1. The extent to which the academic mindset is stuck in pre-internet ways of doing things. The whole process of advancing a career by publishing papers reviewed by a very small number of "peers" was established in the seventeenth century and was an efficient way of filtering out good ideas from bad ones given the technological constraints of the day. Needless to say, many of those constraints no longer apply. There is nothing wrong with peer review. Indeed, it is essential. But, in the age of the internet, there is a lot wrong with peer review conducted by a small handful of people selected by a journal publisher. The whole idea of a journal should be obsolete.

2. The extent to which traditional academia has managed to maintain its privileged role in society despite contributing less and less actual value. A tenured professor is still a highly respected position despite the fact that the actual job of being a professor has a lot more to do with politics than it does with academics. Teaching, which is supposed to be one of the core businesses of the academy, is actively frowned upon. Nothing destroys an academic career faster than putting a lot of effort into being an effective teacher.

Some fascinating sociology there. Someone should do a study. But no one will because it won't advance their career.

What is the basis for these strange claims, how is it priviliged if my University proffesor makes less than some of his graduates with 3 years of experience?

Whu do you think they contribute less, did physicists start slacking? What statistics demonstrates this?

The LHC cost €7.5 billion, and that's the largest particle physics project ever. I have to admit that's noticeably more than I have in my pocket at the moment, so in a sense it's "a huge budget", but it's only slightly more than the US$5.6 billion spent on the Petronas Towers, which is a single office building in Kuala Lumpur. Well, two office buildings.

You know what has a huger budget? Sweet potatoes. The yearly sweet potato market is US$43 billion. That's enough to build almost six Large Hadron Colliders per year.

So by that measure particle physicists have about 1% of the societal privilege that sweet potatoes do.

(And that despite CERN, where the LHC is, having invented the WWW.)

I mean I know that from inside NASA or Google it looks like Ph.D.s run the world and professors wield godlike power. But actually, in the context of world society, academia has a fairly small role.

Particle physicists didn't raise the money for the LHC by selling a product on the open market, they raised by lying to politicians, who in turn extracted the money from taxpayers. If someone without societal privilege (like Anna Sorokin for example) had done that they would be put in jail. Instead the physicists got tenure despite having delivered essentially nothing of value. That is societal privilege.

Are we gonna be moving goalposts all day? First it was not the pay, you said it was how much inflience they have over society, and that influence was measured in a dollar amount. Now it's the 'lying' and 'collective belief'. What's next, the holy spirit graces them with better afterlife?

> What matters is that the sweet potato market is a market.. choose to buy sweet potatoes of their own free will

Who said it matters? I voted of my own free will, and my vote funded the LHC. Is my free will in the form of voting less legitimate than my free will the form of money?

In the same post you are saying that privilidge isn't about money, but you are also implying that you have no free will without money?

What about markets where no person ever bought anything of their own free will, all corporation to corporations markets? For example there is a market for planet destroying coal, for clothes and rare-earth minerals produced with slave labour, etc. Do those industries have more privilidge than academia does?

Fine, let's compare it to something that isn't a market -> recommendations of the Doctors and the CDC, or the Catholic Church, or the spending on the road network, or the military. All of them have bigger budgets. There is no way that this logic works.

This entire series of posts is clearly clutching at straws. Real privilidge is measurable - Men used to make more money for the same job, black people were less likely to get the job, they died younger, etc.

Yes, because your vote spent other people's money, not your own.

> This entire series of posts is clearly clutching at straws. Real privilege is measurable - Men used to make more money for the same job, black people were less likely to get the job, they died younger, etc.

College graduates make more money for the same job, are more likely to get the job, and they die older. For college professors this is even more true, at least if we're talking about former professors going into industry in the first two cases.

So clearly by your definition traditional academia does have significant privilege. Where I differ from Ron is that I think it's well-earned and not very large in absolute terms.

It's our money, I pay taxes too, significantly more than average. So you don't believe in democracy?

If half the population has net worth of rougly zero, does that part of the population not have legitimate free will?

In such a society, what stops the half that is wealthy from becoming exploitative towards the poor, putting in place policies that make sure the poor stay poor. What if they take student loans furhter and make the kids start their life with a loan for mandatory schooling, from primacy school onwards. Making real estate so expensive that the only way majority can have housing is for it to be provided by the company in company towns, and if you quit your job you loose roof over your head. And making healthcare so expensive that it can also be only provided by your employer, and if you loose your job with a chronic health condition you are basically sentenced to die. oh, wait, we have already done that bit.

