By revealed preference, modern academia is about churning incremental papers in order to obtain tenure and research grants.
replyYeah, 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.
replyI think they're criticizing the system, not the people who participate in the system.
replyWhile 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
replyVenture 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.
replyThere are whole disciplines whose telos is now activism rather than knowledge production.
replyhttps://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites...
You linked a pdf but I'm not going to scroll 30 pages on a phone to figure out your cryptic statement
replyThere are whole companies whose only goal is to make money for shareholders! Most people on HN work for them!
replyAnd those companies make money from government sponsored R&D. and educational pipelines.
replyYes.
replyPeople 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.