required to write great grants and schmooze with grant-givers are quite different from that needed to do quality research in science or engineering. So the academic researcher community in science and technology is whittled down to the small set of {those good at research}∩ {those good at writing grants} + ⊂{those good at writing grants} + geniuses
markkat 11y ago
They are losing me. Almost 15 years and twice as many grant submissions. I'm writing a grant atm (a fucking good one), and I hope not to be around to be turned down for it. I'm literally pitching investors between experiments.

by aresant 11y ago

biswaroop 11y ago

Seconded. This is brilliant. As a physics PhD student at MIT who's leaving to build a startup, I'm finding it a relief to leave a broken system. The academic community is fraught with politics, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Researchers are driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Impact is currently measured by citation pagerank, and broader impact is undervalued. Outreach efforts (blogging, education) are consistently stigmatized [1]. This needs to change. I would love to see more transparency and accountability in research. I've seen Nature papers continue to be cited despite completely wrong conclusions (the 'erratum' was published as a separate paper in PRL). The arXiv was a great first step at opening up access to papers, but the large publishers continue to hold cartel-levels of control over scientific knowledge. I'm super excited about YC research. Would love to see a quantum computation division! [1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/how-to-get-tenure-at-a-major-research-university/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/...

matheweis 11y ago
Wow, I knew things were bad, but the education system must be well and truly broken when the students at one of the world's top research universities are leaving to build startups, and calling it a broken system on their way out. (No sarcasm intended; I couldn't find a way to say this better).
- ISL 11y ago
  Leaving to do something interesting in industry is a time-honored tradition, particularly at the fancier schools. Academia is but one fruitful track for a smart grad student.
- gone35 11y ago
  It's so common it's a whole genre in of itself nowadays: "quit lit". [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/09/essays-academics-fed-higher-ed-mark-resurgence-quit-lit https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/09/09/essays-academ...
  - webnrrd2k 11y ago
    Thanks -- good essay -- I just lost an hour or so reading it and following links.
- cossatot 11y ago
  It's not necessarily the 'brokenness' of the system that forces people out but the consequence of producing PhDs faster than new positions are being created. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here". No one expects that all high school students will become high school teachers. Why should it be the same for PhDs? A lot of what is wrong with the academic system is this expectation, which is bewilderingly prevalent in both the student and faculty bodies despite abundant evidence of arithmetic skills. Faculty are often quite unaware of what happens outside their building, and students are, well, students and absorb a lot of the mindset of their role models. So there becomes a glut of post-post-docs applying for a scant few professorship, which makes getting hired and then getting tenure ultracompetitive and stressful--so many people want the jobs that the administration can ask just about anything out of them, including pretty unrealistic expectations, bad working conditions (80 hr/weeks for 75 k/yr in the sciences at many good schools) and so forth. The conditions of tenure-track professorships (when professors are still young enough to be most creative and energetic, and are still skeptical of their fields' dogma) are poorly suited to creativity and focus, so their grad students are tasked with the actual science while the professors become managers. This isn't to say that academia is actually 'broken'. If my coffeemaker is broken, it doesn't make coffee. Academia is still making the things it is supposed to, but never in the amounts or quantities or prices that everybody wants (as it turns out everybody's wants are wildly divergent). So for this and other off-topic reasons, it's not exactly broken but definitely not optimal. I'm of the opinion that a more optimal academy would do more to prepare grad students to find their own path, be it in academia, industry, or elsewhere. Sort of like what the US liberal arts education is supposed to be, but at a higher level and with the requisite specialization as is fitting a PhD. The critical, analytical, creative, scholarly, and technical skills that grad school can (and often does) bestow or hone are a great fit for a variety of pursuits, including entrepreneurial ones. But there is little guidance here, in part because the faculty themselves have little idea how to go about doing anything but what they do 80 hours a week. I left the academic track after a post-doc to become an independent researcher (doing funded and unfunded research as well as R&D consulting) and it's been really surprising to see how many professors think it's an unworkable idea. Not an idea that many people try and flame out, but one so unthinkably scary that no one has seen anybody try. Which smelled like an opportunity to me, and still does...
emanuelev 11y ago
Totally agree. Just wanted to stress how the grant funding systems is totally nonsensical. While as a PhD you could get funding for your entire 3/4 year program (at least here in the UK), if you decide to go for a post-doc things get dramatically complicated as your employment is (usually) tied to a particular grant. When the grant expires, you're out if there isn't another source of money. Is that a decorous situation for a highly skilled person who devoted much of his life to studies? Not sure about that.
rcthompson 11y ago
I've been wondering if academia is really fundamentally broken, or whether it's just horribly distorted due to some combination of underfunding and overpopulation, resulting in way too much competition for scarce resources.
- fsloth 11y ago
  I would claim it's culture is just polluted by scientific management. Too much haste.
noobermin 11y ago
I was reading the article, and it made my blood simmer, as articles like this do. Then, I looked at the comments which referred to Sean Carroll, and I couldn't believe it. The fact he claims his textbook, a fantastic intro to GR and now a standard accessible text, was a mistake with regards to his life in academe is so disheartening, it makes you wonder how science actually continues in the present, hideous environment.
biswaroop 11y ago
Since this is getting some attention, I want to point out that I had a great experience at MIT, and physics research hasn't stopped working. YCR is a great idea because there are issues in academia that need resolving. It's certainly not completely broken.

snake117 11y ago

Very well put. I remember seeing a post last month about the researcher from Duke University who resigned for similar reasons: https://www.facebook.com/jfgariepyneuro/posts/466442776860755 https://www.facebook.com/jfgariepyneuro/posts/46644277686075.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177775 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10177775 It really is nice to see an organization like YC take an interest in research. I applaud Sam for making that considerable donation and hope the outcome is better than expected.

selimthegrim 11y ago

The amount of financial and administrative skullduggery within the UC system 2009 (after the financial crisis)-present (I was at UCSB as a grad student 2009-2011) is almost uncommunicable to people who weren't there. People simply refuse to believe some of the stories I tell them. e: Here's some hard facts - http://universityprobe.org http://universityprobe.org

shas3 11y ago
The best story I heard about this was from a math grad student / instructor about how you had to jump through multiple hoops to even re-up on chalk for the blackboard.
- cossatot 11y ago
  When I was at Michigan, if someone brought cookies for a seminar and wanted reimbursement then anyone who wanted a cookie had to sign a sheet and the cookie bringer had to enter it all into Concur.

shas3 11y ago

I think there is a bit of exaggeration on the non-availability of grant money for research in applied science/technology. @sama acknowledges the adequacy of funds for applied research explicitly, "[1] Funding for technological development is actually relatively high, but funding for fundamental research keeps getting cut. Investors want to fund incremental progress—and the world has gotten very good at delivering that. This is more valuable than it sounds; incremental progress compounds quickly." This is true of industrial research and to an extent, academia. It conforms with my experience. That said, the skills required to write great grants and schmooze with grant-givers are quite different from that needed to do quality research in science or engineering. So the academic researcher community in science and technology is whittled down to the small set of {those good at research}∩ {those good at writing grants} + ⊂{those good at writing grants} + geniuses

markkat 11y ago

They are losing me. Almost 15 years and twice as many grant submissions. I'm writing a grant atm (a fucking good one), and I hope not to be around to be turned down for it. I'm literally pitching investors between experiments.