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You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

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Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#21

Post by vkou »

gweinberg wrote: post #19

Yeah, working 80% of your time in industry would be catastrophically destructive to most academics' intellectual freedom. You know what else would be catastrophic to their intellectual freedom? Working 20% of their time at a university.

Where exactly do I sign up to get paid to do research on topics that don't have immediate business application?

Pick your poison here. Either you're a servant to teaching, training grad students, chasing grants, and academic politics, or you only get to work on things that will make Facebook, Google, etc, money.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#23

Post by gwbas1c »

When I took computer science in 1999-2003, the best professors had rather significant industry experience. The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with a large computer program in their life.

I would have been thrilled if my freshman and sophomore computer science classes were taught by guest "professors" who had legitimate careers, and occasionally took the time to teach a class. I'm sure their feedback to my department would have been extremely valuable, because, at the time, every class was some professor's half-baked experiment on teaching computer science.

Now, almost 20 years later, I'd really enjoy the opportunity to take a school's almost complete syllabus, and teach it to students.

How does this apply to Artificial Intelligence? I'm sure there are lots of unwritten lessons from industry that haven't make their way back into academia.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#24

Post by throwaway_bob »

vkou wrote: post #21
gweinberg wrote: post #19

Yeah, working 80% of your time in industry would be catastrophically destructive to most academics' intellectual freedom. You know what else would be catastrophic to their intellectual freedom? Working 20% of their time at a university.

Where exactly do I sign up to get paid to do research on topics that don't have immediate business application? Pick your poison here. Either you're a servant to teaching, training grad students, chasing grants, and academic politics, or you only get to work on things that will make Facebook, Google, etc, money.

FAIR, DeepMind, Brain, MSR and many others all employ large numbers of people working on pure research with no immediate business application, and with at least as much freedom as their academic counterparts.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#25

Post by wellpast »

gwbas1c wrote: post #23

When I took computer science in 1999-2003, the best professors had rather significant industry experience. The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with a large computer program in their life. I would have been thrilled if my freshman and sophomore computer science classes were taught by guest "professors" who had legitimate careers, and occasionally took the time to teach a class. I'm…

> The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with a large computer program in their life.

Completely clueless? I think you mean: clueless about working as a practitioner on a large, messy code base. No?

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#26

Post by wvenable »

gwbas1c wrote: post #23

When I took computer science in 1999-2003, the best professors had rather significant industry experience. The worst professors were completely clueless because they never worked with a large computer program in their life. I would have been thrilled if my freshman and sophomore computer science classes were taught by guest "professors" who had legitimate careers, and occasionally took the time to teach a class. I'm…

My professor for senior level graphics was a prominent employee of the major visual effects company in town and he taught a fantastic course.

He was pushed out because the school wanted professors who would do research and he just wanted to work and teach classes in the evening.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#27

Post by rlkf »

stochastician wrote: post #18
bvc35 wrote: post #9

The bulk of academic work is chasing grants, not "curiosity driven research". If universities want professors not to leave in droves to tech companies that will consistently give them funding and cut away the bullshit that eats up the majority of a professor's time, they should try competing, rather than bemoaning that professors are no longer following the sacred path of academic asceticism.

I do not think this is what the piece is arguing. Rather, the concern is that by creating these 80/20 splits, the core values of the university are compromised. There's nothing a priori wrong with industrial research, it's this attempted hybrid that's problematic. Hence the title, "you cannot serve two masters". Quoting the piece, "Part of the point of being a big company is to control your environment by crushing, c…

If BigCompany expects its research center to crush inconvenient innovations, they're not really running a research center, they're just calling it that because they like the titles.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#28

Post by hnbroseph »

rlkf wrote: post #27
stochastician wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think this is what the piece is arguing. Rather, the concern is that by creating these 80/20 splits, the core values of the university are compromised. There's nothing a priori wrong with industrial research, it's this attempted hybrid that's problematic. Hence the title, "you cannot serve two masters". Quoting the piece, "Part of the point of being a big company is to control your environment by crushing, c…

If BigCompany expects its research center to crush inconvenient innovations, they're not really running a research center, they're just calling it that because they like the titles.

i read "inconvenient" as "competing". if your r&d can lead to a few choice patents (or you "just" buy them) you can sometimes hamstring competition or get little graft by leeching off competitor's developments.

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#29

Post by [deleted] »

jjaredsimpson wrote: post #5

Article says two masters which implicitly assumes industry would be some new master pulling professors in some new direction. But right now professors have multiple masters. Undergrads, grads, administrations, grants/funding, etc. The idea that the previous master was "curiosity driven research" and now it will be "shareholders" is an exaggeration. I could cynically say the previous master was "least publishable unit…

[deleted]

Re: You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation

#30

Post by beambot »

mi_lk wrote: post #4
wanderfowl wrote: post #2

Just a quick note: 'Dual Affiliation' is being used here differently than in most academic contexts, so the headline's a bit odd. Normally, it means having a joint appointment in two academic departments (e.g. Linguistics and Cognitive Science at State U, or in the Department of Linguistics at State U, with an appointment at the Head-and-Neck surgery program at the local med school). This is a well-known and common p…

Dual affiliation meaning industry/academic split is unambiguous here since that's the word Facebook AI Research choose to use [1][2] and the authors are explicitly responding to Facebook's model. [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-yann-lecun-dual-aff... [2]: https://www.facebook.com/schrep/posts/10156638732909443

Facebook's reappropriation of a well-understood term in academia doesn't mean it's not ambiguous... If anything, it's disingenuous.
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