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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of the academy is to insulate thinkers from this sort of thing and give them room to work, instead of retroactively justifying their existence and life choices to pundits or politicians in search of a soft target.

It seems like we're already having a crisis (ie the collapse of ecosystems) and in any case it shouldn't take a crisis to get supposedly-responsible people to think ahead and do risk mitigation etc. I mean, I have no scientific qualifications or special training other than curiosity and a willingness to plough through papers and follow citations, and it disturbs the hell out of me that I seem to have a much better grasp of environmental and fiscal systems than most policymakers. This idea that we should sacrifice all our institutions built up over centuries on the altar of economic competition (knowing the existence of perverse incentives and short-termism) is clearly Not Working.

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> whole point of the academy is to insulate thinkers from this sort of thing

This might be how it was before, but in a lot of fields, your success going forward is directly proportional to the valuation of the impact of your work so far. This as you note invites perverse incentives.

But we still need to somehow allocate funds to that insulating academy. We can't just give them blank checks to spend on whatever they want.(In current economy maybe we could, but that is beside the point)

So it is also part of that process that someone there provides the politicians good reasons to spend money. Now how to do this sanely is complex question, but it is step of process that needs to exist. Or we might end up funding astrology and likes...

That’s not the point of higher education.

Their jobs are to instruct. As part of that these other roles developed and became expected.

However, like healthcare, privatization got to a point where the money made a difference more than the research and other roles. This is not a failure of capitalism, business, or anything of that sort; it was just a problem of taking things that were considered important out of the equation, because they were not understood or justified; and we’re allowed to scratch our heads over this and wonder why, but it’s simply that it happened; things sometimes fail.

Should we guard against this?

Probably, yes.

Could it be crowdsourced?

Probably, yes.

Academy is not the same as higher education. The other part is people doing research and no teaching. These are people who then publishes their findings in journals for others to see.

And if we’re talking about public universities, these researchers are already crowd sourced.

In the US there is no academy, to my knowledge. It’s another word for school.

Right, I was reading it as academia, so, sure strictly speaking, there's academy which is just a school, and academia which connotes fundamental researcher, literature scholars etc who may never teach.

The comment I replied to read as if they meant academia, not academy.

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