What stops the wealthy part from turning it into Feudalism version 2 - there are lords, there are some 'free merchants' like white collar proffeshional, and then there are the serfs?

No, not really. It's better at preventing the worst harms of government than the alternatives that have so far been tried, such as feudalism ("aristocracy"), dictatorship, and especially colonialism, but democracy still regularly perpetrates atrocities and steals from the poor to enrich the rich. Hopefully we can find a better form of social organization soon, one that doesn't offer the ruthless and ambitious quite so much leeway to enrich themselves by harming others.

I, too, condemn the strawman the rest of your comment rightly condemns, which as far as I know consists of policies that nobody has ever advocated.

Within the broad class of democratic societies, those that have stronger protection for private property and tighter limits on government power are the ones that are best at protecting the poor from the depredations of the rich and otherwise privileged.

Sometimes it has been said that democracy consists of two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner, but Trump's election demonstrates the truth is even worse: they apparently voted to eat library paste and boiled leather.

Surely you wouldn't expect anyone to openly advocate 'let's make housing unaffordable', and yet we are well on our way to making it unaffordable.

Also no-one ever advocated 'let's allow Russian oligarhs to buy UK realestate with blood money, anonymously, inflate real estate prices and introduce strong libel laws to protect them' and yet that's exactly what happened, and even the financial times got sued multiple times for reporting on the issue.

https://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/45.php

(And if not, well, that's the trouble with democracy...)

Hear hear.

Got any suggestions?

All this stuff is, sociologically speaking, "basic research". When you start out on basic research you don't know what the results will be.

(But isn't it unethical to do experiments on humans? No, whatever you do in the world without knowing the full consequences amounts to "experiments on humans", and the question is whether you do it well or badly.)

By the way, would you mind making an effort to answer my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31276333?

> Societal privilege is not measured in terms of the net income of the people who hold the privilege, it is measured in the influence those people have over the workings of society.

"The dollar amount is not what matters" seems to me to be entirely consistent with that.

Coca-Cola makes US$37 billion a year (almost five LHCs, thus 50 times the average annual budget during the LHC's construction) by making people obese with flavored sugar water. Some of this involves lying, but much of it is just emotional manipulation; vanishingly few of its customers receive anything of value. So far none of its executives have been imprisoned as a result.

(Petronas Towers wasn't funded by voluntary contributions, either. Petronas has a state monopoly on oil and gas extraction.)

I agree that it would be better to fund basic research like the LHC from voluntary contributions. (I think dominant assurance contracts are a promising attack on that problem, but I don't know if they will succeed.) But if you take traditional academia and taxation as a package deal, I think most people would prefer to live in a world with the 15 recent enormous contributions to society by traditional academia I listed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31275875, including modern agriculture, solar energy, and Linux, than in a society without them and without taxation.

These are public goods, and it's a well-known result in economics that markets underprovide public goods; the equilibrium result is that they almost don't provide them at all.

Even within the realm of taxation, academic research is hardly the hot spot. Most countries spend almost no tax money on academia. Even in the US, whose federal budget is US$6600B, NIH gets US$42B (0.7%), Pell grants get US$35B (0.5%), NASA gets US$23B (0.5%), NSF gets US$8.3 billion (0.1%, which includes basically the entire particle physics budget), and DARPA gets US$3.4B (0.05%). If you wanted to reduce the US tax burden, most taxpayers wouldn't even notice if you reduced the federal budget by this 1.9%. The rest of the federal budget is literally fifty times as big.

The claims about confirming or ruling out supersymmetry.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96VECuUXbEs particularly starting at the 6:20 mark (but the whole thing is well worth watching).

Other proffeshions that command huge budgets include Architects and bricklayers - we spend 2 trillion on construction in a single year, that's more than all spending on Physics for all of recording history combined. Or doctors, city planners, bankers, etc.

I don't know what beef you have with themm but at least run this mental experiment: Imagine a girl brings her boyfriend over for dinner, and he tells them her parents he a physicist working on the most cutting edge research. Is their first throught going to be 'oh, that's great, if they get married she will live a life of privilidge?'. If the parents had to advise between him and a heart surgeon, or a senior manager at a bank, a succefull lawyer, a developer at google - what do you think it will be?

