4 ms·

I think his point of "We must make long term investments over 25, 50 or even 100 years. The greatest challenges require very long time horizons and cannot be so

by nextos 11y ago

I think his point of "We must make long term investments over 25, 50 or even 100 years. The greatest challenges require very long time horizons and cannot be solved by short term thinking." is extremely important. As someone doing research at a top university, I am constantly annoyed by short term vision and optimizing for publication number at all costs. This system is broken. Alfred Sanger got 2 Nobel Prizes, and he spent a lot of time without publishing before each. Clearly something impossible to do these days.

myth_buster 11y ago
And on the other hand we have the public companies, lacking strong leadership, forced to look at quarterly returns.
throwaway999888 11y ago
Is _top_ university an important distinction in this context?
- huac 11y ago
  Implication is competition is paramount - both level and quality of output
- Cookingboy 11y ago
  It actually is in my opinion. If the top, elite research institutes show these kind of problem, then we can expect it to be very prevalent in the rest of the field as well. As in, this isn't some no name low tier school run by mediocre people.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Actually, I’d say it’s the opposite. "Top" "Elite" universities are usually optimized for their metric – which is the Shanghai index, which is based on number of publications in english-language magazines. In countries outside of the Anglosphere often research at universities can go a lot slower, as they have no chance in the Shanghai index anyway. The Fraunhofer institute has, in cooperation with Sony, VW and Mercedes, worked on self driving cars since 2002. Sometimes you just have to throw a few million euro and a few decades onto a project to get some results.
- nextos 11y ago
  It was just to highlight that things are broken even at the top. I've worked all the way from a relatively small institution and I've found little correlation between long term vision and institution ranking, which is quite surprising.
resu_nimda 11y ago
If you're not already familiar, you might be interested in the Long Now. "The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." http://longnow.org/ http://longnow.org/
sjg007 11y ago
Well there are more research institutions competing for the same dollars so the only way they can differentiate is based on publications. A lot of science is derivative and collaborative. Most important though it needs to be reproducible. Starting there is priority #1.

by nextos 11y ago

myth_buster 11y ago

And on the other hand we have the public companies, lacking strong leadership, forced to look at quarterly returns.

throwaway999888 11y ago

Is _top_ university an important distinction in this context?

huac 11y ago
Implication is competition is paramount - both level and quality of output
Cookingboy 11y ago
It actually is in my opinion. If the top, elite research institutes show these kind of problem, then we can expect it to be very prevalent in the rest of the field as well. As in, this isn't some no name low tier school run by mediocre people.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Actually, I’d say it’s the opposite. "Top" "Elite" universities are usually optimized for their metric – which is the Shanghai index, which is based on number of publications in english-language magazines. In countries outside of the Anglosphere often research at universities can go a lot slower, as they have no chance in the Shanghai index anyway. The Fraunhofer institute has, in cooperation with Sony, VW and Mercedes, worked on self driving cars since 2002. Sometimes you just have to throw a few million euro and a few decades onto a project to get some results.
nextos 11y ago
It was just to highlight that things are broken even at the top. I've worked all the way from a relatively small institution and I've found little correlation between long term vision and institution ranking, which is quite surprising.

resu_nimda 11y ago

If you're not already familiar, you might be interested in the Long Now. "The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." http://longnow.org/ http://longnow.org/

sjg007 11y ago

Well there are more research institutions competing for the same dollars so the only way they can differentiate is based on publications. A lot of science is derivative and collaborative. Most important though it needs to be reproducible. Starting there is priority #1.