You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by wellpast » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 2:08 AM UTC

deanCommie wrote: post #31

wellpast wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I don't get this narrative (and memes) that University code is clear and perfect and real life code is ugly dirty and hacky. My experience shows the opposite. Academics write code that only they need to understand. And the type of deep thinking required for academia lends itself nicely to fewer context switching, ie massively long classes and functions and procedural execution of steps. On the other hand, in real lif…

You misunderstood me. I wasn’t implying academics write clean code, just exactly what you’re saying usually it’s small & dirty code.

However Dijkstra, of course, always wrote impeccable code.

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

#62

Post by _emacsomancer_ » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 2:13 AM UTC

Fomite wrote: post #44

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.

While I would like to stop chasing grants as much as the next tenure track assistant professor, I don't think it's fair to characterize "the bulk" of academic work as chasing grants. If anything, it's responding to emails ;)

Emails and sitting in meetings (e.g. https://twitter.com/research_tim/status/1017506139137826819 ).

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

#63

Post by Fomite » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 2:39 AM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #56

Fomite wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's relatively easy to structure a grant program such that the rights are either shared, or can be licensed for a pretty nominal amount. There are other sectors of academic research that are quite good at this.

Nobody is saying you can't do it, however it's just rarely done. The default way is to not share/license, so that's what normally happens.

At my university, the default is actually a licensing agreement.

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

#64

Post by Fomite » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 2:43 AM UTC

PAClearner wrote: post #54

Fomite wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivial to structure grants (or indeed contracts) such that they have concrete deliverables, even for academic research.

I think the moment a 'grant' has concrete deliverables (to a private firm?) it ceases being a grant and starts being some kind of consulting. I think people try to do this around ucla pretty often i.e. (I give a professor money -they do the research- I keep the IP)- it is pretty frowned upon in that context. In ML and CS I think this is probably more kosher-Michael Kearns seems to have a pretty thriving consultancy.

My university, in contrast, is pushing industry engagement like this pretty hard. I happen to disagree with that approach, but it is a thing.

There is sort of a continuum between consulting and a research contract, admittedly, but I'll also note that I have government grants with deliverables. All it really means is that there's potentially interim products that need to be delivered, or that there's things that are less vague than papers and presentations that the agency/sponsor wants to see.

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

#65

Post by buth_lika » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 2:44 AM UTC

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.

The point of being a big company, not the point of running a research center.

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

#66

Post by AndrewKemendo » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 3:07 AM UTC

Fomite wrote: post #63

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is saying you can't do it, however it's just rarely done. The default way is to not share/license, so that's what normally happens.

At my university, the default is actually a licensing agreement.

Again, the point is that corporations do not have licensing agreements by default, whereas Universities do because their charter is to license usually through a technology transfer office.

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

#67

Post by grigjd3 » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 3:54 AM UTC

beambot wrote: post #30

mi_lk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe better to call it misguided.

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

#68

Post by grigjd3 » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 4:01 AM UTC

azhenley wrote: post #40

reality_czech wrote: post #39

Wow. I don't even know where to start on this one. My experience with academia is that everyone is scrambling to get grants and get published. Nobody ever asked questions about where the grants came from. A lot (probably even the majority at the time) was from the department of defense, and explicitly targetted to create weapons. Professors spent a huge amount of their time writing grant proposals. It's like pitching…

It seems like once a week I see comments like this. This was not my experience at all. With internships, I made over 60k a year in grad school. I worked on projects of my choice. I did not do a postdoc after graduating. I graduated from a small, unranked department and got a tenure-track position at an R1 university in a top 75 department.

I think this is fairly unique to CS. In physics, I had much the other experience.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 5:24 AM UTC

grigjd3 wrote: post #67

beambot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe better to call it misguided.

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by infinity0 » Sat, Aug 11, 2018, 6:09 AM UTC

TL;DR some professors are worried that their poorly-paid students doing grunt-level work that professors find beneath themselves to do, will realise quite quickly what the better deal is after working 80% for a company and 20% for a university.