Bottomn line is this: when pressed on privilidge, you can't come up with anything measurable where physicists will be even be in the top 10, because such a metric does not exist. it's just some impression you formed that you are trying to justify.

Societal privilege manifests itself in all sorts of ways both big and small, but the ultimate measure of it is in the difference between how people are treated for doing the exact same thing depending on whether they have it or not.

It's like what we did in the dark ages, but in reverse?

The World Wide Web on which you posted your comment was invented at a particle physics lab 33 years ago.

For example: the military industrial complex commands huge budgets despite having produced nothing of value for the last 50 years. It commands these huge budgets because generals, senators, and admirals have societal privilege. When a general, senator, and CEO say that society should write a check for billions of euros to build the F-35 or blow up some children, society does it. That is societal privilege.

I think some Ukrainians using javelin anti tank missiles would like to have a word with you…

Given how the academic careers are structured, I do think "privilege" is a very bad word to use here. It's no more of a privilege than working most of your time documenting why you should get a promotion on Google like people were discussing yesterday. But it's one of the many very real problems academia has nowadays.

There are 4,000 colleges and universities in the US. At the VAST majority of those institutions -- perhaps 80% -- professors spend 40 hours per week teaching courses. They teach 3 university courses per semester with 40-400 students per course, with the lower enrollment courses requiring a pretty heavy lift per student (lots of office hours, labor-intensive grading of proofs or long papers or large programs, etc). That's 40 hours of work, sometimes more.

Hacker news massively over-estimates the number of "elite R1 faculty" and under-estimates the number of faculty who are essentially just college teachers.

There are many careers that produce not just zero, but negative value to society, and academia is nowhere near the top of that list.

Also, have you seen what professors have to fill out to get a grant to fund their research?

I'm not aware of almost anyone except for academics that prioritize maximizing societal good. I guess in addition to teachers, firefighters and librarians as well.

Certainly I doubt anyone on this board does that.

Teachers so teach, firefighters do fight fires when those appear, and librarians do organize books. They don't get to not pay attention to those tasks and still be successful.

The comment was "worry about bringing the most value to society". And you think that's what pretty much anyone does? Finance, ad-tech, real-estate flippers, and numerous others may not even add any value. Others are all about internalizing profit and externalizing costs. At the very least, "bringing value so society" is a tertiary goal for most people.

I choose a few people who could be making more doing something else. I'm sure, some people who work at nonprofits could also make more in a different field. But those are the only people I've seen worry about bringing value to society.

Know anyone who got an advertised rate on a mortgage to buy a freshly renovated home?

The fun fact about valuable things is that people often pay for them with money. Where money changes hands there's value changing hands.

No. I know people who got an advertised rate to buy a non-recently-renovated home (including one who decided to take a year-ish sabbatical to totally rebuild and repair the house herself as a life-goal). Others either didn't renovate the old style or renovated it the way they wanted.

I take that back. I do know at least one person who bought a freshly renovated home out of foreclosure auction. But that was because of the price, not the renovations.

But again, you're conflating "add any value" to "worry about adding the most value to society"

Good point.

"The most" implies that there's some objective total ordering. Subjectively, I think people are guided by their subjectively personal notions of "adding value" and "society".

For example, if you looked at my behavior from the outside, I am not adding the most value to society in your metric. But I swear that I am a rational, optimizing agent in my own goofy metric. :)

Tenure and pensions have significant off-book value. There is also social capital to consider

My wife is a professor. I can assure you that her pension options were not good.

Because there are other metrics for respect (and privilege) than simply the salary one makes.

For example: the "privilege" of being able to, at least in theory, devote one's skills and brain power to a higher purpose (curing cancer, say). Or at least to what one actually wants to do. Rather than the basically random stuff (and sometimes dark patterns) that most industrial types have to devote their intellectual resources to.

This wishishy-washy stuff about purpose, maybe you have it all wrong? Maybe the people who can make a career out of damaging mental health of kids through dark patterns are the real priviliged group.

If it’s the same for their graduates but they make 3x, then what forces are keeping them there?

For some it’s idealism - but few tenured professors are idealists in my experience.

Second, most people aren't rational economic actors and even those who are have a myriad of objective functions.

Some common reasons people stay when they could get much higher paying and lower stress jobs:

1. Immigration.

2. Work life balance. Not unique to academia, btw. I know ex-FAANG SWEs who make $70K/yr because they can get the job done in one or two days a week from a van and want to spend most of their life in the mountains.

