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> The goal is no longer the pursuit of knowledge, it's a money game. I don't know about that. All the PhDs I know are dirt-poor (or were until they left scienc

> The goal is no longer the pursuit of knowledge, it's a money game. I don't know about that. All the PhDs I know are dirt-poor (or were until they left science to get tech jobs), and are in the game because they are passionate about science and the project of advancing human knowledge. It's true that your ability to get a tenure-track position is very dependent on your ability to successfully obtain grant money, but most of the scientists I know view that as a necessary evil, not the game in itself. > The only useful science done at the moment is at tech companies who will use it to build better products. This is trivially demonstrably false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope for the first example that came to mind from recent news.

jscipione 4y ago
It is true in the field of computer science at least where the market has destroyed the academic sphere in terms of innovation by building better products.
- p0nce 4y ago
  As a small software vendor, this doens't seem accurate to me. My whole field is reading the papers but very often the scientists are ahead. It's their job to discover new territory, while we also have to deal with more mundane "product" tasks. Industry will do the "fine-tuning" but not really the innovation, or just small innovations. So from a consumer point of view, it might seem that industry people are ahead with their product output, but the new science is light-years ahead of that.
- theptip 4y ago
  Diego Ongaro wrote the Raft paper as his PhD dissertation at Stanford, so this is also false. I’m sure the original claim can be narrowed even further than you just did to make it true; I don’t deny that there is a trend for more research, particularly CS and biotech, to be done privately. It’s hyperbole to claim academia is doing nothing though, even in CS.
turlockmike 4y ago
I definitely exaggerated, but a great example of the opposite case is CERN. Physicists knew the limits of what could and couldn't be tested with it, but they hyped it up to convince governments to spend money anyway. The JWST is a much more fruitful project, but how many of those are there compared to projects that just focus on getting grant money. We should build more telescopes and fewer participle accelerators, but the grant money doesn't match the need since it's hard for politicians to understand.

jscipione 4y ago

It is true in the field of computer science at least where the market has destroyed the academic sphere in terms of innovation by building better products.

p0nce 4y ago
As a small software vendor, this doens't seem accurate to me. My whole field is reading the papers but very often the scientists are ahead. It's their job to discover new territory, while we also have to deal with more mundane "product" tasks. Industry will do the "fine-tuning" but not really the innovation, or just small innovations. So from a consumer point of view, it might seem that industry people are ahead with their product output, but the new science is light-years ahead of that.
theptip 4y ago
Diego Ongaro wrote the Raft paper as his PhD dissertation at Stanford, so this is also false. I’m sure the original claim can be narrowed even further than you just did to make it true; I don’t deny that there is a trend for more research, particularly CS and biotech, to be done privately. It’s hyperbole to claim academia is doing nothing though, even in CS.

turlockmike 4y ago

I definitely exaggerated, but a great example of the opposite case is CERN. Physicists knew the limits of what could and couldn't be tested with it, but they hyped it up to convince governments to spend money anyway. The JWST is a much more fruitful project, but how many of those are there compared to projects that just focus on getting grant money. We should build more telescopes and fewer participle accelerators, but the grant money doesn't match the need since it's hard for politicians to understand.