How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation | Hacker News Reader

How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation

kingsreview.co.uk

206 pointsiswanghao55 comments

"But today there is no way to do this without money. That’s the difficulty. In order to do science you have to have it supported. The supporters now, the bureaucrats of science, do not wish to take any risks. So in order to get it supported, they want to know from the start that it will work. This means you have to have preliminary information, which means that you are bound to follow the straight and narrow."

It's getting even worse, at least in Canada, where not only is the above true, but another pattern is emerging, namely that the government is "intervening" in the topics that get funded, by directing more funds to projects that have an immediate (or even a perceived immediate) impact on commercial activity, and/or topics of interest to the government (e.g. alberta oil sands)... and a concomitant decrease in funding to "open competitions".

Although it has its own set of problems (some pretty large), this is one somewhat nice aspect of the EU scientific funding system. It has ulterior motives, but many of them are "meta" motives rather than specific ones like oil-sands, because it's not one national government setting the priority. Instead there are meta-motives like "improve European research/educational integration". That's implemented by requiring that EU-level funding only go to multi-country projects with partners from >= 3 countries represented (single-country or two-country projects are supposed to be funded at the national level). That adds coordination difficulties since every EU project is a big multinational management problem, but it's at least a political criterion that's mostly orthogonal to the actual research. And when they do pick actual topics, because of the need to compromise between so many governments they tend to be very vague, like "data & 21st-century society", which you can fit a lot of things under.

I do recall seeing a study that suggested that just taking the total pot of money and dividing it by the number of researchers would be at least as good and maybe better, though. Even if the lack of competition leads to less hard work and more money being spent on questionable things, there is a huge overhead removed: the entire infrastructure of people writing 100-page documents, other people reviewing those documents, people flying to Brussels (or D.C. or Ottawa) to make funding decisions, support staff at universities reviewing documents, etc., etc.

The odd thing about your comment is that in my experience science in Europe is a MORE feudal system than in the us, with hierarchies of professorships and less independence for most researchers.

It's possible that this is a cultural thing writ large, but how exactly do you get a committee to do anything but reward the 'haves' at the expense of the 'have not's?

That's one area that really, really varies, and is completely unstandardized across Europe (while the funding mechanisms and degrees are becoming more standardized, which is a tricky divergence). Germany has more of a traditional model where a Professor has a capital P, is not a social peer of the lower-down people, and there is no clear route to becoming that person. But once you are, there is a large degree of research freedom and some guaranteed funding. Sweden has the diametric opposite, where a lecturer with a masters degree who's been teaching at the same place for a few years basically becomes permanent faculty with tenure, without having to either do a PhD or go through a tenure application (and anyone with a PhD is more or less equally at the top tier). Denmark isn't quite as flat on the teaching side, but is flatter on the faculty vs. PhD student side, with PhD students considered more or less faculty, paid much better salaries than most PhD students (€40-45k), and guaranteed funding (by law) for their entire PhD before they're admitted. Italy is more feudal, with "barons" controlling the positions in some departments (apparently Umberto Eco, mostly known to the general public for his novels, is somewhat notorious in Italian academic circles for being one of the big ones). Spanish universities can be super-regional, with complex language requirements, e.g. a colleague of mine who was born and raised in Galicia can't teach at a Galician university without doing additional certifications, because his degree was not done in a Galician university. Etc.

But my point was mostly just that the EU as a funding body doesn't micromanage research areas that much, because it has too many governments to do so: Denmark might want all the money in wind power, but they won't get that through. Instead the EU picks general meta-goals like "promote European research integration", and a few broad focus areas, which allows quite a bit of flexibility on what the actual scientific project is. Some blue-skies stuff gets funded as a result, as long as it's multinational blue-skies work in a broad area of interest.

The administrative overhead on many EU funded projects is so complex and burdensome that there is a small industry of private companies that will help you navigate it. The EU sometimes even allows specific additional budgets for this, all in the spirit of "proper management and oversight" and "accountability". The upshot is that some professors in the UK will not apply for these funds, since the work/research output ratio is too low.

Contrast that to some other funding agencies that simply ask for a 4 or so page annual report of progress and a final report, which hopefully shows your publication output (if none, you probably won't get any further funds from them).

