141–150 of 389 posts
> I’m going to personally donate $10 million Statements like this always turn me off. I guess it's because it breaks the illusion that Sam and everyone else at YC are normal people like most of us. They're not. They're INSANELY wealthy by any reasonable standard.
This thread [0] from couple of days back on Alan Kay's views on recreating Xerox PARC seems relevant. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10322929
We talked to Alan at great lengths in the process of putting this together. He is the most insightful person I've ever met on how to structure an organization for great research.
I love this idea. Not sure if this is driving your thinking but this would open a desperately needed alternative to Academia if you can scale this idea as successfully as you've scaled startups. I've watched my genius brother-in-law (PhD Materials Science & Chemistry / Biomimicry) be consumed by a very broken UC system over the past decade. Started with an exceptionally bright, curious, and inventive man who created…
The academic community is fraught with politics, mismanagement, and inefficiency. Researchers are driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to expand the frontiers of human knowledge.
Impact is currently measured by citation pagerank, and broader impact is undervalued. Outreach efforts (blogging, education) are consistently stigmatized [1]. This needs to change.
I would love to see more transparency and accountability in research. I've seen Nature papers continue to be cited despite completely wrong conclusions (the 'erratum' was published as a separate paper in PRL). The arXiv was a great first step at opening up access to papers, but the large publishers continue to hold cartel-levels of control over scientific knowledge.
I'm super excited about YC research. Would love to see a quantum computation division!
[1] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/03/30/...
> I’m going to personally donate $10 million Statements like this always turn me off. I guess it's because it breaks the illusion that Sam and everyone else at YC are normal people like most of us. They're not. They're INSANELY wealthy by any reasonable standard.
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