I wish academics were challenged to bring a technology to life. A working gizmo cannot be argued away. We need some mechanism by which the products of research are exposed to reality, a little bit of a market force to help us evaluate what works and what doesn't. Already there is a replication crisis. What we need is to make talk less cheap, ideally give the academics skin in the game. This would be a system where people toil away for years before producing something, and some may never succeed, but when they do they get all the upside from creating a new technology, and we as a society benefit from having this new invention.
Essentially, I would break apart the monolithic idea of academia. There's too many inefficiencies, we waste away the talent of very smart people working on incomprehensible details that only a handful of people care about, and they write papers no one will read, only to then go to finance or tech where they'll wonder what was the point of grad school since a small percentage of their skills/specialized knowledge is necessary to make a living. We're creating all these PhDs and we don't know what to do with them. We need to foster a more entrepreneurial path in these people, they're stuck thinking that they only have two choices: academia or industry.
No, theoretical research is needed to understand why a gizmo works, we often use phenomenological models to progress, and the fundamental reason that ties everything together is figured out later. We didn't understand electricity and magnetism for a long time but we were creating all kinds of devices and materials via trial and error. The arrow of discovery has a strong record with experiment first, theory later. Metallurgy was pretty much figured out by trying shit out first, later came the formalization and explanations for why strain hardening is a thing, or doping and microstructure for example.
For the humanities, yeah I have no idea. I didn't specify but I meant the science and engineering parts of academia. I think math doesn't have a reproducibility crisis since it should be all logical proofs that don't require infrastructure, so I guess math is fine as it is.
In Physics theory in many areas is a lot further along than experiment.
Math does have a problem because proofs are very complex to actually check and few people have the time to do so. Subtle errors can creep in very easily.
> What should it be based on? Should academics be judged on performance? If so, how?
Thank for the question. It is, indeed, easier to criticize rather than offer constructive suggestions.
Here are my thoughts on the reward system:
- I would like to see published conclusions challenged (if conclusions are based on data observations or empirical evidence). And if the challenge is clean and results are fair, then:
(1) The challenger gets a credit (regardless if the paper they challenged withstood the challenge or not)
(2) The original authors of the paper get credit if the paper withstood the challenge(s).
- I would like to see a different credit system for papers in applied sciences, based on whether the result is accompanied by an implementation. Where implementation is either a working inference system (if this is all based on data), or a prototype. The discoveries that are accompanied by a working, publicly consumed implementations, in my view deserve higher credit score.
In other words, I would much prefer that our academic discoveries are encouraged to build consumable implementations (unlike US Patent law that does not require an implementation of an invention).
-if an published paper or a conference presentation was incorporated by the same team into a patent, I would remove any academic credits received by the team's researches.
In other words, I would prevent double-dipping, if I may call it that. If the given paper is incorporated into a utility patent by completely different people (and it withstood the USPTO scrutiny), then that's ok.
- if a specific field of study is theoretical in nature (eg mathematics, may be theoretical physics). I would specifically reward joint publications, discoveries where
the theoretical subject matter is incorporated into applied field.
- I would include into the reward system books, blogs and article posts that further public understanding of complex science topics (I would apply it for STEM subjects only).
Such that online video lectures, and other forms of free/unpaid public education are specifically encouraged.
I am not sure how exactly to measure effectiveness of this, but I am sure minds, brighter than mine, could come up with a fair, automatically-correcting model.
Essentially, I would break apart the monolithic idea of academia. There's too many inefficiencies, we waste away the talent of very smart people working on incomprehensible details that only a handful of people care about, and they write papers no one will read, only to then go to finance or tech where they'll wonder what was the point of grad school since a small percentage of their skills/specialized knowledge is necessary to make a living. We're creating all these PhDs and we don't know what to do with them. We need to foster a more entrepreneurial path in these people, they're stuck thinking that they only have two choices: academia or industry.