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Academics, we need to talk

matt-welsh.blogspot.com

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Re: Academics, we need to talk

#101

Post by hackbinary »

PaulHoule wrote: post #94
hackbinary wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting kind of sick of this tactic, where this fake concession is made before going on about how academia isn't designed well enough to deliver to industry. This +1, er +1,000,000. I would firmly state that academia by definition is not supposed to 'deliver to industry', and not even to society. The whole point of academia is to give the very smartest people (whatever that means) the freedom to explore ideas, so…

There is an attitude of entitlement here. Students spend their money and time to learn something and frequently they get worked like a racehorse and nobody cares about if what they learn is transferable after the academic system no longer needs them. If you are not going to be relevant to society the only thing I can do is vote for somebody who is going to cut your research budget.

Do you benifet from the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo Galilei?

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#102

Post by effie »

adenadel wrote: post #90
effie wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is absurd model for evaluation of people that solves only one problem: how to make evaluation easy for the administrators and soft on researchers. We should rather find and implement a model that leads to best research results possible. I think one such model would be this: give tax money only to people whose results of their last work have proven to be beneficial to society (for other people outside their interes…

I really think you have it backwards on basic and speculative research to lose financing from the public. How would you propose "proving that results are beneficial to society"? And how is this different from the current funding proposal process? Committees that fund proposals certainly look at the success of prior research by the group. I don't think anyone would disagree with you when you say "We should rather find…

Researcher with practical results can provide evidence of usefulness of his results to society and discuss his work and result with his money-guarding superiors who are not researchers themselves. Superiors take some time to confer and decide whether and how much he gets.

Basic research cannot be so easily evaluated, often it is decades, sometimes centuries before the practical use is found, if ever. Basic research, by its definition, has unclear significance for anything except researcher's curiosity and intellectual fulfillment. The results in the form of a paper are often too remote from the needs of society and often so intellectually involved nobody except few people competent in the field can judge whether the work is even meaningful, far from judging its usefulness.

The current evaluation process for basic research is that grant committees don't even try to evaluate the usefulness of the research requestors have done. They use superficial indicators like existing publication score, academic rank and history of the requestors, relation of the work to other high-profile trending topics, association with popular research groups and political considerations.

That's why I think people who want to do basic research should not be funded by their colleagues in field directly from tax money. It's too opaque and ridden with corruption.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#104

Post by hackbinary »

PaulHoule wrote: post #94
hackbinary wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting kind of sick of this tactic, where this fake concession is made before going on about how academia isn't designed well enough to deliver to industry. This +1, er +1,000,000. I would firmly state that academia by definition is not supposed to 'deliver to industry', and not even to society. The whole point of academia is to give the very smartest people (whatever that means) the freedom to explore ideas, so…

There is an attitude of entitlement here. Students spend their money and time to learn something and frequently they get worked like a racehorse and nobody cares about if what they learn is transferable after the academic system no longer needs them. If you are not going to be relevant to society the only thing I can do is vote for somebody who is going to cut your research budget.

Some would say that we should divide universities up into more separate institutions for Arts, Philosophy, Fine Arts, Natural Sciences, Applied Science, Math, Social Sciences, Business, Law, Medicine (or is that a Science?) and others, but the point of universities is be places of knowledge, and to help foster cross pollination between the disciplines. The point of independent research is to be unfettered by government, business, and indeed wider society as a whole.

Government and business and society should not be fettering independent research, just the same as they should not be interfering with law courts. The point of independent research is for the independent researchers to have the freedom to follow their research even though it might not be popular with the local Wood Pulp mill pumping dioxins into the local river, and that is pollution is going to cause cancer. This research may not be popular with many in the community because it will impact their jobs. This research may not be popular with the government, and elected officials because it will affect their tax receipts and donations. This research my not be popular with you because it is going to put your family out jobs, but it is important research, we can ultimately make informed decisions.

That is the point of research, information, and knowledge--so we can make informed and reasoned decisions.

I just can not believe the attitude and entitlement of some who think that just because they pay tax they think everything that is not obviously useful to themselves is useless.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#105

Post by nickpsecurity »

samth wrote: post #92
nickpsecurity wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and samth seem to be missing the point: academic research is often built using methods that will ensure no real-world success while aiming to achieve real-world success. Factoring in real-world constraints, best practices, and existing work-arounds will let academics achieve better results on average. Baseline of practicality goes up. And again, these are all academic projects that aim at being practical. The poi…

I'm glad you like Racket, but it's really not the case that what we need is to spend time in a Google product group to make Racket better.

Nobody said you did. He suggested several possibilities. One was working in industry to understand real-world development, deployment, or support needs. Another suggestion is considering real-world issues. That's main one as the other merely supports it.

An example would be putting Racket to use on industrial scale projects with groups of programmers from different backgrounds. These would discover any pain points of language/tooling plus opportunities for improvement. Doesn't have to be Google: just practical, diverse, and outside Racket's normal sphere.

The reason I used Racket as an example is that they already do some of that at least in their forums. Maybe some commercial sector but I lack data on that. They've evolved to be constantly more useful for both academic and practical stuff through such feedback.

