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Comment by mnky9800n | Hacker News Reader

People seem to forget that you need a system like academia that's allowed to fail. Most companies aren't allowed to fail when they need to have quarterly returns. Of course academia has become more and more competitive. But tbh I think the answer is that the funding hasn't increased equally with the number of quality people who could stay in academia. But who knows.

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Stability "like academia" is rich, given all we've heard about "publish or perish". Modern academia is a poor fit for increasingly any case you can think of besides maintaining the status of academia. But sure, there needs to be some stability and ability to "fail"/i.e. produce something worthless. Corporate research departments provide this -- if they didn't, they wouldn't have a research department and indeed many don't, nor do they need to, but this has little to do with quarterly returns.

We've also seen a rise of VC-backed research startups (like DeepMind but many others) whose value proposition (to the VC) only makes sense if the goal is to demonstrate a research capacity to get them bought out by a big company, or as a moonshot to out-compete them on an actual product made possible by the research. Investing in these little research startups themselves is also giving companies a way to push research without having to deal with having the researchers as direct employees, and I'm sure makes some of the startup employees feel a bit safer since there's a separation of money and operation influence. One similarity with modern academia is it selects for those who can do good work but who are also good bureaucrats (write grant proposals well, advising politicians, etc), startups have a selection for good work + good at courting VCs. But the startup just needs a few of them, then they can hire people who just want to do good work.

Another thing that makes corporate even better is they can occasionally spin off research developments into products, they can have some nice advances that only come when you try to productize, and among other reasons by not having to bother with external publishing (which takes time + fights with lawyers and business people) they can routinely be 10+ years ahead of whatever the state of the art in academia is.

That's all nice in theory, but what's the compelling empirical evidence for corporate science vs academic research? A professor might conversely argue the open nature of scholarship and freedom of inquiry as being essential to basic science, and capitalist businesses fundamentally cannot provide that. So it goes back to empirical support. And last I checked, companies still need a pool of trained PhDs to choose from, and those come from academia, for good reason.

Elsewhere in the thread makes plenty of cases for corporate advances, even (or perhaps especially?) in the 20th century with e.g. Bell Labs et al. I think the empirical results are pretty good for corporate science.

As for 'needing' PhDs, I'm not sure. Having some can be convenient, yes, but in many cases not necessary. In some fields the only way to get caught up (i.e. no corporation will train you directly) may be with academic foundations but is a PhD necessary or just some relevant graduate work?

As an example N=1 to show a PhD is not needed always, Jeff Jonas formerly held the title of IBM Chief Scientist where he did some state of the art work in entity resolution. He didn't even finish high school.

That's an interesting way to make selection bias sound like "pretty good"; I disagree on the face of it, even if I am open to considering the idea of completely doing away with academia. I don't know and am skeptical, but intuitively, the day that would happen is the day that Nobel prizes are routinely awarded to FAANG companies and not to academics.

Further, since your original position was strongly that academia is useless, it is your onus to back up the implication that PhDs are not (generally) needed/useful, and using "well hmm, not sure if absolutely necessary" logic is fallacious and clouds the issue.

We are in a period of historically low interest rates. If and when interest rates rise, these moonshot research startups will get dropped like a hot potato.

Why should they rise? Maybe they should stay low if it is so productive.

Because in addition to funding moonshot project plays, low interest rates also fund a lot of really stupid investments that should never have been funded, and that go belly-up at the first sign of a tightening fiscal market.

When too many of those really stupid investments go belly up at once, it's called a bubble popping, and it is catastrophic to the economy.

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