3. Immigration.

4. Some people actually enjoy teaching and view it as a life calling.

5. Immigration.

6. Ageism. A 50 year old who spent 20 years in academia is going to have a hard time getting back into industry.

Also, the multiple is closer to 10x for strong faculty candidates if we're talking about teaching-focused roles. A lower-tier college/university (non phd granting) will offer 60K - 80K for a full-time faculty position. A PhD with 5-10 years of industry experience will make >500K if they are maximizing for income.

Also gives you access to advisory positions (which pay well, and often in equity), and advantage to recruit very talented people into your own startup.

Others may enjoy the privilege of ending up on administrative committees, adding to their job security (eg, post retirement).

Although this is a specific problem with degree mills not representative of all schools.

Eh I’ve seen idiots with a 4 year degree from a state school.

The singling out of state school graduates in that missive did seem rather strange (and contrary to observation).

If the privilidge was in academia, they would have stayed where the privilidge is

> A tenured professor is still a highly respected position despite the fact that the actual job of being a professor has a lot more to do with politics than it does with academics

It seems to me that given your 2 above statements you essentially want to abolish journals and peer review in order to be able to give researchers the ability to sponsor, parlay and generally use their social skills to push a paper out. You mention the internet so it's granted that as soon as somebody discovers that the more rabid followers one has, the better it is for the papers one is pushing...it becomes an arms race

All of the above is in order to essentially enable researchers to do what you accuse professors of doing (using politics to get ahead without or with little contribution).

I think the Right Answer would look something like Page Rank, except with reviewers being ranked. Anyone can review, but the relative weight of each review is biased according to that reviewer's reputation, which in turn is based on the collective value of the reviews they have received. There would still be a role for some kind of governing body, but its function would be to enforce continuity of identity and the binding of identity to publications. So something like Arxiv, but with a vetting process to insure that a paper or review submitted by an author really was written by that author, and to prevent one person from publishing with multiple identities.

And we have some modestly successful sites that kind-of do what you're saying (Faculty of 1000: specifically F1000 Research).

Ask.com used HITS which was published in 99.

Most people, especially outside of academia, think that the problems with the peer review process are something more "philosophical" than they are, like the old establishment not wanting the new generation of physicists to present and support a new "Standard Model". But the real problems are more mundane, and consist of thousands of people wasting time and energy following processes that are, for the most part, crazy.

Whatever replaces the current system ought to have an output that is more like, "Lots of people who have published things that lots of people think are worthy of note think that this paper is worthy of note."

Someone could be very good at reviewing papers but not particularly skilled at original research, or vice versa. They're different skill sets.

Also, giving the most cited authors the most power would have a homogenizing effect: the best way to get ahead would then be to push things that support the viewpoints of those currently at the top of the field.

(I agree that something needs to change; I'm better at critiquing ideas than generating my own...)

https://www.atmospheric-chemistry-and-physics.net/

E.g. we might view different close people as trustworthy or judge their research with different value, which in turn have their subjective judgement.

That subjective judgement is inherent in the scientific method and allows different opinions to compete until the truth emerges.

I think that the web of trust should reflect that and give you a personalized score for each paper based on a trust network between public keys.

The current publication system is indeed broken as it stands.

You're replacing peer review with a social media following. A large social media following is absolutely something you can buy.

Which, by the way, has already happened. The easiest way to get an R1 job is to build a large twitter following. Getting a top 5 CS position without at least a few thousand twitter followers is basically impossible these days. High-prestige academia is just a high-brow social media influencer these days.

None of this is meant as a defense of the old system, btw.

E.g. publishing a paper that gets positive reviews gives you some form of trust token that you can spend on other papers in a positive review.

Ideally there is no single global metric for trust, but trust is computed relatively based on who you trust, so that everybody gets a personalized quality and relevance score for each paper.

In a way you could also personalise your definition of trust.

E.g. do you want to rank papers highly that have positive reviews by a handfull of highly trustwothy individuals, or do you trust papers that have many positive reviews.

We should stop worrying about popularity contests (citation counts, prestige-signalling conference committees/paper venues, etc.).

When we decide whether to retain an academic as a visiting scientist, consultant, etc., I am always the voice in the room encouraging folks to disregard everything except for one question: after having read 3 or 4 of this person's most relevant papers, do we think they can help us with the specific problems we face?

