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Academics are not the place to go to make useful novel contributions, there are too many confounding factors. First, the university owns whatever IP you come u

Academics are not the place to go to make useful novel contributions, there are too many confounding factors. First, the university owns whatever IP you come up with, and will happily exclusively license that IP to entities with no interest in developing it. Monopolistic corporate power centers aren't known for fostering novel competition to their established businesses. This is why it took so long - and serious capital - to get something like Tesla going, as the likes of Toyota, Ford, GM etc. were closely tied to Exxon, Chevron etc. via their investors, and had no interest in developing electric cars. Any kind of applied research in the US academic sector these days is best understood as corporate R & D for established interests in pharmaceuticals, technology, industrial chemistry, etc. You're certainly not free to do blue-skies renewable energy research (budgets for that are still miniscule at best, and have been since the 1980s), for example. The job description has become indistinguishable from that of in-house corporate researcher - narrowly defined assigned problems are what you get to work on, and 'academic freedom to pursue the research wherever it leads' is a quaint myth. The obvious fix is to eliminate exclusive licensing of academic IP (i.e. repeal the 1980s Bayh-Dole Act), which would force corporations to spend capital on their own private R & D divisions if the wanted exclusivity, and simply make any university-held patented discovery available to any entrepreneur who wanted to develop it for a small flat fee. Until then the author is 100% correct about entrepreneurship being the only way out of the trap.

schoen 4y ago
He was specifically going to be an academic mathematician, which would probably have allowed him to publish discoveries without patenting or licensing them.
- abirch 4y ago
  MIT is an R&D corporation which has a college attached. MIT filed 358 US patents and had 435 issued in the year ending June 30, 2021. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1044184/5-mit-patents-that-changed-computing/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1044184/5-mit-pa...
eastbound 4y ago
As I often say, open-source is the 7th wonder of the world. In no previous situation have humans worked together on a larger scale to create a software that powers literally everything in the world, and even a helicoper on Mars. And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Isn’t it fair to say that most of the biggest open source projects and/or most useful projects are developed by people employed by either universities or companies? > And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative. I don’t understand how this relates to the scale of open source software or Apollo software engineers. I guess I know the Unix epoch is 01/01/1970, but how does that relate to Apollo and negative timestamps? Those timestamp definitions came after the first several Apollo missions, didn’t they?
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    > Isn’t it fair to say that most of the biggest open source projects and/or most useful projects are developed by people employed by either universities or companies? Yes, except that largely those projects are tangential to the "real" research. Larry Wall, creator of Perl and other useful things, is a linguist who was "studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it."[1]. Perl was just a side project. 1 https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/225 https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/225
  - andyjohnson0 4y ago
    > how does that relate to Apollo and negative timestamps? I'm not certain, but perhaps the parent commenter wasn't being literal. Maybe just a way of saying that the Apollo engineers did their amazing work before what the rest of us consider to be the "beginning of time"?
    - 4y ago
light_hue_1 4y ago
> First, the university owns whatever IP you come up with, and will happily exclusively license that IP to entities with no interest in developing it That's simply not true. Academia has a lot of problems, we don't need to start making up new ones. Universities want money. The #1 concern, by far, of any university technology licensing office is to get those patents working so that they can reap the benefits in terms of huge licensing fees. Literally, no one wants to license anything to anyone who won't develop it. Also, university licensing offices always have deals where the researchers get the right of first refusal with their own IP. > Any kind of applied research in the US academic sector these days is best understood as corporate ... Academics do very little applied research. Overwhelmingly, we do what is called basic research. Finding cool new ideas. Then, we give them to those corporations that do the overwhelming amount of applied research. This is how the system is supposed to work! > The job description has become indistinguishable from that of in-house corporate researcher No idea what university you at. But this is totally false for any university I've seen. > The obvious fix is to eliminate exclusive licensing of academic IP (i.e. repeal the 1980s Bayh-Dole Act) So.. you want academics to do less impactful research that has fewer applications? Because that's the outcome of denying us the ability to patent our own work.
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > Literally, no one wants to license anything to anyone who won't develop it. Yes, but that doesn't prevent them from licensing things to organizations with a lot of money regardless of intent. If there's enough money involved, say a multi-million dollar endowment, the academic administration wouldn't give two shits about whether or not the licensee develops it.
  - light_hue_1 4y ago
    > Yes, but that doesn't prevent them from licensing things to organizations with a lot of money regardless of intent Why in God's name would a corporation with a lot of money pay for a patent they don't want to develop? Wallpaper is a lot cheaper at Home Depot. Seriously. This doesn't pass the most basic "is this remotely plausible" test. Anyway, universities tend to give licenses that make them money as the patent is used. There is no world under which they want them to be wasted.
choonway 4y ago
The correct fix is to make the costs of developing such innovations within the personal reach of those who can imagine it.
- fwip 4y ago
  So many of our scientific advancements, especially before 1800, came from the idle rich - those free to tinker and experiment. Imagine what could be done if we lifted the majority of the population out of wage slavery with a UBI or similar - how many Newtons, Laplaces, or Fermats are currently toiling in obscurity?
  - robocat 4y ago
    > how many Newtons, Laplaces, or Fermats . . . are currently playing the equivalent of Cookie Clicker?
    - fwip 4y ago
      Probably some of them! I would be willing to bet that a lot of the "number go up" reward in our brains is especially rewarding when we feel trapped in a job/life without notable accomplishments. That is, if you don't have the time or energy to take on fulfilling creative projects, you can at least fake the sense of accomplishment with video games.
bjornsing 4y ago
In Sweden academics own the IP they create. Makes it easier to be both an academic and an entrepreneur. But other than that it doesn’t help much. Academia still seems like a trap to me.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
And as the post points out... the people reviewing your work may not even know what you're talking about. To quote: > Reviewers at the Journal of Cryptology didn't understand why they were being asked to read a paper about CPU design, while reviewers at a computer hardware journal didn't understand why they were being asked to read about cryptography. Why would someone be beholden to these reviewers if their expertise is not adequate or too constrained to review the submission? The author seems to be describing Spectre as well.

