§Academia Constraints

Peer review has failed as an institution

Peer review doesn’t catch duplications

Human capital theory of stagnation

People are incentivized to work on nodes higher up the tech tree

It is easier to have a multipoint mutation in technology than in evolution

Peer review gives peers veto power over each other

Startups and Academia are bad at addressing structural constraints

# Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work
Peer review published papers both determine an academics livelihood and status. Therefore, they are incentivized to spend their time doing work they think can be published. 

On top of this [[Academic credit is a first-to-the post system]]

[[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]] In Academia there are a couple of long term games:
- Gain [[Kleos]] through contribution to the [[Knowledge frontier]]
- Just get to scratch your itch to investigate certain things
- ….

[[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]] and in academia the entwined proxy games are:
- Peer reviewed Published papers
- Citations on those papers
- Grants (which are usually based on papers) 
- Awards (which are usually based on who knows you which comes from papers)

It’s a safer strategy to publish lots of papers than to try to write one super-cited paper because it’s very hard to know which papers will be highly cited. Additionally everybody is impressed when you say “I’ve published a bajillion papers” while only a subgroup might know your super-cited paper by title unless you’ve [[hit the top of the columnade]]. 

Tenure is based on the number of papers you’ve published and the amount of grant money you’ve brought in.  Without tenure, academia is extremely rough. People who don’t think they can get tenure leave universities. [[National labs and other government research centers are a research alternative to universities]].

[[The peer review and citation system incentivizes people to work on things that other people think is interesting]]

### Related
- [[§Academia Constraints]]



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Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work

# Kleos
Glory through deeds, my friends!

**Kleos** (Greek: κλέος) is the  [Greek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_language)  word often translated to “renown”, or “ [glory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(honor)) “. It is related to the word “to hear” and carries the implied meaning of “what others hear about you”. A Greek  [hero](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero)  earns *kleos* through accomplishing great deeds.

[Kleos - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleos)

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Kleos

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