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Comment by admiralspoo | Hacker News Reader

Stories like these confirm my experience that academia is in a sorry state and ripe for disruption. I'm a firm believer that you are only as good as your last recent work. Enough of these inflated egos that haven't published anything interesting in a decade, or whose one claim to fame was a matter of luck.

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Are you criticising Bill Wadge in particular? His Ph. D thesis led to one of the widely studied notions in descriptive set theory [1]. He switched to computer science and made a lot of contributions to CS and AI [2]

If you are talking about disrupting academia in general, I am partly with you. There are academic have-beens, but the "disruption" might be tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bath water. I don't know of any decent way of distinguishing an academic who is currently stuck while trying to make progress, from an academic who is truly academically dead.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadge_hierarchy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_(programming_language)

Wadge is retired and his stories are over 30 years old. So perhaps academia used to be in a sorry state. It still is, and it used to be, too...?

As an undergrad in CS I can say that that politics limit your moves, at least where I live. So the answer is YES.

Academia is full of politics, but in the same time, only a handful of people can continuously keep publishing groundbreaking work. Most of the work published is average or even worse - useless. Groundbreaking discoveries don't happen often.

> Stories like these confirm my experience that academia is in a sorry state and ripe for disruption.

Can we maybe find our way to looking at something from a different perspective than this?

"My marriage is in a sorry state and ripe for disruption". wut?

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