schoen 4y ago

He was specifically going to be an academic mathematician, which would probably have allowed him to publish discoveries without patenting or licensing them.

abirch 4y ago
MIT is an R&D corporation which has a college attached. MIT filed 358 US patents and had 435 issued in the year ending June 30, 2021. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1044184/5-mit-patents-that-changed-computing/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1044184/5-mit-pa...

eastbound 4y ago

As I often say, open-source is the 7th wonder of the world. In no previous situation have humans worked together on a larger scale to create a software that powers literally everything in the world, and even a helicoper on Mars. And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative.

bmitc 4y ago
Isn’t it fair to say that most of the biggest open source projects and/or most useful projects are developed by people employed by either universities or companies? > And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so early before our times that they had to code the timestamps in negative. I don’t understand how this relates to the scale of open source software or Apollo software engineers. I guess I know the Unix epoch is 01/01/1970, but how does that relate to Apollo and negative timestamps? Those timestamp definitions came after the first several Apollo missions, didn’t they?
- cratermoon 4y ago
  > Isn’t it fair to say that most of the biggest open source projects and/or most useful projects are developed by people employed by either universities or companies? Yes, except that largely those projects are tangential to the "real" research. Larry Wall, creator of Perl and other useful things, is a linguist who was "studying linguistics with the intention of finding an unwritten language, perhaps in Africa, and creating a writing system for it."[1]. Perl was just a side project. 1 https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/225 https://twit.tv/shows/triangulation/episodes/225
- andyjohnson0 4y ago
  > how does that relate to Apollo and negative timestamps? I'm not certain, but perhaps the parent commenter wasn't being literal. Maybe just a way of saying that the Apollo engineers did their amazing work before what the rest of us consider to be the "beginning of time"?
  - 4y ago

light_hue_1 4y ago

> First, the university owns whatever IP you come up with, and will happily exclusively license that IP to entities with no interest in developing it That's simply not true. Academia has a lot of problems, we don't need to start making up new ones. Universities want money. The #1 concern, by far, of any university technology licensing office is to get those patents working so that they can reap the benefits in terms of huge licensing fees. Literally, no one wants to license anything to anyone who won't develop it. Also, university licensing offices always have deals where the researchers get the right of first refusal with their own IP. > Any kind of applied research in the US academic sector these days is best understood as corporate ... Academics do very little applied research. Overwhelmingly, we do what is called basic research. Finding cool new ideas. Then, we give them to those corporations that do the overwhelming amount of applied research. This is how the system is supposed to work! > The job description has become indistinguishable from that of in-house corporate researcher No idea what university you at. But this is totally false for any university I've seen. > The obvious fix is to eliminate exclusive licensing of academic IP (i.e. repeal the 1980s Bayh-Dole Act) So.. you want academics to do less impactful research that has fewer applications? Because that's the outcome of denying us the ability to patent our own work.

cratermoon 4y ago
> Literally, no one wants to license anything to anyone who won't develop it. Yes, but that doesn't prevent them from licensing things to organizations with a lot of money regardless of intent. If there's enough money involved, say a multi-million dollar endowment, the academic administration wouldn't give two shits about whether or not the licensee develops it.
- light_hue_1 4y ago
  > Yes, but that doesn't prevent them from licensing things to organizations with a lot of money regardless of intent Why in God's name would a corporation with a lot of money pay for a patent they don't want to develop? Wallpaper is a lot cheaper at Home Depot. Seriously. This doesn't pass the most basic "is this remotely plausible" test. Anyway, universities tend to give licenses that make them money as the patent is used. There is no world under which they want them to be wasted.

choonway 4y ago

The correct fix is to make the costs of developing such innovations within the personal reach of those who can imagine it.

fwip 4y ago
So many of our scientific advancements, especially before 1800, came from the idle rich - those free to tinker and experiment. Imagine what could be done if we lifted the majority of the population out of wage slavery with a UBI or similar - how many Newtons, Laplaces, or Fermats are currently toiling in obscurity?
- robocat 4y ago
  > how many Newtons, Laplaces, or Fermats . . . are currently playing the equivalent of Cookie Clicker?
  - fwip 4y ago
    Probably some of them! I would be willing to bet that a lot of the "number go up" reward in our brains is especially rewarding when we feel trapped in a job/life without notable accomplishments. That is, if you don't have the time or energy to take on fulfilling creative projects, you can at least fake the sense of accomplishment with video games.

bjornsing 4y ago

In Sweden academics own the IP they create. Makes it easier to be both an academic and an entrepreneur. But other than that it doesn’t help much. Academia still seems like a trap to me.

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

And as the post points out... the people reviewing your work may not even know what you're talking about. To quote: > Reviewers at the Journal of Cryptology didn't understand why they were being asked to read a paper about CPU design, while reviewers at a computer hardware journal didn't understand why they were being asked to read about cryptography. Why would someone be beholden to these reviewers if their expertise is not adequate or too constrained to review the submission? The author seems to be describing Spectre as well.