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I'm in violent agreement with Colin here. I have had far more opportunity to do seriously novel work on hard hitting problems in industry than I could ever acco

I'm in violent agreement with Colin here. I have had far more opportunity to do seriously novel work on hard hitting problems in industry than I could ever accomplish in academia. And I have an academic appointment. Which, in pandemic land, pretty much means I have a .edu email address that I also have to attend to. On the industry side, I generate and move data at scale and my teams produce industrial strength models where the SoTA won't be attempted again for years, if ever. Household brands are changing their businesses based on we've done so far, and we're just getting started. The academic system is not where you go to have staggering impact in your lifetime. $500k or $1M a year isn't how innovation scales. Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile designs. He told Bennie Schriever: I need to deliver a payload to Moscow in 30 minutes, gave him $500M, and kept everyone out of Schriever's business. And, have a read of Rickover: http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf http://ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/Rickover.pdf Finally, I would point to the real meat of Colin's experience: if you take on a problem, one problem, like really take it on and try to develop it, you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order. Mind-breakingly hard problems abound when you actually try to solve hard problems in the world.

closeparen 6y ago
Ok but finding teams like this in the real world is not simple. Half the roles billed this way are cynically lying. The other half think that because they’re struggling to stay afloat, they must be swimming in the ocean, but they’re actually in backyard kiddie pools and just not very sophisticated. Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault.
- pathseeker 6y ago
  >Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault. "interesting and novel" in academia currently translates to "incremental improvements on the status quo". The article directly talks about an example of not being able to do anything too novel because there was no journal to review it.
Jhsto 6y ago
The way I see it is that academia and self-entrepreneurship are much alike. Comparing working in academia and for a company is apples to oranges, as working for a company is literally about working in company, i.e., not by yourself. It's also easy to see the distinction between different phases in academia: after PhD it's much more about what could be done against what can be done. It's more like trying to get VC money with just an idea. It's hard, but some can do it, but it requires a vastly different playbook than what is required to get the degree. If you already know how to make things work, it's easier to transition into a bootstrapped mode where you can sideline as an independent researcher without all the fluff of publishing.
arp242 6y ago
At the same time, those missiles probably used quite a bit of science discovered/explored in academia.
- atemerev 6y ago
  Surprisingly not much (if you mean the knowledge discovered after WW2). Scientific endeavors were financed differently during the Cold War, and the academia people were quite anti-militaristic usually, so they didn't get money to work on these sort of problems. It is only after 1990 the funding started to shift to the universities back again, somewhat.
bmitc 6y ago
Your industry experience seems like an edge case to me.
- lostdog 6y ago
  It does seem like an edge case, and often this type of industry experience is limited to candidates from academia. (Not 100% limited, but research experience is preferred).
dustingetz 6y ago
> you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order a problem i am facing doing this myself is that people need all that signaling ceremony to recognize it ... the real value of any credential is extracting compliance. The entrepreneur of course invests in marketing. It's a big complicated world out there and people need brands to help make sense of it.
selestify 6y ago
What is SoTA?
- crazysim 6y ago
  I believe it is short for "State of The Art"
Cd00d 6y ago
I will say that my experience in industry after academia, I feel a lot more personal satisfaction (bigger paychecks and frequency of promotions are probably a big part), but a sense of faster progress. That said, the success criteria for solutions to problems is different. In academia, my analysis needed to be irrefutable. In industry I have often felt in different companies that whatever the sales team can push is good enough to move on. I do sometimes wonder how much of what we have given to the world is just flat wrong, because we weren't validating with the same seriousness. Tangential topic: I'd prefer a synonym to your 'violent' agreement. I appreciate your desire to emphasize your support, but I think we can do with less violence and brutality in discussion overall. Maybe 'vehement' or 'passionate'?
- montereynack 6y ago
  “Emphatically” is a good one.
  - I_complete_me 6y ago
    "Totally" and "fully" also seem wholly adequate.
solarhoma 6y ago
Looking up Bennie Schriever really took me down the rabbit hole. Quite a life he lived. Incredible to think what he was able to lead.
- qznc 6y ago
  You can compare Groves with his Manhattan project and Mueller with his Apollo project. Schriever is right between in the story line. He advanced the atomic weapon pioneered by Groves and prepared rocket science for "human payloads".
fractionalhare 6y ago
> Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile designs. On the other hand this is the venture capital model. I wonder if we'd have worse, equal or better results if Eisenhower somehow applied the venture capital and entrepreneurial model of today to missile R&D back then. It's an interesting thought experiment.
- qznc 6y ago
  I don't think that approach would be as fast. The ICBM program created the whole airospace industry within a few years through massive investment directed by a military industrial complex scared by the soviet union. If you give so much money to a single company they squander it like during the dot com bubble. If you disperse it over many companies a chaos ensures as everybody struggles to find product market fit.
pathseeker 6y ago
>I'm in violent agreement with Colin here. You're not really in "violent agreement" when you're just agreeing with him from the outset. https://wiki.c2.com/?ViolentAgreement https://wiki.c2.com/?ViolentAgreement
- zerocrates 6y ago
  Interesting. I definitely think of the term pretty much exclusively in the sense of (a) here, i.e. extreme, vehement agreement: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2007-September/074396.html http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2007-Septem...
yodsanklai 6y ago
> The academic system is not where you go to have staggering impact in your lifetime. This is a really a generalization. Plenty of people do have "impact" while working in academia. There are also a lot of very smart people who are working on boring projects in companies or banks. It depends on so many factors...
svara 6y ago
> Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile design Uh, ok, if that's what you want to do I guess academia isn't the right place. Pretty odd example though. You might as well have chosen some of the 20th century academic scientist who discovered, I don't know, relativity, quantum mechanics, the genetic code, the neural action potential or synaptic transmission to make the opposite point. Is it likely to be among these people? No. But that's what motivates people in academia, rather than bombing Moscow.
- mam2 6y ago
  Your examples are only ideas, he is talking about actual systems. In fact his points still stands for the actual experiments that validated the most recent advances in relativity and quantum mechanics..
  - andrepd 6y ago
    Which experiments are those? I can't think of one foundational experiment in modern physics (>20th c.) that was developed in industry rather than academia.
    - sriku 6y ago
      Much of the work on realising quantum computers seems.to be happening in industry, no?
    - mam2 6y ago
      The point of op is that you need a lot of money at the same place to make great things happens, and that's mostly in industry. Large colliders for example were only possible because of that. I didn't say it was not possible in academia, just that money is in industry...
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - svara 6y ago
pgt 6y ago
I can corroborate this: "If you take on a problem, one problem, like really take it on and try to develop it, you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order. Mind-breakingly hard problems abound when you actually try to solve hard problems in the world." Every area that I explored deeply because I had an almost "irrational obsession" yielded new general insights about the world. For me it has been, among other things, smart volume control via signal coherence, typically only applied in radar applications. This opened up a whole world of signal math that I would not have stumbled on before. And there is plenty to develop there for the future of communications.
selimthegrim 6y ago
Rickover way overstayed his welcome. In academia he would have been kicked upstairs when he started strangling people’s careers.
rscho 6y ago
In my mind, your opinion is the epitome of capitalist thinking. You have an extremely low bar for the definition of lifetime impact. In a century, will "changing how household brands do business" be remembered, or rather the low-paid scientists who will have discovered the thing that will make nuclear fusion work? Admittedly, academic work is often a dead end. That's because it's high-risk, low pay. You're choosing the high pay, low risk path. It's almost certainly a better path personally speaking, but will people remember you for it? I think not, and nor should they.
- DennisP 6y ago
  Nuclear fusion is an interesting example. Right now academia is mostly focused on conventional tokamaks, and while they're learning a lot, the exponential rise in the fusion triple product essentially stopped while we wait 25 years for ITER to finish construction. Now private startups are building reactors to explore all sorts of alternative ideas.
  - rscho 6y ago
    The example was chosen on purpose, as I'm aware of that. However, pure research startups although private, definitely do not fall in the same basket as companies which produce something they can sell. Otherwise and following the alternate opinion, the distinction between academia and private businesses disappears (in the US) since US research depts are in good part funded by private money. Truth is that modern academia is a poorly regulated and inefficient industry. It wasn't always like that I think, and I am still hoping for better days to come back.
- 0-O-0 6y ago
  In a century you and everyone you know will be dead. So what difference does it really make?
  - rscho 6y ago
    None indeed. But then how do you define the impact of a lifetime? If it's to be immediate, then politics is a far better choice than anything else.
djsavvy 6y ago
That Admiral Rickover link doesn't seem to be working anymore --- do you have another source, or even just a title I can search for?

