Comment by hackbinary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hackbinary | Hacker News Reader

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I'm getting kind of sick of this tactic, where this fake concession is made before going on about how academia isn't designed well enough to deliver to industry.

This +1, er +1,000,000.

I would firmly state that academia by definition is not supposed to 'deliver to industry', and not even to society. The whole point of academia is to give the very smartest people (whatever that means) the freedom to explore ideas, so that a some point humanity may benefit from their ideas, experiments, and research.

My point is that it could be any number of generations of research from the current generation of (what seems like quack) research (to the establishment) will turn into being instrumental to our understanding of the universe. Galileo Galilei (and Copernicus) for instance. Their ideas (and research) did not sit well with the establishment of the Church (which was pretty much the central authority of everything at the time), but their ideas are now central to our understanding of our Solar system.

edit: formatting.

There is an attitude of entitlement here.

Students spend their money and time to learn something and frequently they get worked like a racehorse and nobody cares about if what they learn is transferable after the academic system no longer needs them.

If you are not going to be relevant to society the only thing I can do is vote for somebody who is going to cut your research budget.

That's a tremendously short sighted view to take. It's very hard to judge relevance to society over short time frames.

As would others vote to continue it.

Relevance is a very broad term, with industry a subset.

>Relevance is a very broad term, with industry a subset.

That's very insightful. It's easy to lose sight of things and be reduced to a particular worldview. The Higgs boson doesn't have to have commercialization potential for us to justify spending a few billion and a few decades discovering it. :) It's an end in itself.

That's how I see it. Pure research is necessary and possible.

Do you benifet from the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo Galilei?

Some would say that we should divide universities up into more separate institutions for Arts, Philosophy, Fine Arts, Natural Sciences, Applied Science, Math, Social Sciences, Business, Law, Medicine (or is that a Science?) and others, but the point of universities is be places of knowledge, and to help foster cross pollination between the disciplines. The point of independent research is to be unfettered by government, business, and indeed wider society as a whole.

Government and business and society should not be fettering independent research, just the same as they should not be interfering with law courts. The point of independent research is for the independent researchers to have the freedom to follow their research even though it might not be popular with the local Wood Pulp mill pumping dioxins into the local river, and that is pollution is going to cause cancer. This research may not be popular with many in the community because it will impact their jobs. This research may not be popular with the government, and elected officials because it will affect their tax receipts and donations. This research my not be popular with you because it is going to put your family out jobs, but it is important research, we can ultimately make informed decisions.

That is the point of research, information, and knowledge--so we can make informed and reasoned decisions.

I just can not believe the attitude and entitlement of some who think that just because they pay tax they think everything that is not obviously useful to themselves is useless.

Honestly, that makes more sense which is why PRIVATE industries should create schools inorder to foster educatin relevent to them.

Having organized education that is relevent to the real world is an exellent idea. However, reforming schools is not the appropriate approach. We live in a capitalist society, if they dont like whats around, they should compete. Im confident people are more than willing to pay 20k a year for a guarenteed job. Code boot camps charge that much for inadequate preparation and people are still clamboring to get in there.

Edit: i agree with you, im just so passionate right now. I need to relax

This is also very dangerous.

Having schools that don't teach for the sake of fostering knowledge and critical thinking but rather just train you to serve in a specific industry/company would be the final blow to higher education in the US.

Why? Vocational schools exist and always have. They are not supposed to replace universities, but complement them.

It is the consumers choice. I personally believe that vonventional universities enable creativity and freedom that a private institute would likely avoid. These types aspects are paramount to popular culture and forward thinking. However, if I want to get a job out of school, id prefer a guarentee

Cutting the research budget only makes academia more cutthroat and exploitative. We need to fundamentally get rid of the pyramidal academic job structure.

I think you and Matt are talking about different kinds of research. He's specifically talking about incremental research in computer systems. And he's 100% right that most of such work has zero impact, both over the short term and long term. I didn't read this essay as a condemnation of research in general, especially not of what he describes as "visionary, out-of-the-box, push-the-envelope research." It's talking about "research" that is misguided and is not doing anything meaningful to advance knowledge.

This is exactly what your grandparent (and parent to some extent) comments are arguing against.

There aren't 2 different kinds of research, kind A that is never gonna go anywhere and kind B that is visionary. The vast majority of the advancement of knowledge has been what academia has always valued: probably never gonna go anywhere, but might push the envelope by an inch or a millimeter. The whole reason you have to research a thing is you don't know whether it's gonna go anywhere.

Which isn't how we think in industry, not even in industry R&D. We have to know it'll probably to go somewhere, or at least have a small chance of going really far. That's the only way to get a profit in expectation.

But work that will probably go nowhere or even if it does go somewhere, won't get very far, like most of scientific progress? The point of systems like tenure is to foster that, since industry can't.

I don't think you understand the point being made about different kinds of research. You are correct, it is not "kind that will never go anywhere" and "kind that is visionary".

But I do think we can separate "kind that is incremental improvement on existing systems" and "kind that is visionary change of existing systems". This is particularly true in computer systems research. It's common to see a paper where people tweak a small part of an existing system; I consider that incremental research, and it is necessary. But the value of such incremental research is dependent on the assumptions made by the researchers. Often, those assumptions are informed by impressions of what is important to the wider field of computing, and the author is saying those impressions are often misguided.

> I would firmly state that academia by definition is not supposed to 'deliver to industry', and not even to society.

That, and also, academia is several thousand years older than industry.

If I recall correctly, Maxwell was once asked by a minor noble-person what value his research would lend to industry.

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