I have to second this. EU-funded research projects seem to be quite inefficient in at least the few cases I know of. You need several universities and companies - distributed over as many EU countries as possible - to cooperate and communicate. This apparently works some of the time. Each university gets funding for one or two PhD students. In the cases I observed, these PhD students had to produce an enormous amount of written "deliverables" all the time. Their research project was so different from what the rest of the group was doing, that they had more or less nobody to discuss their work with. Other, nationally funded research projects have always seemed more effective and efficient to me.

There's definitely overhead, and simply choosing not to get into that game is a legitimate choice (often a good one, if other funding is available). How it's managed can make the experience differ greatly though. One of the consortium partners is supposed to be the managing partner, and if they do a good job, the scientific partners should be in much better shape. Of course, they don't always.

I haven't done a deep investigation, but anecdotally the projects that have worked best for us have a managing partner that is a research institute, not a university, i.e. full-time researchers who are used to managing large projects and have substantial administrative support for doing so. For example CERTH (http://www.certh.gr/root.en.aspx) do that kind of thing well. This is kind of analogous to doing a big DARPA project in the U.S. with a partner like BBN or SRI, who know how to handle DARPA, are staffed to do so, and can take care of the interface.

I think, though this is more speculative, that it also helps if the managing partner is in southern Europe, contrary to the usual stereotype about efficiency. Mostly because costs are lower: if a managing partner in Denmark is given €200k/yr, we can hire 3-4 staff members, while the Greek managing partner we worked with hired 10 staff members on that same budget (some researchers and some secretarial). They took care of nearly all the project's paperwork as a result. I think people in bureaucratic countries are also better at navigating the EU bureaucracy quickly. The administrative staff here (Denmark) are really slow at it and in a sense take it too seriously, not realizing that Brussels paperwork is not the same as Danish paperwork. Much of it is filler, not something you should agonize over and spend a lot of time filling out (some of it is important, but you need to recognize which is which to get anything done). With this kind of arrangement, full-time staff who know how to do such things should be writing the reports, not PhD students. I'm not sure we're even allowed to have PhD students do that kind of work; it might be seen by the PhD oversight board as misusing them.

Nationally funded projects are definitely lower-overhead, but there's also much less money for basic science, at least here. If you're developing smart-grid technology or wind power, there is a ton of targeted research funding. If you're doing theoretical CS, not so much. Whereas the EU explicitly has blue-skies research calls, and is currently pouring money into fairly long-term stuff like computational creativity.

There are obviously better and worse ways to deal with bureaucracy, but I find it amusing your suggestion that one solution is to outsource it to countries known for bloated bureaucracies. I'm sure Greek scientists are by and large as good as German or Danish ones, so maybe the science should be sent to Southern Europe and the bureaucracy sent to ever-efficient Germany.

Or better yet, do away with all that "filler".

It's certainly not a solution, more of a coping process. If the EU has a bunch of bureaucracy, having a project managed by someone who knows how to navigate bureaucracy streamlines things.

Alternatives are opting out of EU projects entirely (possible for some people, not for others), or revamping the EU funding process (difficult, way above my level of authority to do anything about).

A bit of revamping is probably in order.

Scientists are naturally a very mobile group and will usually work wherever the facilities/environment is favorable.

Certain pan-European organizations have a very strong reputation, such as The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL, link below), and the EU funds the Joint European Torus (link below). These institutes have a very mixed national contingent.

So... if the motive of EU funding is to promote transnational collaboration, then the approach they take is needlessly complicated. A simpler possibly solution would be to fund "magnet" institutes (which could be based in existing centers of excellence, or created de novo) that have a requirement to recruit from diverse EU states.

http://www.embl.de/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus

that's the problem with a lot of places that deliberate try to be so-so 'science hub'. the thing with scientific research is that doesn't always turn into a positive result - much of it is messy, we don't know a lot, and ends in failure. most investments in science assume that results are always positive and profitable, which works with agencies and pharama companies but not for the pursuit of scientific research aka 'the higher ideal' of human knowledge.

Science funding has devolved back to Feudal times, where an aspiring scientist must gain the favour of wealthy barons to support his research. Because of course by capitalist reasoning, science as a pursuit has no immediate returns on investment, thereby being a frivolous waste of time.