closeparen 6y ago

Ok but finding teams like this in the real world is not simple. Half the roles billed this way are cynically lying. The other half think that because they’re struggling to stay afloat, they must be swimming in the ocean, but they’re actually in backyard kiddie pools and just not very sophisticated. Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault.

pathseeker 6y ago
>Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault. "interesting and novel" in academia currently translates to "incremental improvements on the status quo". The article directly talks about an example of not being able to do anything too novel because there was no journal to review it.

Jhsto 6y ago

The way I see it is that academia and self-entrepreneurship are much alike. Comparing working in academia and for a company is apples to oranges, as working for a company is literally about working in company, i.e., not by yourself. It's also easy to see the distinction between different phases in academia: after PhD it's much more about what could be done against what can be done. It's more like trying to get VC money with just an idea. It's hard, but some can do it, but it requires a vastly different playbook than what is required to get the degree. If you already know how to make things work, it's easier to transition into a bootstrapped mode where you can sideline as an independent researcher without all the fluff of publishing.

arp242 6y ago

At the same time, those missiles probably used quite a bit of science discovered/explored in academia.

atemerev 6y ago
Surprisingly not much (if you mean the knowledge discovered after WW2). Scientific endeavors were financed differently during the Cold War, and the academia people were quite anti-militaristic usually, so they didn't get money to work on these sort of problems. It is only after 1990 the funding started to shift to the universities back again, somewhat.

bmitc 6y ago

Your industry experience seems like an edge case to me.

lostdog 6y ago
It does seem like an edge case, and often this type of industry experience is limited to candidates from academia. (Not 100% limited, but research experience is preferred).

dustingetz 6y ago

> you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order a problem i am facing doing this myself is that people need all that signaling ceremony to recognize it ... the real value of any credential is extracting compliance. The entrepreneur of course invests in marketing. It's a big complicated world out there and people need brands to help make sense of it.

selestify 6y ago

What is SoTA?

crazysim 6y ago
I believe it is short for "State of The Art"

Cd00d 6y ago

I will say that my experience in industry after academia, I feel a lot more personal satisfaction (bigger paychecks and frequency of promotions are probably a big part), but a sense of faster progress. That said, the success criteria for solutions to problems is different. In academia, my analysis needed to be irrefutable. In industry I have often felt in different companies that whatever the sales team can push is good enough to move on. I do sometimes wonder how much of what we have given to the world is just flat wrong, because we weren't validating with the same seriousness. Tangential topic: I'd prefer a synonym to your 'violent' agreement. I appreciate your desire to emphasize your support, but I think we can do with less violence and brutality in discussion overall. Maybe 'vehement' or 'passionate'?

montereynack 6y ago
“Emphatically” is a good one.
- I_complete_me 6y ago
  "Totally" and "fully" also seem wholly adequate.

solarhoma 6y ago

Looking up Bennie Schriever really took me down the rabbit hole. Quite a life he lived. Incredible to think what he was able to lead.

qznc 6y ago
You can compare Groves with his Manhattan project and Mueller with his Apollo project. Schriever is right between in the story line. He advanced the atomic weapon pioneered by Groves and prepared rocket science for "human payloads".

fractionalhare 6y ago

> Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile designs. On the other hand this is the venture capital model. I wonder if we'd have worse, equal or better results if Eisenhower somehow applied the venture capital and entrepreneurial model of today to missile R&D back then. It's an interesting thought experiment.

