# §Academia and Research ### What is academia * [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]] * [[Modern academia is a nebulous institution characterized by some combination of labs with PIs being judged on papers and labor being done by grad students]] * [[Academic credit is a first-to-the post system]] * [[Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering]] * [[University professorships are the highest status jobs in academia]] * [[In academia more grant money leads to more power]] * [[Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic]] * [[Academia incentivizes novelty, not focus]] * [[Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work]] * [[Academia is not just universities]] * [[Academic labs are like a federation of small companies]] ### Universities * [[Universities have multiple conflicting missions]] * [[Universities have been pushed more towards applied research since the end of WWII]] * [[National labs and other government research centers are an academic alternative to universities]] * [[Universities can take more than a third of grant money as overhead]] * [[Any technology that comes out of a university needs to go through their tech transfer office]] ### Constraints and issues * [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]] * [[Professors do three or more jobs]] * [[Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers]] * [[Physical experiments are expensive]] (is this true?) * [[Younger professors have to spend more time getting money]] * [[Academia is not a good environment for systems engineering]] * [[Going outside of the approved process can be a black mark against people in academia]] * [[Necrobotics illustrates how academia forces engineering]] * [[Labs implicitly judge research through the sense of dollars per paper]] * [[There can only be one first author]] #### Grants * [[Professors are constantly doing the calculation of whether a grant is worth the time to apply for it]] * [[Most grant money is tagged so unrestricted money is like gold for professors]] * [[A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility]] * [[The government grant process depends on politics and committees]] * [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]] * [[People proposing work that they have already done is a sign that feedback loops are broken]] ### Related * [[§Startup Constraints]] * [[§Corporate R&D Constraints]] * [[§Philanthropy and Non-Profit Constraints]] * [[Market Failures in Science]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/§Academia+and+Research) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/§Academia+and+Research)