Honestly, I don't know if this insanity will ever stop in our lifetimes. Profiteering has now become the number one profession of the developed world, and anything that does not generate short term profit is seen as wasteful. I increasingly fantasize about the days of the Manhattan and Apollo projects, where the state treated science as critical to its survival.

Let's look at ourselves: how many brilliant people are now scrambling to make web/social/mobile apps in hopes of getting acquired or hitting their IPO? Is this what these people would do if left to their own devices? Or would they become fascinated with the eternal undertaking of science, and make breakthroughs in fields which would change the way we understand the world?

All the brilliant people I know have admitted defeat, along the lines of "If you can't beatem, joinem." The only way they see research in their future is if they can become the next Bill Gates or Zuck, and have billions to spend at their discretion.

This is an extremely sad development. An entire generation of aspiring scientists (myself included) are shut out of the system, while parasites such as administrators and rent seekers suck the last bits of life from the dying government funding apparatus that they have successfully gamed.

Science is the eternal pursuit of truth. It is the very thing which distinguishes us as a species. The quest to understand ourselves and the universe is a fundamental drive of every human being which should be nurtured from birth. Increasingly, however, scientific pursuit is relegated to the sidelines in the quest for pure capitalism. A society focused upon profiteering can only have one end: fiscal and moral bankruptcy.

I totally sympathize with your plight, it's a sorry state of affairs. I'd love to know, what's your take on "crowdfunding" type initiatives, such as http://www.experiment.com and http://www.petridish.org ?

I don't think crowdfunding will work for science. Science is the turtle in the race. Long, slow and steady is how every single breakthrough has occurred, because it requires setting foundations that take decades. Crowdfunding is the most unstable funding source, and thus involves a level of uncertainty that no professional could live with on a long term basis. It's great for small, self contained projects with a clear goal. Not for quests into the unknown.

Furthermore, the average person has no understanding of the history, practice, and effects of scientific research. They don't realize that the unbelievable technologies we enjoy today are a result of very concerted efforts throughout history to advance the state of our understanding. The iPhone is a result of the accumulation of every discovery made by mankind since the inception of our species. This is not what the average person thinks when they hold an iPhone. As such, I believe crowdfunding will be for a very small niche of like minded people. That does not compare to the resources available through taxation.

From the article:

“A Fred Sanger would not survive today’s world of science. With continuous reporting and appraisals, some committee would note that he published little of import between insulin in 1952 and his first paper on RNA sequencing in 1967 with another long gap until DNA sequencing in 1977. He would be labelled as unproductive, and his modest personal support would be denied. We no longer have a culture that allows individuals to embark on long-term—and what would be considered today extremely risky—projects.”

From Peter Higgs [1]:

"The emeritus professor ... published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Edinburgh University's authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he "might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn't we can always get rid of him".

Higgs said he became "an embarrassment to the department when they did research assessment exercises". A message would go around the department saying: "Please give a list of your recent publications." Higgs said: "I would send back a statement: 'None.' "

1. http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-b...

While I agree with your overall analysis of the issues facing science, I disagree that 'the average person' is to blame. I think the professors / administrators / i.e. the "scientists" in academia themselves are responsible for the current state of things. The public believes scientists collaborate for best results, but as we all know this is in fact the opposite of what's happening: All results are hidden until publication. Methods and data intentionally difficult to get / obscured due to a desire to maintain edge. P-value hacking and exaggeration accepted practices due to desire to publish "high impact" research and get more grants and tenure.

Hey, don't despair.

First, not everyone has admitted defeat. Maybe you just need to meet more people. Grad schools are just wrapping up admission season, and I'm totally inspired by the level of talent and quality of students I met this past few months.

Second, scientists are among the greatest beneficiaries of the information technology revolution. The most important instrument every scientist uses is a personal computer. Brenner says "The way to succeed is to get born at the right time and in the right place. If you can do that then you are bound to succeed. You have to be receptive and have some talent as well." This definitely feels like the right time and place to me.

Science may be the pursuit of knowledge, but that doesn't mean humans who work as scientists get to be privileged when it comes to allocation of resources. We will just have adapt to new ways of communicating why our work is important, and new ways of raising money [1]. Science is way more expensive than most people realize, but it costs millions, not billions to run a successful lab.

Anyway, we'll make it work. Just like our predecessors made it work when science budgets were a fraction of their current size.

