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Comment by codingslave | Hacker News Reader

Academia keeps employing people who have done well in classes and within fine bounds. Its a careerist track. Industry cares about results, its more meritocratic

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> Industry cares about results, its more meritocratic

Industry cares about positive results. If you're not allowed to fail, you will be afraid to explore. That's what Academia is. Then, the industry reaps the fruit of that exploration, which is as it should be.

High impact journals care about positive results and academia very much cares about journals.

You need to win grants to survive.

If academia actually allowed failure we wouldn't be getting so many tiny incremental growth papers just for the sake of it as in deep learning and machine learning.

In my (one point) experience of industry R&D more projects failed than succeeded, but project leaders were not blamed.

How could one predict success or failure in risky project proposals? In both cases you learn something.

I wish people would stop making reductive and false statements. Life isn't this simple.

This is actually something I feel strongly about. The absent minded creative professor is the one who traditionally has made the breakthroughs. Recent years has instead seen the straight A student with no curiosity making it into programs, when they really have no business doing novel research and are better suited as orderly wage slaves

There's a lot of fanciful stuff about "creative" and "absent-minded" people doing the best work, but what actually makes a good researcher is the same as in any other field: (a) curiosity (b) determination, and (c) hard work.

PhD programs don't take people who just have a good GPA; you have to have a research record before you're even in the consideration. I've been on an admissions committee, so this is not conjecture.

Right, but a modern research record is about incremental improvement. The argument being that low hanging fruit is often picked, and so the incremental is natural. My argument is that far too many people are gaming the academic system, using it as a form of status credentialing, which is hurting true academic research.

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