>Absolutely any successful aircraft has pilots on the development team Of course it does. But I'm a bit unsure as to how this has gone from academics don't kno

>Absolutely any successful aircraft has pilots on the development team Of course it does. But I'm a bit unsure as to how this has gone from academics don't know nuthin. To design teams who never listen to users are bad. The latter is a measured, reasonable argument. The former is just anti-intellectual nonsense. No one every said anything about having zero pilots on an aircraft development team. >And you're absolutely right that us in the computer business DO spend a lot of time navel gazing instead of listening to the users. It's endemic. That's endemic everywhere from CEOs, to the guy changing your brakes, to the real estate agent selling you a house. It has absolutely nothing to do with academics. And again this is a much different argument from Computer Scientists rarely produce anything useful. The problem with the OP's argument is that you can't pin it down. Academics are bad--except when their R&D work produces something useful. Then they weren't academics, they were problem solving engineers, and it was the guy on the ground who did the real work their anyway. Computer Scientists are bad except in the case of something like asymmetrical encryption--well in that case it was one of the rare instances where they did something useful.