When I sit on grant review committees I ignore all the academic prestige shit and ask: is this a real 10-15-30 year problem for a field, does that field matter to the funding agency's objectives, and does the description of the plan of attack have a good chance of success? I don't need to evaluate popularity contests to answer those questions.

Popularity contests are low-effort short-cuts for the low-brow scientist/program manager. Best to ignore them if you have real problems and need real solutions.

I fear that the scientific community is not mature enough to do this properly and truthfully without some gamification though sadly, and funding commitees will want some kind of metric for "non-technical" people.

But maybe the only solution is to pass out funding based on random lottery tickets.

In the USA, publishing a large number of low-quality papers is at best unhelpful for getting grants. It's probably (very!) harmful.

> funding commitees will want some kind of metric for "non-technical" people.

The stakeholders within funding agencies are always technical. The external stakeholders -- congressional staff and corporate executives -- could not care less about citations/paper counts.

Based on your view of how these things work, I'm a bit curious about your background here. Have you sat on a funding committee for a public funding agency? Do you know the names of any program directors? Have you served on an academic grant review committee for your employer? If so, I'm really curious to know what field you're in, since things appear to work quite differently there.

If this were true, we would not have snake oil salesmen, pyramid scheme leaders, drug lords or youtube celebrities

You just want to turn academics into yet another category of celebrities that must game social media. We have enough of that shit

We need those games to be transparent at least.

And a web of trust is not the same as social media.

And please show me where do we have a functioning web of trust

If you are blind to this then you are either in a very sheltered environment or you're part of the problem.

We haven't build such a system yet, which is exactly the critique OP had.

The broken funding process based on citation count and journal impact deincentivizes building and participating in such a system.

It's all self enforcing with the publishers reaping in billions.

It took years till european academia finally started to rebell against elsevier, and even now open access gets sabotaged by golden path open access publishing.

But you criticism is based on a fantastical benchmark that was never seen in practice

OpenPGP for example.

Send an email signed with openPGP to your bank, can they validate your signature?

Have you ever tried to get an OpenPGP key to sign your email, do you know what a nightmare it is? Because i have, and I couldn't, I have also built kubernetes clusters from scratch, and it's easier.

Okay, say you got a key, send it to your IT department, what % of IT proffeshionals can use OpenPGP, 2%? What % of 'normal people' can use it, 0%?

That is your great success, 0-2%.

That's way worse than the system academia has now, it might be crap, but its not 98% crap

I just outlined how no-one is using it and no-one is capable of using it.

What is the metric and benchmark of success you are using where OpenPGP with it's 0% adoption is successfull, but the way academia works currently is not successfull?

Elon Musk hyperloop whitepaper pipedream...he made it in one night, probably on heavy drugs. It got press for 8 years, still getting press.

A bastardised version of Hyperloop got hundreds of millions in public funding in Las Vegas and Los Angeles for what essentially amounts to a large underground car garage with skeets. The company selling this bastardised version just raised 700M in equity.

"infeasible".

When you open the floodgates of the court of public opinion...it becomes the game of the person who screams the loudest and is able to con people with the most confidence or has the loudest megaphone.

History has shown us time and time again that the best governance system is a bunch of elder statesmen who are terrified of being judged harshly by their peers long after they are gone.

For example people still say about Newton that his track record wasn't immaculate because he wasted time looking for hidden messages in the Bible or trying to turn bronze into gold.

Same for Einstein, his track record isn't immaculate because he was wrong on quantum-mechanics.

Elder statesmen who dream of having the track record of a Pythagoras, that's the perfect governance system, that just requires finding them, doesn't require crypto-tokens or blockchain or any other flavor du jour tech.

Those elders have a hard time steering the ship in the storm of technological change. Faced with that, at best, they will most likely try avoid implementing anything radical (due to their bias for what's familiar to them) and will instead attempt to integrate the new with minimal change to existing system (which makes sense as a strategy, if that happens to work). At worst, they will ignore or actively resist change, betting on the likelihood that it's about some overhype at play and things needs to settle a bit before being taken seriously. As sound as this may be as a governing strategy (in general, not only for handling things in academia), it comes however with the inherent risk of inflicting debilitating effect to governed realm's progress. To avoid this, the governance has to include visionaries, and a governing body including only (although assumed visionary, yet just) elders, with a blindspot in judging much of what's new and unfamiliar, will not do.

