[joe_mamba]

>Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.

He's not entirely wrong though. Industry makes the advancements that actually supposed to sell and be profitable on the free market. Academia is all over the place, as not everything being researched there can be used commercially, often it's just to get grant money, push papers and raise their egos amongst their peers.

[godelski]

That's not the pipeline at all. Academia creates the foundation industry sits on. There's a lot more failure, yes, but hits are way more impactful. Innovations generate entire industries.

So weird argument. Academia isn't meant to be "profitable" because no one is measuring the indirect profits. But when you do it's comically large

[joe_mamba]

>Academia creates the foundation industry sits on.

Depends on the industry. All the researchers I know in academia are just wasting government grant money not delivering anything useful. Their words, not mine.

Some is useful shure, a lot is bullshit though.

[sofixa]

Why are you conflating and equating "useful" with "sells for profit on the free market"?

There are many areas of research where profit is not a goal, and cannot be one. Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit. Researching different education methods, same. Hell, the researchers who won the 2024 Nobel prize in economics, who helped us understand how to build economically successful nations, something incredibly useful, cannot turn a profit with their research.

It's frankly absurd to expect everything useful to be profitable.

[tanker_war]

This conflation between "useful" and "profitable" is maybe the most annoying motte and bailey that industry people like to employ.

[godelski]

I really don't get why it's so commonly stated. It's so obviously dumb once you think about it for more than 5 seconds. It's like people arguing that improving the track or improving the shoes doesn't win races because at the end of the day it's the runner that crosses the finish line. Sure, but to discredit everything but the runner is so myopic. Let them run barefoot and run on glass shards, then watch them lose

[joe_mamba]

> Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit.

That definitely is for profit. They aren't researching climate change for the love of the game, but because agriculture, oil futures, real estate development, insurance policies, all depend on predicting climate developments.

[godelski]

I'd phrase it as people are researching these things because they're important. The reasons they're important are pretty diverse but because of how our economy works the research all ends up being related to profits downstream. Problem is we only measure "profit" as one step back.

To make an analogy, let's pretend we're a company selling water. We measure profit by how many bottles of water we sell. But people like the gp are complaining that building aqueducts, water purifiers, weather machines, or even improving the bottling process "isn't profitable". It's a weird claim and I'm not sure why it's so prolific. It's incredibly myopic