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by j2kun
4156 days ago
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I'm not as worried about the author's conclusions as he seems to be. I think there will always be more engineers than physicists, more financial experts than economists, and more security professionals than cryptographers. There will always be more people who want to take advantage of the fruits of basic research than there are people who want to do that basic research. And moreover, the basic researchers are generally not as publicly celebrated than their entrepreneurial counterparts (cf Steve Jobs vs Don Knuth or Dennis Ritchie). Without data showing the decline of the number of people who want to do basic science, I'm not convinced that things like the theory of parsing will be lost to history. That being said, I think there is a lot of extremely exciting stuff going on in theoretical computer science (this is my field), and I think we could do a lot better publicizing our work to encourage more people to think about our problems. It's a shame that there are no career benefits to doing so. |
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One step would be to tear down the paywall that keeps decades of super-interesting computer science research locked up. I'm looking at you, ACM. (Paywalls really limit access from people non-affiliated to any subscribing institutions, and even for affiliated people, it might be that slightly annoying barrier that make them not bother if they don't really need to)