Academic Research Incentives

I see this negative claim on HN quite a bit. R&D CS labs where D is in service of R do exist. I work at such a lab. We expect fresh PhDs to lead their own research project. Spend some time perusing the ACM DL in your area and try to find labs that have high publication-to-researcher ratios (many of these labs are quite small so it does no good just to do a raw pub count).

I'm not sure what your experience is but research is vastly different to commercial enterprise and there is a massive motivational difference between curing cancer and making CRUD apps to get your 'side hustle' on.In my experience in highly funded research groups that run outside out of traditional management (translation annoying and wasteful tertiary education administration) researchers that make an impact get on just fine and produce excellent results on a liveable wage and

Go and do some cutting edge research, and publish it. Nobody's stopping you.

> There are no major advances left.I think the problem is elsewhere. There's noone doing the advancing. People like myself (smart, educated, ambitious, technically-oriented) are way better of doing the unproductive things (finance or ad-tech) than the productive (research). And by "way better" I mean it doesn't even compare! Academia is fucked-up as well (chasing it's proverbial tail by encouraging young researchers to publish, not to, you know, actua

My way involves a lot more risk that nothing useful will be produced.I basically want a higher risk / reward than what working in this field as an employee would provide. I wouldn’t be able to try far out ideas if I wanted to keep my job, because it may be the case that one avenue of research never goes anywhere for years.Peter Higgs has some interesting thoughts on how he would probably not have produced anything valuable if his work had occurred in the current academic environment t

A short question: have you ever worked in research? Or know well anyone working in academia?First, many problems there are much harder just to get to the level that one can do any valuable contribution. And approaching them goes well beyond reading tutorial, playing with it, asking some questions on SE, being expert.In mathematics, or medicine, it's rather years than weeks.Second, many deep problems are not that easy to commercialize; even if they may, possibly, save many lives in futur

Back when I was in grad school there was a whole set of research people who just lived at the university - but I noticed, they'd didn't really do a whole lot of work. They were just always there, always on hand when the tenured PI showed up to be noticed, and so on. They'd mastered the art of appearing to be dogged 24-7 nose-to-the-grindstone researchers, but it was really just a relaxed little club. Most of their energy was going into cultivating relationships that would aid th

Cost of masters degree, living cost in expensive city, lost wages... It is expensive!You do not have to be member of academia to interact with other researches.》This seems pretty unfunded. Unless you mean most people who have already done a PhD.My experience is from astronomy and cryptography. You can make good contribution without being part of academia. Data are freely available on internet. Also code.

I've often felt that there is something inherently unwholesome about PhDs and the modern academic effort. As if we could create research factories, and that the quality and quantity of discoveries would scale with input (money). I'm not a historian of science, but I do know that many of our greatest scientists were not professional researchers, doing the work essentially in their spare time on the side (Einstein, Newton) or more typically, because of the support of a wealthy patron. Co

I think I know this, because even though I haven’t personally graduated from so much as high school, a lot of my friends and family are academics.Let’s start with your career as a doctoral student. If you personally find great interest in your research, but nobody else does, then you will find it very hard to get published (except in bullshit fake conferences and fake journals that accept any author who pays the fee) and you will not be able to persuade your committee to accept your disserta