I don't think this is true outside of the (tiny) academic bubble.

Being a tenured professor at a well-ranked R1 has some prestige within a limited community. However, most tenured faculty -- even Full Professors -- are not at R1s.

Consider the following 5 facts about non-R1 faculty:

1. Compensation. At most institutions -- even in CS -- salaries max out at $100K. It's not uncommon for a CS professor with 30 years of experience to make less than a high school mathematics teacher, especially if the former is at a private university and the latter is at a public school in a state with a strong pension system. It's extremely common for CS professors to make less than new grads at FAANG.

2. External Opportunities. A non-R1 professor will have a difficult time trying to be a consultant, expert witness, etc. Also, raising grant money is basically impossible.

3. Job Autonomy. At most institutions -- even in CS -- the average faculty member spends most of their time teaching. They are, for the most part, treated as replaceable cogs.

4. Job Security. Tenure doesn't mean what it used to mean, and it never meant "perfect job security". During COVID, many universities laid off tenured faculty.

5. Even WITHIN academia, faculty at R2 or LACs are taken less seriously. Outside of academia, faculty are essentially viewed as "teachers" (and that view, again, isn't exactly inaccurate outside of R1).

On the whole, in the vast majority of cases, being a professor is lower status than being a software engineer. You don't get paid well, you spend 40 hours a week teaching, and then folks WITH PHDs who know how the business works claim that you have undue privilege because you don't someone find another 40 hours a week to do world-changing research for which you are not compensated and for which you will not reap any reward.

Personally I think curated content streams are very useful, you can try looking at the arxiv/new pages for a month and see how you feel about someone organising it for you after that.

2. Dude, why would you claim nobody is studying the sociology of academia in reply to an article studying the sociology of academia?

"The extent to which traditional academia has managed to maintain its privileged role in society despite contributing less and less actual value"

Or it isn't obsolete, but the reasons for it are different.

I feel like a lot of technologies that once primarily had value as means of dissemination, now have more value as a means of filtering to make a firehouse manageable by humans, so to speak.

Any actual or former professors here agree with this? I don't.

People with equivalent seniority in industry spend plenty of time on politics, early startups possibly excepted.

I am dissatisfied with the role currently played by academia however.

I thought the value they brought in was grant money.

This is not correct. The practice of peer review didn't become established until the early 20th century. Einstein was famously indignant and withdrew his paper the first time a journal tried to subject him to it. Like many other journals, Nature didn't do peer review until the 01960s.

There are have of course always been journals whose editors published a proper subset of the letters they received, and we have a documented instance of this happening in the 17th century, though not on an ongoing basis.

> traditional academia...contributing less and less actual value

I could understand you writing this in 01822 but I cannot imagine what you are thinking writing it in 02022.

Traditional academia built the internet while industry was building X.25, Tymnet, CompuServe, and SONET (for the Advanced Intelligent Network, so the phone company could bill you more for more valuable information), and hobbyists were building FidoNet. Later, traditional academia built the WWW at CERN. Google and Yahoo were research projects at Stanford; Fecebutt was born at Harvard, albeit in the undergraduate space.

Microsoft developed the product that launched them by "stealing" computer time from Harvard to simulate the hardware it would run on.

AWS was built on Xen, which was created in traditional academia in the early 02000s before being spun out as a company.

So out of FAANG, FGA (plus Yahoo and Microsoft) are creatures of traditional academia; only AG are not. We could add the GNU project, informally hosted by the MIT AI lab from its inception.

So much for the internet; but maybe the internet is Bad Actually and we should not consider it "value contributed". What about larger issues in society, like pandemics, overpopulation, climate change, and energy?

Moderna created an mRNA vaccine for covid in March 02020, four months after the pandemic began and a few days after Chinese academics published the virus's genome; mRNA vaccine research was done entirely in traditional academia from 01989 to 02008, after which it was DARPA-funded for several more years.

The traditional academic research of Norman Borlaug tripled world food production in the 01970s; without it, civilization would have collapsed in famine.

Our knowledge of the looming climate catastrophe is entirely a product of traditional academia; and while many of the advances in photovoltaic cells essential to escape it have happened outside academia, many others have come from traditional academia, most recently PERC.

RISC-V was created by traditional academia. (So was Linux, and the Minix it was modeled on.)