If you doubt that or that they're purely academic in a bubble, then feel free to share why. You may have data I dont have but Ive seen them adapt based on external feedback and usefulness in specific cases. Not a Racket user or insider, though.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#106

Post by hackbinary »

hackbinary wrote: post #96
mdwelsh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the author of the original blog post.) Ad hominem attacks aside, I do think it's a big deal if a bunch of academics are spending time working on the wrong things, if for no better reason than maximizing efficiency: Don't forget that most academic research is funded by the government. Since I also happen to help decide which research proposals Google funds, I also care that academics are well-aligned with the pro…

I also care that academics are well-aligned with the problems we care about. That is not the point of academia, and indeed not the point of why academics are offered tenure with their institutions. Please consider Galileo and Copernicus and the Church of the 15th and 16th centuries. Please consider history. Google as a business may care about research being aligned with its business, or what 'society' or certain segm…

In other words, academic research is a punt in the dark. Much of it will not yield all that much, but some of it will.

It is kind of similar to what YC and VC's do: give a little bit of funding to a small number of businesses, but hope a (very) small number will pay off big.

Academia is a small investment to a number of ideas, with the hopes of big pay-offs in a very small number. The technology behind the Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in the early nineties. You might not think that funding in high energy and particle physics would be worthwhile, but yet something completely different and revolutionary for all of humanity came out of it.

We just do not know where these revolutionary ideas come from, but what we do know is that they tend to come from some of the very brightest people.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#107

Post by s986s »

hackbinary wrote: post #104
PaulHoule wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an attitude of entitlement here. Students spend their money and time to learn something and frequently they get worked like a racehorse and nobody cares about if what they learn is transferable after the academic system no longer needs them. If you are not going to be relevant to society the only thing I can do is vote for somebody who is going to cut your research budget.

Some would say that we should divide universities up into more separate institutions for Arts, Philosophy, Fine Arts, Natural Sciences, Applied Science, Math, Social Sciences, Business, Law, Medicine (or is that a Science?) and others, but the point of universities is be places of knowledge, and to help foster cross pollination between the disciplines. The point of independent research is to be unfettered by governme…

Honestly, that makes more sense which is why PRIVATE industries should create schools inorder to foster educatin relevent to them.

Having organized education that is relevent to the real world is an exellent idea. However, reforming schools is not the appropriate approach. We live in a capitalist society, if they dont like whats around, they should compete. Im confident people are more than willing to pay 20k a year for a guarenteed job. Code boot camps charge that much for inadequate preparation and people are still clamboring to get in there.

Edit: i agree with you, im just so passionate right now. I need to relax

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#108

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

skywhopper wrote: post #3

> I know this sounds like a waste of time because you probably won't get a paper out of it It's unfortunate that a "lessons learned" paper summarizing a sabbatical in industry doing customer-facing work would not be publishable. Surely it's far more useful to other academics than most papers. It'd definitely be more broadly relevant. My wife is a professor in a practical field and I'm always sad to hear what counts a…

People often misunderstand what it means to get a paper published. Nobody publishes a paper to "disseminate their work." You can do that perfectly well by making a blog post or posting on arXiv. A published paper is a badge recognizing your contribution to the scientific community. If the lessons I learned from my summer exploits at FooCorp do not constitute a significant scientific discovery, then they're not publishable, and justly so.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#109

Post by Gatsky »

forgottenpass wrote: post #9

Now, I don't think all academic research has to be relevant to industry. I'm getting kind of sick of this tactic, where this fake concession is made before going on about how academia isn't designed well enough to deliver to industry. If authors of articles like this didn't care about the efficiency of academia to deliver them research, what's the big deal if there are a bunch of people somewhere running around in ci…

Look, this blog post contains good advice for academics. You seem to be overreacting quite severely. The truth is that the utopia where anyone can work on interesting problems is long gone or rather never really existed (http://amapress.gen.cam.ac.uk/?p=1537). Academia produces a massive oversupply of academics, and there isn't the capacity to fund them all. Funding bodies in general are talking more and more about 'impact' as a deliverable. The original post is just trying to say don't ruin your chances to get funding with faulty thinking about industry applications.

You can argue, quite rightly perhaps, that focusing on impact/industry applications is a bad idea, and that we will miss out on important epochal discoveries, but that is a problem with society, not the author of the blog post.

Re: Academics, we need to talk

#110

Post by dgacmu »

wfo wrote: post #45

If you're doing industry-relevant research and you're in academia, leave. Your work can be supported by corporate profits because it is in essence for corporate profit. Get a job in industry, make more money, and make room for academics who want to do honest-to-god academics and work on theory or fundamental research. Or who want to do research relevant to improving society, not improving profit margins. There aren't…

Oh, my toosh, no. I don't agree with everything Matt said, but on this, you're totally off. I try pretty hard to do research that is (a) potentially industry-relevant (key word: potentially); and that (b) industry won't do for various reasons. Thus far, it's seemed to work pretty well. Using my favorite example of the week, take some of our work on cuckoo hashing -- it's contributed quite a bit to the literature of how to implement fast cuckoo hashes, contributed a new and fairly intriguing data structure for approximate set membership, and produced a design that I know to be in use in two Very Large Companies(tm).

The companies wouldn't have done this work, at least outside of their research labs, because the solution's theory is too far from the need of any one problem. But the result -- a more memory-efficient hash table design -- turns out to be broadly useful.

And yes, I do consider this to be "industry-relevant" research. I'm not going to solve their problems for them -- but there can be great synergies between industry and academia for having broad impact through adoption.

(full disclosure: I'm an academic on sabbatical at Google for the year. It's likely I'm a little biased in my belief that both have value. But this isn't a bias unique to me; systems as a general area is close to industry, and most of my colleagues rotate in and out of industry periodically via sabbaticals or startups.)

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