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Academia has became an routine extension of school. In school, you learn to fill in the blanks. In today's academia, you find the weakest and most useless subj
by Aperocky 7y ago
Academia has became an routine extension of school.
In school, you learn to fill in the blanks. In today's academia, you find the weakest and most useless subject, but the easiest to 'improve' on, and then manually fill in the blanks.
Of course there are exceptionally bright people in both places, but what used to happen was that academia consisted of much more of them proportionately. Now most everyone can put crap into graphene and observe the increase of electrocatalytic effect.
- ampdepolymerase 7y agoAnd that is basic research. It may be dry, boring, and tedious but somebody has to do the legwork. Throwing machine learning at it won't change things much either. Applied ML has a last mile problem - eventually you still need somebody to supervise the wet lab experiments/machines and all not so glorious bits that would never be featured in Nature or Science.
- Aperocky 7y agoI agree. My point being getting a larger sample size of things have diminishing returns, while being simple enough for most of the people to do it. With the end result of sizable expansion of the academia system without a corresponding increase in new advances. In fact, most of the things that are not theoretical in nature is already being spearheaded by the industry, likely for exactly that reason.
- ampdepolymerase 7y agoGiven enough time the industry would accumulate institutional knowledge that creates a massive moat. The knowledge and experience is siloed up. Better have boring academia where everyone benefits than to continue feeding corporate titans.