John Goodenough, who invented lithium-ion batteries, is a professor at UT, though he was an Oxford don at the time, and it was Akira Yoshino in industry who brought it to market. (Yoshino is now a professor at Meijo University.)

> Teaching, which is supposed to be one of the core businesses of the academy,

There are people who suppose it to be one, but most of them are outside the academy. The core business of the academy is philosophy: the love of wisdom, the quest for truth. (Philosophy does, of course, predate the internet, so perhaps that's what you mean by "stuck in pre-internet ways of doing things".) Teaching is a means to that end; it pays the bills, gives philosophers valuable feedback on their ideas, and occasionally creates new philosophers.

That's not quite true. Traditional academia developed the technological foundation (TCP/IP) but the actual internet was built by industry.

And "less and less of actual value" != "nothing of value". And the work on TCP/IP was done 50 years ago so that's not a particularly strong data point to argue against my claim.

50 years ago was 01972, and work on TCP/IP didn't begin until 01974, and didn't get deployed even on the ARPANET until 01982. Academic work on TCP/IP continues to this day and it wasn't until Van Jacobson's work in 01988 (academic in nature but done at a government research lab operated by a university, rather than at a university itself) that it was actually viable. TCP Vegas is from 01994, and academic work on TCP/IP and other internet protocols continues today. Dan Bernstein's work creating the most widely used cryptosystems for TLS comes to mind.

Even today, the most important site on the WWW is Wikipedia, and it's largely a creation of traditional academia, though ever since the Essjay scandal Wikipedia discourages editors from touting their credentials.

Basic research is by nature somewhat slow to affect society at large; certainly very few people in 01980 or 01990 would have named the 01974 work on TCP/IP as one of the most valuable things created in the past 20 years. They might have named the Lisp Machine, for example, which turned out to be a dead end. There's research being done today that's similarly earthshattering but we won't know what it is for 30 years.

Also, though, you seem to have confined yourself to criticizing a single one of my 15 examples of enormous contributions of value to society from traditional academia in the immediate past. And only one other is vulnerable to your weak criticism that it's from 50 years ago (unlike the actual example you criticized, which is mostly from only 35 years ago).

Does that mean you agree that the other 13 examples are indeed enormous contributions of value to society from traditional academia in the immediate past? If so, what kind of much larger historical contributions of value to society by academia in the more distant past are you implicitly contrasting them with? Please give examples.

So yeah, nearly all of the students a professor supervises will not end up tenured.

Here they point out that "most" doesn't mean all, some people do get into PhD programs or tenure track without necessarily going the conventional route of undergrad in subject, grad in subject, post docs in subject, etc. And they raise an interesting point that the talk of a rigid pipeline risks constraining the mindset of candidates and reviewers such that it excludes many potential applicants with more diverse backgrounds from applying. Instead they suggest using a "lattice" metaphor to emphasise that there are more than one path open.

At the same time, they report that women aren't actually leaving academia at a higher rate than men but are instead more likely to end up in non-tenure track positions, so the pipeline metaphor ends up being fairly useful anyway from the perspective of its use to summarise why there is so few female tenured professors.

So I get this vague sense that much of this interview, and possibly the work itself, was really about boosting the respect of academic work done outside universities and is not really that interested in why there are representation imbalances at the tenured level.

Salaries in industry are better both in level and in growth rate, there isn’t the up-or-out tenure clock, hours are better according to classmates of mine who went to industry, etc.

Government jobs are lower salary but lower stress and extremely secure.

I’m sure there will always be those who have their hearts set on the academic world, but for those who aren’t committed to that I can still recommend a phd pretty enthusiastically for the options it provides afterwards, certainly in economics.

That's not a bad thing. I think the businesses are doing as good a job as they can spotting and promoting talent. It's just a good argument against getting a PhD if you're just going to end up in industry. And by some measures anywhere between 80-95% will end up in industry or government.

Of course a PhD is not the best decision if you are only looking at optimising your path to industry. However, during my PhD I had a fantastic time. I studied what I wanted to, I had a lot of free time to develop any skill I wanted to.

It was also very useful to jump start my career. Instead of having to work for X years until o reach a certain position, I was able to go straight into a high paying job.

I came from a poor and rural part of South America. For me, the PhD was the best and easiest path to getting a top paying job in the US. I'm not saying this is for everyone, but it can be a very nice choice for a career in industry. I even met PhDs from low ranked universities during my career.

