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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Reading between the lines in sama's comment - I think his objective is to replace academia, such that in 20 years, nobody will either attend or work for a university. Except he can't say that, because a.) he'd be laughed off this thread and b.) it's not to YC's advantage to alert competitors that they are, in fact, a threat.

The way it'd work out is the same way YC itself started: attract talented, smart people who have no patience for academia's politics. Let them make their own decisions. Build a brand on the discoveries they make, which attracts more people. Change public opinion about how research should be done. Eventually, the "top academic talent" realizes they've made a horrible mistake, and scrambles to join the new system that's replaced the old.

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It is high time for such a change. It seems to me that tech culture is a better fit for scientific research than academia.

Scientific research is by its nature risky and uncertain. The current risk-averse culture of academia with its focus on grant applications, publishing, tenure, and positive results seems to discourage the risk-taking necessary in science.

On the other hand, the culture prevalent in tech accepts and encourages risk-taking, supports fast and easy recovery from failure and generally evaluates people on merit, not success or failure of their most recent project.

The broken aspects of academia are, it seems to me, an unavoidable consequence of needing a scalable system to determine who is doing well and who isn't, so you can give them money. I don't see how to dream up a system that gives you all the good of academia with none of the annoyances.

Think how hard the hiring problem is. How do you hire the best people? How do you assess someone's quality based on a few bits of paper and a short interview. Allocating funding in academia consists of solving problems like that, all the time.

"nobody will either attend or work for a university" -- universities will never disappear, at least not in 20 years because (a) there's too much business, cash flow, physical infrastructure, etc currently and (b) professions such as lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc. will still require formal education whether you call it a "university" or not.

Those are 2 reasons off the top of my head.

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