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Good for you if your products do well. But making logos and such is your job as PI if you want it to happen. It's certainly not your students' job. They're here

by rscho 5y ago

Good for you if your products do well. But making logos and such is your job as PI if you want it to happen. It's certainly not your students' job. They're here to learn academic skills and advance the field, not to make products that do well. Any material advantage they get from that should be incidental, and not a goal in itself.

lmeyerov 5y ago
The student picks the PI, and as part of that, the field of methods they want to learn, which may include scrappy prototyping. If they don't think that kind of R&D is their thing, they should pick another PI and, potentially, field. Ex: My wife's lab had paid staff, but she still had to feed cell cultures at 1am for the research she wanted to do, and later decided those methods were not for her and no longer does wetlab projects. That doesn't invalidate people still doing cell cultures as part of their methods, and I'd still love to see more robots & no-code & budget there to make it easier. Edit: RE:products, Whoosh. Academically derived products at that scale imply a community of practice and development: societal impact and dedicated makers growing it, including more knowledge. That should have the level of respect that a paper that opens up a small subfield gets. From a norms perspective, it's disappointing to see what sounds like a practicing academic to not value that. Separately, again, community of practice work values being embedded, so a student not enjoying it is their personal methods choice, not rules for others.
- rscho 5y ago
  Well, I guess we have different opinions about what academia should be, then. IMO, material incentives outside core academic activities are cancer and I think university spin-offs are heresy. If even tenured staff now attempts to "develop products" and thinks academia and industry R&D are similar, I think western science is finished.
  - lmeyerov 5y ago
    I don't think academia should be one thing, that's kind of the point of tenure You're promoting both a super traditional view yet also one that seems divorced from the last ~100 years of sociology studies wrt how society progresses wrt inventions and how people fit into that. So, it's great you follow old beliefs handed down by generations of giants from much earlier ages -- there's clearly precedent -- and I encourage you to learn about new ones from the last few generation of scientists who took a more scientific method to learning how recent progress often works. These methods are not for everyone, but it's useful to at least know about them before calling the techniques of your peers 'cancer'. Personally, as technology keeps speeding up, I expect this to become even more important, but at the same time, do value head-in-the-sand research too ;-) Also, to be clear: I am not rejecting the scientific method here. Products, and more importantly, the communities of practice around them, have a lot to do with hypothesis generation, methods, and evaluation. Most industrial labs, and ironically, especially ones that force researchers to embed into existing internal product teams, put a lot of hand cuffs on this process so academic env helps. It does take humility and empathy and time to incorporate them, so not so easy (kind of like startup-lite), but it is a family of tools and one aimed at more intentional progress. And no, 'products' is not synonymous with financial motivation: most OSS projects have no paid piece, for example.

by rscho 5y ago

lmeyerov 5y ago

The student picks the PI, and as part of that, the field of methods they want to learn, which may include scrappy prototyping. If they don't think that kind of R&D is their thing, they should pick another PI and, potentially, field. Ex: My wife's lab had paid staff, but she still had to feed cell cultures at 1am for the research she wanted to do, and later decided those methods were not for her and no longer does wetlab projects. That doesn't invalidate people still doing cell cultures as part of their methods, and I'd still love to see more robots & no-code & budget there to make it easier. Edit: RE:products, Whoosh. Academically derived products at that scale imply a community of practice and development: societal impact and dedicated makers growing it, including more knowledge. That should have the level of respect that a paper that opens up a small subfield gets. From a norms perspective, it's disappointing to see what sounds like a practicing academic to not value that. Separately, again, community of practice work values being embedded, so a student not enjoying it is their personal methods choice, not rules for others.

rscho 5y ago
Well, I guess we have different opinions about what academia should be, then. IMO, material incentives outside core academic activities are cancer and I think university spin-offs are heresy. If even tenured staff now attempts to "develop products" and thinks academia and industry R&D are similar, I think western science is finished.
- lmeyerov 5y ago
  I don't think academia should be one thing, that's kind of the point of tenure You're promoting both a super traditional view yet also one that seems divorced from the last ~100 years of sociology studies wrt how society progresses wrt inventions and how people fit into that. So, it's great you follow old beliefs handed down by generations of giants from much earlier ages -- there's clearly precedent -- and I encourage you to learn about new ones from the last few generation of scientists who took a more scientific method to learning how recent progress often works. These methods are not for everyone, but it's useful to at least know about them before calling the techniques of your peers 'cancer'. Personally, as technology keeps speeding up, I expect this to become even more important, but at the same time, do value head-in-the-sand research too ;-) Also, to be clear: I am not rejecting the scientific method here. Products, and more importantly, the communities of practice around them, have a lot to do with hypothesis generation, methods, and evaluation. Most industrial labs, and ironically, especially ones that force researchers to embed into existing internal product teams, put a lot of hand cuffs on this process so academic env helps. It does take humility and empathy and time to incorporate them, so not so easy (kind of like startup-lite), but it is a family of tools and one aimed at more intentional progress. And no, 'products' is not synonymous with financial motivation: most OSS projects have no paid piece, for example.