Comment by hackbinary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hackbinary | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I also care that academics are well-aligned with the problems we care about.

That is not the point of academia, and indeed not the point of why academics are offered tenure with their institutions. Please consider Galileo and Copernicus and the Church of the 15th and 16th centuries. Please consider history.

Google as a business may care about research being aligned with its business, or what 'society' or certain segments of society care about; Google really should not care what academia and academics want to work on. That is the point of, for better or worse, academia: independent research by some of our smartest people.

If Google, and industry, care about what gets research, they should fund it. They then can choose. Please leave academia and academics to be just that, academic.

Without government funding, support, and indeed the wider academia 'ecosystem', my father would have never been able to be a historian of the Scottish enlightenment, and producing the seminal book on Adam Smith. And if you don't think that the Scottish Enlightenment is important to our modern understanding of the Universe, then I suppose that you then have to rethink the contributions of these notable academics, scientists, engineers, and philosophers: David Hume, McLaren, Taylor, James Watt, Telford, Napier--off the top of my head.

My point is that my fathers book may not itself be a major contribution to a current revolutionary idea, but it will likely be part of some future realisation about economics, since Adam Smith is a major cornerstone of our current understanding of economic thought.

I'm sorry, but I think this perspective is fairly naive and ignores the reality of how applied science and engineering work in universities today. You're talking about 17th century scientists, but the reality is that in the middle of the 20th century there was a tremendous shift to applied sciences -- computer science being one of those fields -- with the goal of producing useful innovations.

The whole point of my blog post is this: Most academics are trying to do work that is relevant to industry, but many of them are going about it the wrong way. Nobody is saying you have to work on industry-relevant research, but if you're going to try, at least do it right.

>Most academics are trying to do work that is relevant to industry,

That is certainly not what most academics think.

Bullshit.

In other words, academic research is a punt in the dark. Much of it will not yield all that much, but some of it will.

It is kind of similar to what YC and VC's do: give a little bit of funding to a small number of businesses, but hope a (very) small number will pay off big.

Academia is a small investment to a number of ideas, with the hopes of big pay-offs in a very small number. The technology behind the Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in the early nineties. You might not think that funding in high energy and particle physics would be worthwhile, but yet something completely different and revolutionary for all of humanity came out of it.

We just do not know where these revolutionary ideas come from, but what we do know is that they tend to come from some of the very brightest people.

That's not true that they come from the brightest people, I'd say that's very much a bias.

Much like how YC often says that the best startup founders aren't necessarily the smartest people in a room. Occasionally, being the very brightest can even be counter-productive because in the end the people who are less smart and realize it will strive to work harder.

And that's what research really is, really hard laborious work. Not this fantasy of someone bright sitting in a chair thinking up discoveries. That's why research is hard.

> That's not true that they come from the brightest people, I'd say that's very much a bias.

[Citation needed]

There are such things as talent, insight and experience but intelligence makes everything easier, from learning new fields and tools to evaluating and formulating new ideas. Ceteris Paribus more intelligence is better.

That's a bit reductionist on something that is inherently non-reductionist: how do you define a good problem worth solving.

I believe you presented a logical leap between having all the tools one could ever dream of <-> delivering scientific impact.

Here's a citation: "scientific impact is a decelerating function of grant funding size".

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

I would further add that Google, and similar technologica enterprise are some of the richest organisations of all time. I'm not sure about comparison to the Spanish Empire, however Google and 'Industry' can well afford to pay for their own research. If you have not been to Seville, and other major European Empirical cities, Rome, Paris, London, St Petersburg, Berlin, etc, then I recommend that you do a bit of travelling in Europe and witness the legacy of the dangers of what happens when money and power have no checks.

You can edit your posts if you realize you have something to add after hitting submit.

Click "Threads" and you will be presented with a list of your recent comments. Anything that is still editable will have an "edit" link. I am not sure how long this link is available but its definitely longer than an hour.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com