qznc 6y ago
I don't think that approach would be as fast. The ICBM program created the whole airospace industry within a few years through massive investment directed by a military industrial complex scared by the soviet union. If you give so much money to a single company they squander it like during the dot com bubble. If you disperse it over many companies a chaos ensures as everybody struggles to find product market fit.

pathseeker 6y ago

>I'm in violent agreement with Colin here. You're not really in "violent agreement" when you're just agreeing with him from the outset. https://wiki.c2.com/?ViolentAgreement https://wiki.c2.com/?ViolentAgreement

zerocrates 6y ago
Interesting. I definitely think of the term pretty much exclusively in the sense of (a) here, i.e. extreme, vehement agreement: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2007-September/074396.html http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2007-Septem...

yodsanklai 6y ago

> The academic system is not where you go to have staggering impact in your lifetime. This is a really a generalization. Plenty of people do have "impact" while working in academia. There are also a lot of very smart people who are working on boring projects in companies or banks. It depends on so many factors...

svara 6y ago

> Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile design Uh, ok, if that's what you want to do I guess academia isn't the right place. Pretty odd example though. You might as well have chosen some of the 20th century academic scientist who discovered, I don't know, relativity, quantum mechanics, the genetic code, the neural action potential or synaptic transmission to make the opposite point. Is it likely to be among these people? No. But that's what motivates people in academia, rather than bombing Moscow.

mam2 6y ago
Your examples are only ideas, he is talking about actual systems. In fact his points still stands for the actual experiments that validated the most recent advances in relativity and quantum mechanics..
- andrepd 6y ago
  Which experiments are those? I can't think of one foundational experiment in modern physics (>20th c.) that was developed in industry rather than academia.
  - sriku 6y ago
    Much of the work on realising quantum computers seems.to be happening in industry, no?
  - mam2 6y ago
    The point of op is that you need a lot of money at the same place to make great things happens, and that's mostly in industry. Large colliders for example were only possible because of that. I didn't say it was not possible in academia, just that money is in industry...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- svara 6y ago

pgt 6y ago

I can corroborate this: "If you take on a problem, one problem, like really take it on and try to develop it, you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order. Mind-breakingly hard problems abound when you actually try to solve hard problems in the world." Every area that I explored deeply because I had an almost "irrational obsession" yielded new general insights about the world. For me it has been, among other things, smart volume control via signal coherence, typically only applied in radar applications. This opened up a whole world of signal math that I would not have stumbled on before. And there is plenty to develop there for the future of communications.

selimthegrim 6y ago

Rickover way overstayed his welcome. In academia he would have been kicked upstairs when he started strangling people’s careers.

rscho 6y ago

In my mind, your opinion is the epitome of capitalist thinking. You have an extremely low bar for the definition of lifetime impact. In a century, will "changing how household brands do business" be remembered, or rather the low-paid scientists who will have discovered the thing that will make nuclear fusion work? Admittedly, academic work is often a dead end. That's because it's high-risk, low pay. You're choosing the high pay, low risk path. It's almost certainly a better path personally speaking, but will people remember you for it? I think not, and nor should they.

DennisP 6y ago
Nuclear fusion is an interesting example. Right now academia is mostly focused on conventional tokamaks, and while they're learning a lot, the exponential rise in the fusion triple product essentially stopped while we wait 25 years for ITER to finish construction. Now private startups are building reactors to explore all sorts of alternative ideas.
- rscho 6y ago
  The example was chosen on purpose, as I'm aware of that. However, pure research startups although private, definitely do not fall in the same basket as companies which produce something they can sell. Otherwise and following the alternate opinion, the distinction between academia and private businesses disappears (in the US) since US research depts are in good part funded by private money. Truth is that modern academia is a poorly regulated and inefficient industry. It wasn't always like that I think, and I am still hoping for better days to come back.
0-O-0 6y ago
In a century you and everyone you know will be dead. So what difference does it really make?
- rscho 6y ago
  None indeed. But then how do you define the impact of a lifetime? If it's to be immediate, then politics is a far better choice than anything else.

djsavvy 6y ago

That Admiral Rickover link doesn't seem to be working anymore --- do you have another source, or even just a title I can search for?