# National labs and other government research centers are an academic alternative to universities Government researchers are still in the ‘academia’ game in that they want to publish papers and discover and invent cool shit. [[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]]. Government researchers have both less freedom and more freedom than university researchers. If they can justify how their research is aligned with the higher-level missions of the organization, they don’t need to spend time writing grants or teaching like professors in universities. [[Professors do three or more jobs]]. The need to spend the majority of their time on organizationally aligned research means that they can’t do super crazy things. Additionally [[The people setting research priorities at AFRL are often not technical]], which is another constraint that may kill promising projects. Research at national labs is perceived by people in academia as being lower impact than at universities. [[University professorships are the highest status jobs in academia]]. The lower impact is because their research needs to align with the department they are part of. ([[Innovation orgs need to be aligned with their money factory]]. This creates a feedback loop where the really good researchers don’t work at government labs and the phenomenon of [[A players hire A players and B players hire C players]] happens. One could argue that government researchers are not part of academia because there is no teaching, there are priorities besides publishing, and there are ostensible priorities beyond knowledge generation. I suspect it depends on the specific organization, division within that organization, and person. For example, the Mars Rover teams at JPL aren’t particularly academic. Their goal is to build a robot that works. At the same time, there are teams at JPL that are building prototypes that will probably never see the inside of a rocket and publishing about them, which feels very academic. So perhaps the way to look at government labs is as a heterogenous mixture of games/incentives ([[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]). The actual mix is an empirical question. But in the context of pre-commercial technology research ([[What do I mean by pre-commercial research?]], (I suspect that) work that is not directly aligned with creating a product that the government wants skews academic. Because [[Few parts of the government outside of the military uses products]], I would expect most people doing pre-commercial research that isn’t focused on military products to trend towards academic incentive systems. The [[Industrialists and Academics]] dichotomy is useful here. This whole story is so similar to [[§Corporate R+D Constraints]], I would go so far as to say that government labs are basically tax-payer funded Corporate R&D. [[Government research is corporate R&D for United States Inc]]. Questions about the orgs: * [[How are research agendas set at National Labs?]] * Are the people who work there technically government or university employees? * How is the money allocated * How does your career progress? * How much do careers ### Related * [[Federally funded research and development centers - FFRDC]] * [[Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research]] * [[Air Force Research Laboratory - AFRL]] * [[Naval Research Laboratory]] * [[Jeff Graham Conversation 2020-04-17]] <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/National+labs+and+other+government+research+centers+are+an+academic+alternative+to+universities) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/National+labs+and+other+government+research+centers+are+an+academic+alternative+to+universities)