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Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure modern academia has very much left to do with scholarship in the sense quoted in this article.

This is unfortunate.

And what pray tell do you think modern academia is about? I have trouble understanding why so many Hacker Newsies have such disdain for a class of people whose main objective in life is to discover and share knowledge, and have sacrificed tremendous amounts of their time, and potential money, to do so.

By revealed preference, modern academia is about churning incremental papers in order to obtain tenure and research grants.

Yeah, those greedy guys just want to (1) keep their (underpaid) jobs and (2) have a bit more money to increase pay for their (underpaid) students. :) As with software engineers, and every other job, some academics are crappy and some are amazing. Let's not paint everybody with the same brush. As for incremental, well, the AI you're all so fond of was incremental academic research for a couple decades before it was this sudden world changing thing.

I think they're criticizing the system, not the people who participate in the system.

While i don't disagree that there's a problem with publishing for the sake of publishing, we really do need the incremental papers. GPS (the evergreen science example) is the result of incremental papers starting in the 40s with grants for atomic clocks

That is not "revealed preference". That is literally what is demanded of them else they be fired.

Revealed preference of academia as a whole, not of the individuals working within it.

Still same bullshit claim. These are requirements for academia to get money or other resources. No grants and no papers, no resources. And yes, resources are necessary.

There are whole disciplines whose telos is now activism rather than knowledge production.

https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites...

There are whole companies whose only goal is to make money for shareholders! Most people on HN work for them!

And those companies make money from government sponsored R&D. and educational pipelines.

Yes.

People working hard on problems that other people are willing to freely compensate them for is a good thing.

Activism disguised as research is a bad thing.

You linked a pdf but I'm not going to scroll 30 pages on a phone to figure out your cryptic statement

Venture capitalists and Silicon Valley have strong anti-intellectual tendencies as a whole. See how many founders pride themselves of being drop-outs and how many of them openly reject humanism and liberal arts. HN is mainly a plattform of Ycombinator to advertise and find like-minded workforce.

I hope you're not suggesting that I am anti-intellectual.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com