Same. And I would say that the PhD "rapidly" forced me to learn to take on large, ambiguous projects and see them from conception to completion. This was, by far, the most valuable result of the experience. Anecdotally, this seems like a rare skill, even in tech -- though it is not necessarily as recognized as it should be.

I put "rapidly" in quotes up there because if I have one piece of advice to PhD students, it's to get the hell out of grad school as soon as you can. Like the parent, I had fun exploring my interests, and it was a period of intellectual freedom that most people never get. I relish that time, but I also regret the costs. I was idealistic and unwilling to compromise my personal goals, which ended up delaying everything. If I could go back and do it over, I'd be more mercenary about finding an already successful collaborative project, contributing a little bit, and getting out. Grad school is a job -- a particularly abusive, low-reward job -- and the only goal is to finish. You get no trophies for knowing more stuff at the end, and spending time gratifying your curiosity or being a perfectionist might seem appealing ("why would I be putting myself through this if I weren't going to indulge my intellect?"), but it's ultimately a trap.

(Unfortunately, the nature of grad school is that nobody who is pre-disposed to wander aimlessly will listen to my advice, while those who understand what I'm saying probably just think I'm stating the obvious.)

I feel the same in many ways. I went into the PhD without a specific project and it was extremely complex. I was fortunate enough work in a theory heavy field, but had friends with more data-related interests. They had a really hard time finding data. Unless you are in top places in the US, data is almost impossible to get.

I highly recommend project PhDs (if you want to choose the PhD route), which are the norm in Europe/UK. You can choose very good universities in cheap cities and have some great 3/4 years. Travelling in Europe is quite cheap, food is cheap enough.

2. "you'll work with people who don't have phds" is also true in Academia. R1 faculty are research group managers. Almost none of their direct reports have PhDs.

Due to the variety of experiences and knowledge I acquired in grad school, I became conversant in a few different fields, which allowed me to cross disciplines to a very nicely compensated career path WITHOUT meeting many of the relevant criteria that new grads might be subject to.

So sure, maybe a PhD isn’t optimal if one values money and is certain that they are on a lucrative career path, however, it has opened doors for me to enter a career path where individual enrichment is a large focus since the prestige of the company is built upon the accomplishments of individual employees.

If nothing else, I got to spend five years enriching myself, studying what I love and getting paid (modestly) to do it. While there are certain aspects of academia that are off putting, grad students are mostly shielded from politics and get to spend time focused on learning their field and becoming experts with no serious expectation of a useful deliverable at the end. You might argue that the thesis is the deliverable, however, since one is working at the boundary of knowledge, there’s often very little oversight and one can justify chasing down exploratory research directions that turn out to be dead ends. My experience in industry is that it is more a zero sum game, where you have to carve out opportunities to enrich yourself and hours and productivity are tracked much more closely.

However there may only be so many options related to your PhD.

As someone in the edge of going back to school, this is my long term plan. I’m not sure why discussion of higher education assume that anyone going for a PhD wants to go into academia, when there are plenty of industrial research labs looking for PhDs.

This is an important sentence that I haven't seen before in discussions about people-pipelines in the physical sciences. It deserves more visibility.

Academics, simply because they have all come through the same pipeline, may underestimate the management skills that industry experience can bring to modern research. Lord knows we promote accomplished scientists with non-existent management skills all the time -- what about hiring in the occasional faculty with a solid science background but extensive management acumen?

Many of the best-practices and philosophies implemented around management and process in the larger company would have been quite helpful and beneficial in my prior environment.

Academia selects for science prowess first, then almost entirely through Darwinian means, management skills. That approach keeps the focus on science, which is good, but misses out so very much on knowledge that could radically accelerate research progress.

An example: There is substantial focus in good research groups on mentoring good technical writing and science presentation skills. I had never encountered formal mentorship on concepts as basic as, "Okay, here's how to run a meeting in a way that ensures all necessary topics are addressed, everyone gets their say, action items will actually happen, and the meeting will end on time."

My mentors probably hadn't gotten that sort of mentorship either -- we each learned simply from what we'd seen work effectively. A functioning industry group simply can't operate without that sort of fundamental skill.

> A lot of people jump into the tenure track from outside of the tenure track, from industry for instance

That would be surprising if significant

So the author has dropped out of posting their reasons? Very apropos.

Or, ABD, if you will.