[1] For example: YC-backed experiment.com

Of course there will be extremely talented yet naive students lining up for graduate schools. They are mostly unaware of the soul crushing reality of working in perpetual poverty in hopes of landing a tenured research position that doesn't exist.

This is a perfect case of confirmation bias due to information asymmetry. They have been in school their whole lives and thus have only met the few successful people who've managed to land tenured positions. They haven't met any senior grad students who've spent decades in a lab being paid less than the lowest administrators, and dumped to the curb for a fresh batch as soon as their best years are spent.

I'm not a pessimist, but when the reality is bleak [1], I will not convince myself that everything is dandy. Will this change? Hopefully. When and how are the questions I'm most concerned with at the moment.

1. http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/a-dark-future...

Look up the phrase "catabolic collapse". It's one I only ran across in the past year, but it explains much of what I've seen for the past two decades and some.

About a quarter century ago, the following thoughts struck me:

• Are we going to hell in a handbasket?

• Why are we going to hell in a handbasket?

• Is this what's supposed to be happening?

• Who else has figured this out?

• Is it better to be a tree or a mushroom?

It seemed clear to me that the huge resource troves which had fueled the past couple of centuries of growth were expiring. And that without them we'd likely at best be holding ground, if not losing it, by and by.

My own constitution is to be a tree: I'd rather build things up than tear them down. I catted around for a bit looking for work in renewables, transit, or anything remotely similar, but found the jobs were very few and the pay worse. I opted for the next-best thing and ended up in one of the two great catabolic endeavors: software and IT (the other is, of course, finance). I've been very disenchanted with what Silicon Valley's turned out over the past decade.

And so long as we're relying on the naive market principle to guide us, I think that's the best we can hope for. I'm not sure alternatives can do a whole lot better, but some level of guided state or higher-level directed investment and planning might help. Or not.

As for the patronage funding model: I suspect that's going to be what's increasingly common, particularly for science and the arts, possibly also technical ventures. If you think about it, it's a regression back about 150 - 200 years.

It'll be interesting, though, over the next 10 - 200 years.

"Profiteering has now become the number one profession of the developed world, and anything that does not generate short term profit is seen as wasteful."

That is very evidently wrong. Almost all major inventions around us are a result of at least some long term research.

Also, I don't see why anyone including the scientific community should feel entitled to any funding for long term research if no one sees any value in them.

Rest all sounds Obama like empty rhetoric to me.

There is a third way, one in which research is not a full-time endeavour, but is still a part of your life. It's certainly not for everyone, and is not "pure" in the sense that you still need to make a living doing something with market value. I generally work 3 days in industry and do research the other 2 days in a university setting (a PhD program).

My work is in the broad area of my research (e.g. power systems), and while there's no direct overlap, they aren't entirely different spheres. I quite like my work and I find the industry contact important, so while I could easily live on 1-2 days of work, I've chosen a work/research split that is more biased towards work. Having said that, as a freelancer, I have a fairly flexible arrangement and some weeks I don't work at all.

The key advantage of this approach is that I am not at all bonded to the university. I don't have to participate in the politics of academia, grant funding, the pressure to publish, progress reporting etc, which I see the other grad students struggling with. I suppose I still have to massage the egos of tenured professors, but I can live with that (as a consultant, I'm always massaging peoples' egos anyway). The bottom line is that having independent funding insulates me from most of the pain of being a PhD student and gives me the freedom to pursue ideas that may lead to dead ends.

" I don’t believe in peer review because I think it’s very distorted and as I’ve said, it’s simply a regression to the mean."

"SB: ... Somehow that’s why the journals insist they will not publish your paper unless you sign that copyright over. ... everybody works for these journals for nothing. There’s no compensation. There’s nothing. They get everything free. They just have to employ a lot of failed scientists, editors who are just like the people at Homeland Security, little power grabbers in their own sphere."

If we want scientists to be able to work on projects that nobody else cares about, we can't be judging who deserves money and who doesn't. What we need is a system that allows people to work on whatever they want without any requirement that their efforts be sanctioned by greater society.

Sounds to me like a job for guaranteed basic income.

That won't work. The money isn't going to line the pockets of (most) of the researchers. It's going to fund the actual science costs itself, which is millions per project.

