[noooooooph]

What an abysmal take. Academia is arguably the one place in modern society where the human drive for curiosity does not need to be tied to some notion of utility. It would be terrible to corrupt this with the introduction of a market. Saying that the problem with academia is a matter of assessing “market impact” is missing the point entirely. First and foremost, academia should be about advancing our understanding of the world around us. Figuring out potential applications of this knowledge is a secondary goal, best left to engineers and researchers at companies whose role it is to extract profit from scientific knowledge.

[native_samples]

Academia should be about many noble and idealistic things. What it's actually about is producing as many publishable papers as possible, many of which will turn out on close inspection to be nonsensical, non-replicable, waffle, statements of the obvious or outright loopy ideological rants. Having read lots of research papers in recent years, I feel very strongly that the ones that were worth it came overwhelmingly from corporate labs, or sometimes collaborations between universities and corporate labs. Purely academic papers tend to have an extremely low ROI for reading them, and that's ignoring the research that is outright deceptive or fraudulent!

Planned economies very inefficiently produce crap. That was one of the big lessons of the 20th century. We have a planned economy for research and not surprisingly there's lots of dysfunctionality, like the work being published in ways that mean its own authors can lose the ability to read it. It's not a morally defensible system really, which is why so many defenses of it are vague appeals to the idea that academics are somehow purer intellects than everyone else. They aren't.