Y'know, occasionally I see off hand remarks from tech or start-up people dissing academia, not understanding that academia is probably one of the hardest career paths in the world (and thus surprisingly similar to start-ups). You can't take a break (publish or perish), you need a lot of qualifications to even dream about getting tenure (top 5 grad schools or bust), and you're competing against ridiculously smart and pathologically obsessive people.
No, well, I guess that’s exactly why we are dissing academia. It’s ridiculously hard, the environment seems shitty, and the payoff is pretty much nonexistent.
Why would anyone choose to do that instead of making boatloads of money in industry?
The 'purpose' of academia is pretty awesome: you get to figure out how the brain works--and how to fix it when it doesn't work well--why the sun shines, etc...
Some people find a lot more meaning in that than, say, using cutting-edge ML algorithms to optimally place Facebook ads for awful pizza.
For the privilege to do what they really want to do, i.e. study something they are really interested in.
For myself, I am interested in logic programming and machine learning. I started a PhD in Inductive Logic Programming, which is machine learning of logic programs from examples. There's no way I could follow this interest in any other structure but a PhD on ILP.
In the industry? I can forget right about it. Even ordinary logic programming is out of the question. Machine learning? That would have to be statistical machine learning that just bores me to death.
In academia I have -so far- the freedom to pursue my actual research interest and all I have to show for it is success in understanding my subject and discovering new knowledge, which is exactly what I want to do anyway.
To be sure the exact same argument can be made for some startups too. Toxic work-culture for the sheer possibility of (often limited) rewards is not unique to academia -- its just more prevalent.
Considering almost all the world changing knowledge our society has has come from academia, I really can't agree with you.
Even in CS, almost all of what I learned in grad school was directly applicable to real problems. The issue is that the bar in industry is so low that we're more worried about getting people to do even basic things than getting them to use state of the art technology.
Yes, but the results of "academia" are an exercise in the net effects of collective intelligence. Many a bee sacrifices its life without making a difference.
Rarer in business is one individuals efforts 100% wasted with such regularity.
Academia is a path finding strategy through a forest where most paths are dead-ends.
On a case-by-case, individual basis, it doesn't look so good.
In startups, a set of individuals efforts is 100% wasted with extreme regularity. They are also a path finding strategy through a forest where most paths are dead-ends, but you get paid very well until you hit that dead-end and move to the next path.
A lot of that world changing knowledge is a result of academia’s partnerships with industry. Consider the early radio lab at Stanford.
Academia as we know it is fairly recent. Many of the fundamental results in the sciences were discovered by people who weren’t academics but had a chill day job. For example, Newton.
Newton's biggest discoveries were back at his home while his University was closed due to the plague. I wouldn't say that thinking at the family estate to wait out the plague is a chill day job. In that era, many scientists were wealthy aristocrats, e.g. Antoine Lavoisier.
The difference is that they do business with bananas, primitive tools, sex, etc. While we do business with phones, planes, houses... i.e. things that exist thanks to science.
