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Translation: Universities should continue on the path to becoming the research arm of industry. Academics should alter what they do and how they think, in order

Translation: Universities should continue on the path to becoming the research arm of industry. Academics should alter what they do and how they think, in order to better suit industry. Academic research does not have value or merit of its own, outside of its usefulness to industry. Impact on the world happens only in an industrial context.

jsolson 11y ago
Actually reading the article, explicitly none of those things. Alternatively: if you are doing work that attempts to have industry relevance you should have some idea of what problems are actually relevant to industry. In particular, just because you think something is an interesting and challenging problem that just has to be affecting industry players does not mean it actually is. It may have been solved already, or you may have made some poor assumptions on conceiving the problem which, if corrected, make the problem disappear entirely (perhaps replaced by a different one that would've been a more valuable research target). If you're trying to do forward-looking invent things that aren't even a twinkle in industry's eye yet, that's absolutely fine too, and the author explicitly calls out that the only important thing here is to recognize when your work isn't likely to be applicable in the near term. Nowhere does Matt state that this makes this sort of research less valuable, and honestly in many cases academia is the only place it can reasonably happen due to funding incentives.
wfo 11y ago
It's already happened with CS education for undergrads, why not have industry dominate the research arm of CS departments as well? If we don't bend over backwards pandering to industry and completely restructure academic thought to pander to profit-driven corporations then how will our bright grad students get jobs at Google? God forbid if we don't obey every command of the software industry one day someone might say they're a CS major at a party and have someone ask "CS? Why? What are you going to do with that?"

jsolson 11y ago

Actually reading the article, explicitly none of those things. Alternatively: if you are doing work that attempts to have industry relevance you should have some idea of what problems are actually relevant to industry. In particular, just because you think something is an interesting and challenging problem that just has to be affecting industry players does not mean it actually is. It may have been solved already, or you may have made some poor assumptions on conceiving the problem which, if corrected, make the problem disappear entirely (perhaps replaced by a different one that would've been a more valuable research target). If you're trying to do forward-looking invent things that aren't even a twinkle in industry's eye yet, that's absolutely fine too, and the author explicitly calls out that the only important thing here is to recognize when your work isn't likely to be applicable in the near term. Nowhere does Matt state that this makes this sort of research less valuable, and honestly in many cases academia is the only place it can reasonably happen due to funding incentives.

wfo 11y ago

It's already happened with CS education for undergrads, why not have industry dominate the research arm of CS departments as well? If we don't bend over backwards pandering to industry and completely restructure academic thought to pander to profit-driven corporations then how will our bright grad students get jobs at Google? God forbid if we don't obey every command of the software industry one day someone might say they're a CS major at a party and have someone ask "CS? Why? What are you going to do with that?"