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I'm not sure why this is being down voted. The classic argument in favor of taking a (potentially major) pay cut to work in academia as opposed to industry was

I'm not sure why this is being down voted. The classic argument in favor of taking a (potentially major) pay cut to work in academia as opposed to industry was always that academia is an environment for true learning and doing proper research uncorrupted by profit-seeking motives of corporations. Essentially, you make the classic trade-off between income and integrity. In recent years we've seen that there's not a whole lot of integrity in academic research. Most of it is politics, grant hunting and working to inflate someone's ego; integrity of the actual science being done be damned. At least with the current state of industrial research your results have to pan out enough to convince the market. Maybe LLMs are a overhyped, but they at least work enough to impress the people using them. Meta might never create the metaverse Zuckerberg dreams of, but at least people doing research on the hardware will hold in their hand lighter, higher performing, and truly state of the art VR headsets.

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dguest 3y ago
I'm guessing that it's getting down voted because it implies that the solution to bad science is to stop doing science. It's unfortunate if the poster was trying to say something different. There are other solutions to "fixing" science: you demand more openly published data, look more critically at peer review, reexamine the tenure process, incentivize open source development, etc. It's possible that the poster was suggesting some of these things, but that wasn't clear. Industrial research is great if you have a product you can sell, but there's a huge swath of science research where that doesn't work: you can't monetize JWST images or LHC data. Zuckerberg, whatever you think of him, isn't going to dump all his money into something that won't pay out at all in the near future, and will be shared by everyone when it does.

deleted 3y ago

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dguest 3y ago

I'm guessing that it's getting down voted because it implies that the solution to bad science is to stop doing science. It's unfortunate if the poster was trying to say something different. There are other solutions to "fixing" science: you demand more openly published data, look more critically at peer review, reexamine the tenure process, incentivize open source development, etc. It's possible that the poster was suggesting some of these things, but that wasn't clear. Industrial research is great if you have a product you can sell, but there's a huge swath of science research where that doesn't work: you can't monetize JWST images or LHC data. Zuckerberg, whatever you think of him, isn't going to dump all his money into something that won't pay out at all in the near future, and will be shared by everyone when it does.