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Ok but finding teams like this in the real world is not simple. Half the roles billed this way are cynically lying. The other half think that because they’re struggling to stay afloat, they must be swimming in the ocean, but they’re actually in backyard kiddie pools and just not very sophisticated.

Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault.

>Maybe I am overly optimistic about academia, but my understanding is that your advisor, funding agencies, journals, etc. know the layout of the field and make sure that what you’re doing is both interesting and novel - even to a fault.

"interesting and novel" in academia currently translates to "incremental improvements on the status quo". The article directly talks about an example of not being able to do anything too novel because there was no journal to review it.

> Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile design

Uh, ok, if that's what you want to do I guess academia isn't the right place.

Pretty odd example though. You might as well have chosen some of the 20th century academic scientist who discovered, I don't know, relativity, quantum mechanics, the genetic code, the neural action potential or synaptic transmission to make the opposite point.

Is it likely to be among these people? No. But that's what motivates people in academia, rather than bombing Moscow.

Your examples are only ideas, he is talking about actual systems. In fact his points still stands for the actual experiments that validated the most recent advances in relativity and quantum mechanics..

Which experiments are those? I can't think of one foundational experiment in modern physics (>20th c.) that was developed in industry rather than academia.

Much of the work on realising quantum computers seems.to be happening in industry, no?

The point of op is that you need a lot of money at the same place to make great things happens, and that's mostly in industry. Large colliders for example were only possible because of that. I didn't say it was not possible in academia, just that money is in industry...

> Your examples are only ideas, he is talking about actual systems.

Yes, exactly, that's the distinction between engineering and foundational research. Academia is for the latter.

The examples that I quoted have arguably had more impact on civilization than any single engineering project, because they define what engineering can even be.

There's a separate (and IMO more interesting) discussion to be had about why many academics feel like they're not contributing to highly relevant foundational advances. But this thread right here just seems like a big misunderstanding about what academia is.

There's a story that an academic was telling the world that heavier-than-air flight was impossible at the same time that the Wright brothers flew the first plane. Not all engineering advances are based on science, often the engineering comes first.

Physics has been stuck in a quagmire for 50+ years. The "foundational research" hasn't moved, possibly since Einstein (who only became an academic after publishing his important work). Meanwhile the engineers have done awesome things.

The impact on civilisation from string theory: zip

The impact on civilisation from the internet: huge

I'm not sure what foundational advances you mean, but the impact is definitely on the engineering side for the last 100 years.

The internet and the web both came out of public/gov funded organisations with fundamental academic ties.

I think there is some dubious domain claiming in these industry vs academia anecdotes.

OK, but only partially. The invention of IP protocol and HTML happened as byproducts of government-funded projects (they were certainly never invented to be what they are). Since then all the impact (and further development) has happened because of things deliberately developed by industry.

>* Physics has been stuck in a quagmire for 50+ years. The "foundational research" hasn't moved, possibly since Einstein (who only became an academic after publishing his important work).*

You forgot all Quantum Mechanics. His only collaboration was the explanation photoelectric effect. (He got a Nobel price for this but is it a very tiny part of Quantum mechanics.)

The electroweak unification and quantum chromodynamics were discovered after Einstein's death. Also the Higgs boson prediction and experiments are post Einstein's death.

There haven't been recent (significant) advances in relativity or quantum mechanics.

Not the OP, but instead of "bombing Moscow", try "designing and building a reusable space rocket". A similar task, but much nobler intentions.

This is exactly what SpaceX pulled off, and cheaply so. No wonder that they are a magnet for young engineering talent, even with their insane workaholic corporate culture.

You also have to keep in mind that SpaceX pulled this off 40 years after NASA created the Space Shuttle. I'm not sure if that invalidates the example per se, but it seems a little like giving Apple credit for inventing the modern GUI, when they basically took it from Xerox PARC.

Yeah, and that whole walking on the moon thing.

This "Industry, industry über alles!" chest beating is very unconvincing.

Saturn V was a huge feat, but Apollo program consumed about 2 per cent of American GDP in 1965.

This is not a trivial cost. In fact, the nation was so unwilling to carry it on, that Apollo ended and the last footprints on the Moon will soon be fifty years old.

Doing things affordably is a huge, huge leap for mankind (to paraphrase Armstrong). Look, for example, at healthcare. A cancer treatment that costs 1 million USD may be theoretically revolutionary, but out of reach of most people. Drive the cost down to 15 thousand, now that is a real revolution from the point of view of a regular Joe.

Yes - I absolutely agree there is a place for industry, the market and competition; I just find the superiority argument misplaced.

But a great example of the difference between academia and private industry. The shuttle was reusable in theory, but required $1.5B in refurbishment between flights. Refurbishment of the boosters cost more than simply buying new ones would have.

Sure, and the Falcon rocket is not fully reusable, either. It's a lot harder to reuse the second stage, because it's the part that goes to orbit, which means it's moving very fast, and has to lose a lot of energy in order to land softly.

Again, this makes me wonder if the gulf here is academia vs industry, or if it's just 1980 vs 2020.

Original creators definitely need credit, but in my opinion, they are not the only ones who should be adequately respected.

Taking an existing, but very expensive or impractical idea, and reengineering it to be orders of magnitude cheaper or practical, is a huge feat.

In case of SpaceX, development costs of the Falcons was a fraction of Space Shuttle's and refurbishment of the first stage is very simple.

To be fair, their operated under very different constraints. SS program had a lot of money, but to win over senators from across the US, the manufacturing process had to be spread over half of North America, which exploded the engineering complexity and the costs. SpaceX had to integrate internally, precisely because they did not have such a war chest of money.

