the author needs to chime in a few years later when he fully understands how big science actually works:
- most work is done by untrained and inexperienced graduate students, good luck understanding/reproducing the process
- most faculty are little more than grant submitting machines trying to land a grant at all costs regardless of what actually interests them
- most research reviews processes are incredibly biased with countless people doing terrible jobs (the reviled "reviewer number 3") a single negative can sink a grant/paper acceptance
- most institutions are grossly monolithic and the rules and regulations are such that incompetent individuals can never be removed from any given position.
- most institutions are run as medieval lordships, with many smaller decision makers like deans, head of departments that have incredible influence on someone's career. It is great when the dictator is benevolent and unbearable if not.
Note how instead of paying a good salary the University choses to give out handouts (lower childcare fees, lower rentals) - because those in turn are paid via taxpayer grants. It hides the fact that they pay so little the people would qualify for foodstamps.
From my vantage point in academia they're definitely the norm. I'd say the only one that's mostly false is #2, but that could be the norm outside of my particular field (computer science).
I've seen fantastic research sunk and forced through resubmission time and again because of reviewers that either don't understand the work (and why would they? they have zero incentive) or have pre-existing biases based on their own work (and are called in as expert reviewers, effectively functioning as gatekeepers in a subfield).
Bad deans/department chairs can make life suck pretty hard. This is usually not the case because they (in my experience) don't have that much power, but over some things like hiring they can definitely be as capricious as they want. The real killer are the people outside the department, on IRBs, grant review boards, etc.. In a good research-focused school they can be great; in worse schools they can be tinpot despots.
Reproducibility in particular is insane. In computer science virtually no systems are released at the time of a paper submission, so papers describe things that may or may not exist. I'd say this is less due to untrained/inexperienced grad students and more due to a combination of constantly rushing to publish, unclear institutional regulations regarding releasing artifacts such as source, and inability to focus on cleaning things up for a release.
Academia has serious problems at its core, and in a lot of places, it's obvious that startups and industry is outpacing it. I think this comes down to an incentive problem -- when there's no incentive to build things that work, you tend to build broken things.
>Academia has serious problems at its core, and in a lot of places, it's obvious that startups and industry is outpacing it.
Let's be realistic here. How many startups actually do any sort of research at all? By my estimates, the number is very close to zero.
How many places in industry? You can cite the big labs, but the majority of science is still done by universities. While academia has serious problems, lets not fool ourselves into thinking that industry is any kind of substitute.
To some degree it depends what you consider research. I agree startups and "the industry" are 1) not necessarily publishing, and 2) not doing work in a way that matches the procedural standards of traditional research, but a lot of new ideas are being experimented.
Does git count as important research? Does CoffeeScript?
I'd agree that startups aren't doing much research in general, but larger companies (Microsoft, Google) have pretty impressive research organizations and do a lot of good work.
Apple does too, but unfortunately they lean towards keeping everything a trade secret rather than publishing (excluding their patents I suppose)
Sadly with 15 years in the academia spent in three different fields of science (at multiple universities in roles that support dozens of researchers) - I found it to be the norm. Time and again I am surprised just how bad it is and that with time it is getting worse, more people are writing more and more research papers that are worse than ever before.
It is a race with very strange incentives this is the world where a Nature paper makes your career but publishing nonsense has no negative effect (in fact there is a positive one, you now have more publications padding your resume). You have to go out of your way like manufacture data and get caught to experience any negative consequence. Doing sloppy work is the norm.
I wish it weren't true and it could be that the problem is my perception.
As for the comparison with the industry: you can always go and try to work for a different company that does things your way, but guess what, science is all the same. You'll get the same reviewers, same grant application process, same publication process, same ranking methods no matter where you work etc. You are stuck with the system and you can't reform it.
On the latter point, I haven't found that to be the case in CS. Sub-fields of CS work completely differently. Some are entirely based around journals, some conferences, some a hybrid. Some are very large, some small. Some are based mainly on theoretical work, others mainly empirical. The empirical ones differ completely on what empirical work looks like: does it mean systems and data, does it mean field work, does it mean psych-style user studies, does it mean longitudinal case studies? Some subfields value big budgets, big systems, and big data, others value mathematics, algorithms, and proofs. European, Asian, Australian, and US institutions also differ considerably inside each of those subfields.
> I'm not arguing that the things you describe never exist in academia, but they're the worst examples of when things go wrong. They're not the norm.
