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From my vantage point in academia they're definitely the norm. I'd say the only one that's mostly false is #2, but that could be the norm outside of my particul
by tedks 13y ago
From my vantage point in academia they're definitely the norm. I'd say the only one that's mostly false is #2, but that could be the norm outside of my particular field (computer science).
I've seen fantastic research sunk and forced through resubmission time and again because of reviewers that either don't understand the work (and why would they? they have zero incentive) or have pre-existing biases based on their own work (and are called in as expert reviewers, effectively functioning as gatekeepers in a subfield).
Bad deans/department chairs can make life suck pretty hard. This is usually not the case because they (in my experience) don't have that much power, but over some things like hiring they can definitely be as capricious as they want. The real killer are the people outside the department, on IRBs, grant review boards, etc.. In a good research-focused school they can be great; in worse schools they can be tinpot despots.
Reproducibility in particular is insane. In computer science virtually no systems are released at the time of a paper submission, so papers describe things that may or may not exist. I'd say this is less due to untrained/inexperienced grad students and more due to a combination of constantly rushing to publish, unclear institutional regulations regarding releasing artifacts such as source, and inability to focus on cleaning things up for a release.
Academia has serious problems at its core, and in a lot of places, it's obvious that startups and industry is outpacing it. I think this comes down to an incentive problem -- when there's no incentive to build things that work, you tend to build broken things.
- tensor 13y ago>Academia has serious problems at its core, and in a lot of places, it's obvious that startups and industry is outpacing it. Let's be realistic here. How many startups actually do any sort of research at all? By my estimates, the number is very close to zero. How many places in industry? You can cite the big labs, but the majority of science is still done by universities. While academia has serious problems, lets not fool ourselves into thinking that industry is any kind of substitute.
- fossuser 13y agoI'd agree that startups aren't doing much research in general, but larger companies (Microsoft, Google) have pretty impressive research organizations and do a lot of good work. Apple does too, but unfortunately they lean towards keeping everything a trade secret rather than publishing (excluding their patents I suppose)
- tolmasky 13y agoTo some degree it depends what you consider research. I agree startups and "the industry" are 1) not necessarily publishing, and 2) not doing work in a way that matches the procedural standards of traditional research, but a lot of new ideas are being experimented. Does git count as important research? Does CoffeeScript?
- auggierose 13y agoGit: Yes; CoffeeScript: No;