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Universities aren't the only places research and development take place.
by jrpt 3y ago
Universities aren't the only places research and development take place.
- mydogcanpurr 3y agoBut they are where the vast majority of researchers are educated.
- j45 3y agoEducating to create a researcher, vs application of applied research vs results of commercializing in less than one decade is a fair observation.
- whoknowsidont 3y agoBut it is where the majority of useful research takes place, because Universities are where researches are created. Most research at private companies is namesake.
- ke88y 3y agoThis isn't even remotely close to true. The only perspective in society from which it appears that Academia does more R&D than the private sector is academia itself. Academics in this respect have their eyes wide shut. At mot, publishing in academic conferences at private companies is namesake. But academic publishing in general is a shadow of its former self in terms of dissemination power, both because most academics are horrible writers and also because a product you can buy (with a support contract) or a well-documented software package is many orders of magnitude more impactful than a paper no one will read. And even then, many companies publish far more than even highly productive research universities. Consider AI. There are little pieces here and there that you can attribute to academia. But for the most part, over the last two decades, the enabling big steps happened at TSMC+NVIDIA+Google+OpenAI.
- kevinventullo 3y agoover the last two decades, the enabling big steps happened at TSMC+NVIDIA+Google+OpenAI Those big steps are standing on the shoulders of decades of academic work, and were carried out by people who had spent a great deal of time in academia.
- ke88y 3y ago> and were carried out by people who had spent a great deal of time in academia. Right. Who then promptly left academia when they needed to start doing R&D at a meaningful and consequential scale. The academic contribution to chip fab R&D today is nearly inconsequential compared to private sector investment, both in raw dollar amounts and especially in terms of impact per dollar spent. This is like saying that academia is responsible for Google because its founders spent a couple years on an NSF grant. Yes -- but then they left to do the real R&D work at scale. Academia plays and important role in training people. But the R&D component is -- with some exceptions -- mostly a matter of "training young people for the real work by messing around on toy problems".
- astrea 3y agoElaborate. Also, if you could elaborate on how one would partake in such things without previously having a degree.
- teeray 3y agoThis YouTuber[0] does an excellent job recreating chemistry research from papers and improving on the techniques to be accomplished with household materials. He documents his failures and takes an empirical approach to arriving at his successes. I’m not sure of his background, but it’s certainly research that he’s doing. Watching his channel always reminds me that the scientific method does not have “first obtain an expensive degree” as one of its steps. [0] https://youtu.be/N3bJnKmeNJY https://youtu.be/N3bJnKmeNJY