Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge
Universities have multiple conflicting missions
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Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering
People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible
Manufacturing is important and often ignored
The word ‘novel’ is used as an idea bludgeon in academia
Running list of relevant science news?
Peer review doesn’t catch duplications
A new professor needs about $1.5m to get going
Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory
Younger professors have to spend more time getting money
Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work
Things that are not paper-worthy enough for academia and not product-focused enough for a startup
What was the real incentive for people to work on the DARPA Grand Challenge?
NS Notes on Officers Techniques
Three myths about scientific peer review
A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility
Pay-it-forward tithing could resolve the tension between the potential public-good and potential profit in research.
The Architected Innovation Institute - Engineering Scientific Revolutions
It is easier to have a multipoint mutation in technology than in evolution
Is it more impactful to find and train undiscovered diamonds or to unlock well-positioned but constrained researchers?
The boundaries between industry government and academia are fuzzy
Startups and Academia are bad at addressing structural constraints
Is it possible that we’re actually getting less research because we have more researchers?
People keep track of their ‘score’ in citations, published papers, grant money, awards.
People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power
§Academia Constraints
The peer review and citation system incentivizes people to work on things that other people think is interesting
§Institutions and Games
Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic
Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers
All institutions are coupled to at least one game
Human capital theory of stagnation
Research requires massive intrinsic motivation