Unfortunately, they are the norm. There are places when this doesn't happen, or where you have the privilege of working with an extraordinary professor who manages to shield you from this.
That's rare, though. #3 isn't constant and #2 is not an entirely accurate description (or at least not that widespread), but by and large, the portrait is very accurate.
I miss the intellectual challenge of academia. I'm in a pretty high-end job and it's nothing compared to what I used to do. But the working conditions and the colleagues? Not in a million years. I'd seriously consider selling hamburgers than returning there, and I have worked on minimum wage before, I'm not talking out of my ass on that.
I could be lucky, but I have the opposite view. Some of academia is bullshit, but I genuinely like at least half my colleagues, and find the discussions with them interesting. I like some of what Silicon Valley produces, but the lifestyle and colleagues? No thanks. You've got the 60-hour crunch lifestyle on the one hand, the pagerduty.com lifestyle on the other hand, and the "everyone eats dinner at work at 7pm" lifestyle on the third hand. Plus a really bro-tastic atmosphere, and rampant jerks who are always trying to Disrupt The Very Concept Of Transport while quoting Ayn Rand. Sure, a bit of a stereotype, but some mixture of this actually does seem to be the norm. And people really do say "disrupt" a million times a day with a straight face. Maybe industry not in the SF Bay Area (where I lived a few years) could be more tolerable, though.
I'm sure I'd be a really bad fit in the Valley, too. Things aren't bro-tastic over here in Europe. More often than not, the pretentious idiots who are always trying to Disrupt The Very Concept Of Transport while quoting Ayn Rand are just given a Mac to play with and kept away from programming.
It's not so much that the random startup person would be a Republican (I'm not sure they even are?) as that many seem to be buzzword-slinging airheads who've never read anything but YA novels and self-help blogs. There are plenty of conservatives (in CS academia and elsewhere) who've read Hayek and the Chicago school and can make an intelligent and informed argument for that side of economics & politics. They might be wrong (they are), but they at least have an argument. The disrupt/Rand people remind me more of Christian fundamentalists, in that they just have some slogans and faith.
The physical rationale is fundamentally flawed. It assumes that all wind that is "caught" will enter on the big opening and all of it will leave on the small opening. But that is wrong, the smaller of the narrow region the less wind enters the entire construction.
The fundamental flaw of the rationale is that it confounds the concept of an engine to that of wind entering the tube. If you suck cold air into a compartment via a valve and provide heat inside it the air expands rapidly and must leave because it does not fit inside anymore. But note how we spend a lot of energy to expand the air and turn that internal energy into mechanical energy. There is absolutely no way that you could get air freely inside of a tube and have it "speed" up without actually pushing back on the air that is coming in.
Imagine that you close the narrow part completely. What happens? Will the construction blow up, of course not? Will the the pressure inside rise to a high value? Of course not. It will simply fill up with air and will experience as much pressure as the wall of the building is subjected to. Can you make the closure experience more pressure than any other part of the building? No that is not how pressure works, it is uniform inside the building.
Now imagine that you make a teeny tiny hole in the closed area. Will that lead to air leaking at insane speeds? No it will be barely noticeable, almost no air would be coming out. There is no reason whatsoever that the air would voluntarily go into a building than on it is own choose to leave on the tiny hole instead of leaving the same way where it got in (basically it is not getting in at all because the pressure inside is the same as outside)
Does it work, of course to some extent, take the area of the building that catches wind, multiply it with the speed of the wind and density of the air and you get the the mass and volume of air that is moving. Air is actually pretty light, you would be surprised how big the area needs to be.
- most work is done by untrained and inexperienced graduate students, good luck understanding/reproducing the process
- most faculty are little more than grant submitting machines trying to land a grant at all costs regardless of what actually interests them
- most research reviews processes are incredibly biased with countless people doing terrible jobs (the reviled "reviewer number 3") a single negative can sink a grant/paper acceptance
- most institutions are grossly monolithic and the rules and regulations are such that incompetent individuals can never be removed from any given position.
- most institutions are run as medieval lordships, with many smaller decision makers like deans, head of departments that have incredible influence on someone's career. It is great when the dictator is benevolent and unbearable if not.
Note how instead of paying a good salary the University choses to give out handouts (lower childcare fees, lower rentals) - because those in turn are paid via taxpayer grants. It hides the fact that they pay so little the people would qualify for foodstamps.