Falcon 9 vs. Space Shuttle is also an interesting case study on the "more money is not necessarily better" topic. Ceteris paribus perhaps, but in practice, more money tends to come with strings attached and those strings may more than compensate (negatively) for the advantages of a larger budget.

I will say that my experience in industry after academia, I feel a lot more personal satisfaction (bigger paychecks and frequency of promotions are probably a big part), but a sense of faster progress.

That said, the success criteria for solutions to problems is different. In academia, my analysis needed to be irrefutable. In industry I have often felt in different companies that whatever the sales team can push is good enough to move on. I do sometimes wonder how much of what we have given to the world is just flat wrong, because we weren't validating with the same seriousness.

Tangential topic: I'd prefer a synonym to your 'violent' agreement. I appreciate your desire to emphasize your support, but I think we can do with less violence and brutality in discussion overall. Maybe 'vehement' or 'passionate'?

“Emphatically” is a good one.

"Totally" and "fully" also seem wholly adequate.

I can corroborate this: "If you take on a problem, one problem, like really take it on and try to develop it, you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order. Mind-breakingly hard problems abound when you actually try to solve hard problems in the world."

Every area that I explored deeply because I had an almost "irrational obsession" yielded new general insights about the world. For me it has been, among other things, smart volume control via signal coherence, typically only applied in radar applications. This opened up a whole world of signal math that I would not have stumbled on before. And there is plenty to develop there for the future of communications.

The way I see it is that academia and self-entrepreneurship are much alike. Comparing working in academia and for a company is apples to oranges, as working for a company is literally about working in company, i.e., not by yourself.

It's also easy to see the distinction between different phases in academia: after PhD it's much more about what could be done against what can be done. It's more like trying to get VC money with just an idea. It's hard, but some can do it, but it requires a vastly different playbook than what is required to get the degree. If you already know how to make things work, it's easier to transition into a bootstrapped mode where you can sideline as an independent researcher without all the fluff of publishing.

At the same time, those missiles probably used quite a bit of science discovered/explored in academia.

Surprisingly not much (if you mean the knowledge discovered after WW2). Scientific endeavors were financed differently during the Cold War, and the academia people were quite anti-militaristic usually, so they didn't get money to work on these sort of problems. It is only after 1990 the funding started to shift to the universities back again, somewhat.

> you will find 100 PhDs worth of work in short order

a problem i am facing doing this myself is that people need all that signaling ceremony to recognize it ... the real value of any credential is extracting compliance. The entrepreneur of course invests in marketing. It's a big complicated world out there and people need brands to help make sense of it.

> Eisenhower didn't pay 100 labs $5M each to come with possible ballistic missile designs.

On the other hand this is the venture capital model. I wonder if we'd have worse, equal or better results if Eisenhower somehow applied the venture capital and entrepreneurial model of today to missile R&D back then. It's an interesting thought experiment.

I don't think that approach would be as fast. The ICBM program created the whole airospace industry within a few years through massive investment directed by a military industrial complex scared by the soviet union.

If you give so much money to a single company they squander it like during the dot com bubble. If you disperse it over many companies a chaos ensures as everybody struggles to find product market fit.

>I'm in violent agreement with Colin here.

You're not really in "violent agreement" when you're just agreeing with him from the outset.

https://wiki.c2.com/?ViolentAgreement

Interesting.

I definitely think of the term pretty much exclusively in the sense of (a) here, i.e. extreme, vehement agreement:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2007-Septem...

Your industry experience seems like an edge case to me.

It does seem like an edge case, and often this type of industry experience is limited to candidates from academia. (Not 100% limited, but research experience is preferred).

> The academic system is not where you go to have staggering impact in your lifetime.

This is a really a generalization. Plenty of people do have "impact" while working in academia. There are also a lot of very smart people who are working on boring projects in companies or banks. It depends on so many factors...

That Admiral Rickover link doesn't seem to be working anymore --- do you have another source, or even just a title I can search for?

Looking up Bennie Schriever really took me down the rabbit hole. Quite a life he lived. Incredible to think what he was able to lead.

You can compare Groves with his Manhattan project and Mueller with his Apollo project. Schriever is right between in the story line. He advanced the atomic weapon pioneered by Groves and prepared rocket science for "human payloads".

Rickover way overstayed his welcome. In academia he would have been kicked upstairs when he started strangling people’s careers.

What is SoTA?

I believe it is short for "State of The Art"

In my mind, your opinion is the epitome of capitalist thinking. You have an extremely low bar for the definition of lifetime impact. In a century, will "changing how household brands do business" be remembered, or rather the low-paid scientists who will have discovered the thing that will make nuclear fusion work? Admittedly, academic work is often a dead end. That's because it's high-risk, low pay. You're choosing the high pay, low risk path. It's almost certainly a better path personally speaking, but will people remember you for it? I think not, and nor should they.

Nuclear fusion is an interesting example. Right now academia is mostly focused on conventional tokamaks, and while they're learning a lot, the exponential rise in the fusion triple product essentially stopped while we wait 25 years for ITER to finish construction. Now private startups are building reactors to explore all sorts of alternative ideas.

The example was chosen on purpose, as I'm aware of that. However, pure research startups although private, definitely do not fall in the same basket as companies which produce something they can sell. Otherwise and following the alternate opinion, the distinction between academia and private businesses disappears (in the US) since US research depts are in good part funded by private money.

Truth is that modern academia is a poorly regulated and inefficient industry. It wasn't always like that I think, and I am still hoping for better days to come back.

In a century you and everyone you know will be dead. So what difference does it really make?

None indeed. But then how do you define the impact of a lifetime? If it's to be immediate, then politics is a far better choice than anything else.