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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Agreed and that is a really good, but simple, point that I didn't realize as clearly before: there is no real alternative to the academia vs. industry dichotomy. What is needed might be a third option that allows for exploration without the pressures of profits or publications.

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Common to all "3rd options" seems to be their (read, immediate) implicit/tacit "dual-use" assumption:

Egs:

DARPA: every new findout is an edge for beating the soviets

Patronage: sooner or later, but most likely sooner, you come up with something your funder can brag about or profit from or simply feel good about

(Detour back to second options.

Academia: professors must bring in the tuition bacon at the very least

Industry: academics can immediately reverse engineer your artifacts or even patents, if they happen not to be mere positioning.)

Bell labs: if you squint hard enough, everything is related to infocomm infra

Sorry, had to try to beat that "one day everything will see the sun!" clause

https://archive.today/latest/www.nytimes.com/1985/01/06/nyre...

The traditional 3rd option was the patronage by a rich benefactor. The modern version is patreon. It's imperfect but seems to work pretty well for some.

Patreon is still dependent on the creator caring about what their audience wants, what the market wants, etc. This is a distinctly "populist" approach, which does have its downsides: specifically if there is important work that doesn't have a wide audience, or takes years to get any results.

Your third option sounds suspiciously similar to golden-age DARPA, which had been created in response to the launch of Sputnik in 1957?

The kicker is it's not really a dichotomy either. Academia and industry have gotten closer together, colluding to decide what research is funded and what is silently dropped, what is taught and what never makes it onto the curriculum. This is even framed as a good thing by governments who talk of academic-industry "alignment" and how the academy "serves" industry. It's a way to get public money for training that is a subsidy to commercial interests.

"Objective" higher education and research designed to shape industry by genuine innovation is as rare as rocking-horse shit - mainly in niche areas of physics or biotech that don't have any commercial application yet.. but might one day.

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