The problem is that science nowadays is expensive. We've past the days where scientits can preform chemistry experiments in their garage, most science requires heavily specialized equipment, years of preparation, and/or lots of people.

I don't see a clear way to fix this problem. The projects that have the clearest ROI will continue to get funded first.

This really isn't true. Math and computer science research need very little in terms of materials cost. The physical sciences are indeed more of a problem, but I have difficulty believing that everything needs big money to research. Surely a large communal lab would facilitate a lot of smaller scale work?

Those fields aren't the issue, and not what he is discussing in the article. The two fields he mentions, bio-chem (the DNA sequencing) and quantum physics (higgs), both require large amounts of funding to progress. Think the large hadrom collider was cheap? Think a DNA sequencing machine is cheap?

Math is only limited by computer power, and our own personal mental computing power. Computer science, similarly. Those two fields are different from the rest of science as we know it today.

It's true that certain aspects of science are very expensive. We're generating a lot of data these days through DNA sequencing, particle collision, and various other expensive scientific measurement techniques.

But there's a lot of work to be done in making sense of that data. It doesn't cost anything to play with data that's already been collected.

The biggest breakthroughs come from people thinking differently.

Not sure what you're trying to say, do you believe collected data is currently shunted to a bin while the next sequencing run is started or something?

No. I'm just saying that we're collecting data faster than we can make sense of it. New discoveries don't necessarily require new data.

Obviously experimental physics can be extremely expensive, but coffee-and-chalk theoretical physics positions like (afaik) Higgs' have roughly the same costs as most math or humanities posts. And apparently theoretical physics has huge problems of PhD oversupply.

Does this disprove your implicit point though? The problem is any position which doesn't cost a lot is attracting way too many people for the amount of possible work.

Meanwhile, the expensive parts - i.e. all the applied physics needed to prove or disprove theoretical physics, is not receiving appropriate funding.

That's a really good point. Many meaningful projects will eventually cost a lot of money.

But I like how Brenner provides an environment for scientists to basically do what they want. Some of them eventually get projects funded, but it's important to have that first stage in which people have the freedom to explore.

A basic income can provide that freedom for everyone.

The standard rate for overhead billed to a grant is 30% and this has increased over time as has the amount of university administration and their salaries , so almost certainly we're not dealing with increased physical plant costs(typically, specific research equipment is billed to the grant, overhead covers things like building maintenance and admin costs).

So yes, (some) science is expensive, but universities also profit from it.

The problem with "the problem" is that there is no uniquely specified problem. The article is concerned with the use of key performance indicators by administrators to allocate resources to scientific projects in many fields. Math and computer science are also affected by this, contrary to what you say.

No, just have multiple tiers of basic funding for all scientists. Junior scientists start out (say) two tiers above the bottom. Every scientist gets funding at their specific level which lasts for a full five years, no questions asked. After the five years are up, each scientist's progress is assessed, and they move up or down one or more tiers on the funding ladder, based on various performance criteria. If you fall off the bottom, you're finished as a researcher (unless you can obtain some private source of funding). If you do particularly good research, your funding increases. You are also free to pursue extra outside funding as you see fit.

Under a system like this, there would be no more grant applications prior to conducting research, but rather the emphasis would be transferred to a defence of research already carried out.

As for peer review; it's fine and necessary, but it should no longer be anonymous. Let reviewers stand by their reviews.

Okay. But how do you define someone as being a scientist?

Let's not forget about self-sustaining communities:

15 erasmus friends cite each other, and peer review each other.

In few years, one/two/ten of them will be also editors of more or less decent journals (Impact factor usually between 4 and 12). Most of them will publish 10/15 papers per year, on their companion journal. Which is a good throughput for having founds.

And if one is caught saying bullshit, 14 "experts" will protect him.

As an example see Stellacci story here http://raphazlab.wordpress.com/

Well, that's eye-opening. So the rot seems to have reached materials science?

I've been in the community 5yrs now. And I've seen a little bit of everything.

This is my favorite one so far:

    A, B, C write paper, submit to his pal D.
    D appoints E,F,G as reviewers.
    C, and E were in school together.
    F was a C student.
    G sends the paper back to C to auto-review it. 
    C cannot be bothered, so delegates the review back to A.
    A reviews his first name paper.

    (poor phd student B doesn't even know)

yay peer review!

