alt Hacker NewsThere's this crowd on HN which is very vocal against academia. From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc.
And while it is very true that often the research coming out of Academia is useless, what is always neglected are the roots of the research done in private labs.
When Jürgen Schmidhuber and team published their work on Neural Nets back in 1991 it was also useless. Unless you had a supercomputer and very, very deep pockets you were not going to do anything with what came out of their lab.
But still, 30 years later here we are, standing on top of the shoulders of this useless research.
Replies
I do a lot of work that is based on academic research, aka building a proprietary sparse embedding model. My issue with academia is that they don’t bother to solve the practical issues. They tell you how to build a PPMI model, but what about hitting a database that’s 500TB to find co-occurrence numbers? This isn’t even touched so you’d then have to go and invent a bazillion of algorithms yourself to make your life easier. So while the bedrock is based on academic research and we thank them for that, scaling anything requires a lot of work in uncharted territories.
I think most people forget the graph-like nature of scientific research. You don't have n useful papers and m useless ones by themselves, you have an interconnection of those. There may be isolated cliques of uselessness, but there isn't a clear correlation between academia and private research.
Many ideas come from philosophy, which many find useless.
Heraclitus discovered change back in ancient Greek, I don't know where we would be in scientific research without that (deliberately ignoring the debate about the originality of what we know about Heraclitus work). I bet his contemporaries found his "research" useless.
Where is "this crowd" that you are talking about?
The closest to that that I've seen is that traditional academia approaches are too far removed from practical applications for highly applied fields like software engineering, or too slow for fast-moving fields like modern day ML (thus, all the preprints).
Private labs feed off academia. Without academics to staff them, they'd get a lot less far.
I used to work at Nokia Research when they still made phones. Probably the closest thing Europe had to Silicon Valley twenty years ago. Except it was in Helsinki. Lots of stuff got invented there. Nokia didn't really manage to capitalize on its own inventions of course. Or rather it got caught up in its own clumsy attempts throwing babies out of the window by the bucket load. But others sure did. A lot of modern smart phones still have tech in them that Nokia pioneered before either Google or Apple shipped a smart phone.
At the time there was a lot of talk about the demise of industrial research labs. Bell labs (now actually owned by Nokia!), Xerox PARC, IBM, and all the other big US labs that produced amazing stuff are former shadows of themselves. There is some truth in that
But you could argue that Google and Apple picked up some of the slack. And the current AI boom came out of Google cherry picking all the best universities for their AI talent and putting them all together in a research group that then got free reign. Like Nokia, that involved a lot of ejecting of babies with the bath water. But it seems to have spawned lots of new startups that can trace their roots back to that research group in Google.
I think most of criticism of academia is about the rampant fraud and unreproducible results, due to the way the incentives are structured.
It's like the old saying "only 10% of my marketing budget is making a difference, I just don't know which 10%"
You don't know ahead of time, where the breakthrough will come from.
There is ton of research that sits on the shelf, and then years later, it gets re-combined with some other useless research, and boom, some big breakthrough.
This current attitude of all research is worthless, so it should be cancelled, is shooting our future selves in the face.
Every western academic nearly systematically ignores eastern science and philosophy: classicism means "western European". Never mind Europe only flourished intellectually post Islam, which imported the science and engineering of China and India, critically including printing and zero[0]. IMHO this is why distaste for academia grows: it's based on appeals to authority which are demonstrably farcically misplaced. Alternatively stated: the emperor has no clothes, much less silk or paper!
Just as the Dewey Decimal System really only served the purpose of providing the facetious nominal linearization of an arbitrary depth ontological oversimplification, so too humans are much more like random pattern matching machines than festidious sense-makers glued to absolutes derived from false appeals to static mono-perspective ontological hierarchies. The same is becoming lived experience in the LLM age, although the tiktokked youth apparently cannot string ten words together or focus longer than three seconds to attest, I'd wager they can feel it. Are we losing something by rejecting the habit of rigorously manually tending to spurious and temporary ontologies? Yes. Is it necessarily a loss in the long term? Probably not, in the same way we no longer write long-form letters or leave calling cards. Are we gaining something in response? Yes, at a minimum much stronger cross-pollination between ivory towers by fearless exploratory pragmatists who disrespect the would-be scope of nominal professions in favor of holistic thinking... both AI and human.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...
and you still need tons of money
This is a straw-man if I ever saw one.
Practically no one is against hard science research, properly conducted. The issues are rampant fraud / p-hacking / unreproducible garbage mixed with an unhealthy dose of ideological monoculture and indoctrination, garnished with rising tuition prices while sitting on huge endowments in case of the Ivy Leagues.
> From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc.
Well... that's "starve the beast" in action. A lot of things we take for granted, that underpin our modern ways of life, came to be due to government investing. Laser, radar, microwaves, the early Internet, that all was military R&D.
"Unfortunately" (well, for the rich and the MIC, at least) there is no way for people to siphon off money in government-funded research, so once the libertarian/small-state BS completely took over following the collapse of the USSR, a lot of that got torn down or supplemented with enough bureaucracy to make Germans cry... and that's why reusable rockets were not invented at NASA but at SpaceX instead.
I feel like you're constructing a strawman to argue against. I visit this site almost daily and the prevailing sentiment is usually the polar opposite of what you're suggesting.
If sentiment on HN were as you say, how could your pro-academia and anti-big tech comment be sitting at the top as the most upvoted comment?
Like half of what Schmidhuber is always complaining about is that (except for LSTMs) people aren't standing on the shoulders of his research very much. They try to solve some of the same problems people have always wanted to solve, try some of the same approaches people always tend to try, and then tinker until it works. At no point do they consult Schmidhuber's decade-old papers where he tried something kind of similar but didn't get very impressive results, and hence they also do not think to cite him. Then he comes out of the woodwork to assert priority.