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This is a very Academia driven problem. They have been so detached from problem solving that they forget how to problem solve. Modeling a human randomness wit

This is a very Academia driven problem. They have been so detached from problem solving that they forget how to problem solve. Modeling a human randomness with math didn't give you perfect data and conclusions? What was the original problem? To solve something unsolvable with our current understanding of biology? Industry asks better questions and finds solutions. Academia waddles around in theoreticals, and makes minimal meaningful progress. Edit, to clarify. Academia picks a unreal problem, and can't find a logic driven solution. Industry picks real problems, and doesn't make money unless they solve it. We should be learning to solve problems from Industry, not our underachieving professors.

apocalypstyx 7y ago
And yet much profit has been derived from the privatization of publicly-funded academia.
- throwayEngineer 7y ago
  This is the exception, not the rule.
lukevdp 7y ago
Academia is a process of finding new knowledge and sharing it. Industry is a process of commercialising added value. They both add to society in different ways, and their outcomes aren’t really comparable.
openfuture 7y ago
This is hopelessly narrow minded. I won't defend all of academia but it is clear that sometimes there's a cache of 'useless knowledge' that suddenly gets cashed in when industry reaches a point where it is actually needed (most famous example being number theory and cryptography). The whole point of academia is for it to be a space for the free exploration of unknown intellectual domains. This exploration will often be worthless but may occasionally bear fruit in completely civilization changing ways. Meanwhile, industry is too busy manipulating the evaluation criteria to make problems magically go away to actually solve anything (this is the counter strawman to your strawman). Seriously though, our econonic systems do not seem to be able to evaluate survival as an important concept. There is no evidence that industry will move by itself in a direction that sacrifices profits to avoid pollution, someone else will just say he did the same and offer a cheaper product. What we want is for our political systems to be more robust and for the gradient between academia and industry to be more smooth. What we have is broken in too many ways to count.

apocalypstyx 7y ago

And yet much profit has been derived from the privatization of publicly-funded academia.

throwayEngineer 7y ago
This is the exception, not the rule.

lukevdp 7y ago

Academia is a process of finding new knowledge and sharing it. Industry is a process of commercialising added value. They both add to society in different ways, and their outcomes aren’t really comparable.

openfuture 7y ago

This is hopelessly narrow minded. I won't defend all of academia but it is clear that sometimes there's a cache of 'useless knowledge' that suddenly gets cashed in when industry reaches a point where it is actually needed (most famous example being number theory and cryptography). The whole point of academia is for it to be a space for the free exploration of unknown intellectual domains. This exploration will often be worthless but may occasionally bear fruit in completely civilization changing ways. Meanwhile, industry is too busy manipulating the evaluation criteria to make problems magically go away to actually solve anything (this is the counter strawman to your strawman). Seriously though, our econonic systems do not seem to be able to evaluate survival as an important concept. There is no evidence that industry will move by itself in a direction that sacrifices profits to avoid pollution, someone else will just say he did the same and offer a cheaper product. What we want is for our political systems to be more robust and for the gradient between academia and industry to be more smooth. What we have is broken in too many ways to count.