One of the reasons I left academia was that, as an Engineer I became completely disillusioned with the novelty over utility bias. Things were published because they were new and not because they were really any better than existing techniques.

I completely disagree with your sentiment and think that academia should focus on novel work rather than incremental improvements. Something novel may not be better than the existing techniques right now, but what's to say they won't be better in the future? When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, it was not better than candles because it was extremely expensive, fragile, lasted only briefly, and the light was very dim. But it was novel and with more improvements, beat the state-of-the-art.

Science requires repeatability and thorough testing to stabilize theories. If studies are only preformed once and discarded, instead of repeated, we know nothing.

You can't disagree with my reasons for leaving academia. I never said academia was at fault, simply that I wanted to build useful things and couldn't achieve that when I was only going to be measured largely on how novel the solution was.

I would also suggest that most valuable research conducted today is incremental. Even the amazing breakthroughs are usually the final piece of many years of work by many varied teams.

Academic funding is just like venture funding in that you need to convince someone. And because they don't know what will work, they mostly follow trends and fads. You can see this if you look back over the publication history of the average academic (i.e. not a leading, ground-breaking academic who founded their own field), with paper titles twisted to fit the then flavour of the month.

Here's a popular thought for HN: why not a YC-style academic funding, where you fund people, not ideas?

The metric for success would be parallel to YC: funding rounds from academics. This potentially falls prey to the same biases as current - but avoids it, by giving all ideas a initial start. The other question is whether academic work really does require more mentoring and guidance than start-ups.

Though I guess the first year of a PhD often plays this role...

> Though I guess the first year of a PhD often plays this role...

In the U.S., the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships sort of do that for a bit longer (3 years). You do have to write a short proposal, but like with YC, there's not necessarily an expectation that you'll stick with the project that was in the proposal. It's just there to demonstrate that you can come up with a coherent project proposal. I actually did something completely unrelated to the original proposal, and they were fine with that. So it ends up being 3 years of guaranteed funding to do whatever you want. The funding is also tied to you, not through a faculty member, so you really can do whatever you want (e.g. if you change supervisors or even universities, the grant follows you).

At the faculty level, there are also NSF CAREER awards, which are supposed to fund promising researchers, not specific projects. However at that point it's harder to dissociate the person and the research area: is it really possible to judge only the person unbiased by which area they work in and what they've been publishing? With the graduate fellowships it's a bit easier because, like with YC, applicants often have no real track record, so you're just judging college seniors' potential to do research, not judging their existing research.

> Here's a popular thought for HN: why not a YC-style academic funding, where you fund people, not ideas?

So the charistmatic scientists with shitty ideas get the most funding?

There is Peter Thiel's Breakout Labs: http://breakoutlabs.org/home.html

Part of me views this as a branch apart of a larger problem in our societies today, which seems to be with the allocation of capital in general, combined with the (mis)alignment of traditional institutions in general (the state/corporation/church) with the (idealized?) vision some people look back upon their effectiveness in the past.

I think this interview gives me insight as to what the void is (something I've been wondering myself as I feel kind of estranged from academia, but wanting to pursue pseudo-academic interests), and how its currently being filled (by individuals in an ad-hoc fashion, who have capital it seems), but leaves me wondering: who will be the actors in the future, where their incentives will align enough, for something to take off on a larger institutional level?

Really fantastic interview, thanks.

A bit of a read, but couldn't agree more, although I believe something of a similar title was on HN within the last 6 months that made the exact same points. If I didn't know better I'd bet that professor is an HN subscriber!

A significant element of scientific research is being the first to find something. It's the ego thing, all the way to standing up there in fancy dress some day to receive one's gong. Publishing is a time stamping service for the ego trip. Why rail against it?

That's a naive interpretation of state of things. Timestamp aspect can be simply fulfilled by putting your pdf online and let google (and wayback machine) index it. "Publishing" as understood in academia is very different. It's about publishing a paper in a "high impact" journal and has pretty much been devolved to a grade card for the working scientist.

Clickbait. Next.

Don't think so. The interview is long winded, but right around the mid-point the author get's to the point. The title isn't misleading.

The scientist interviewed is one of the most important biologist ever. He is worth listening to.

I was worried about that too, but it turns out to be a really interesting interview with a famous and old scientist whose watched the industry change.

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