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

All the incentives in research drive towards conservatism

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

Academic culture prizes individual recognition

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

The idea that academia is for crazy exploration and companies are for low risk exploration is bullshit

Different axes of where research gets done in the US

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 Innov􏰂ation Institute - Engineering Scientific Revolutions

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

Wolfgang Merkt conversation 12 Oct 2021

There are very few senior individual contributors in academia

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

An institution riffing on the ARPA Model could enable paradigm shifts that are not happening

Academic administrators and professors are playing very different games

An Institute for Creative Technology - Riffing on ARPA

Funding structures lead to several layers of indirection on what even gets proposed

Is it possible that we’re actually getting less research because we have more researchers?

# §Academia Constraints
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]

- [[Universities have multiple conflicting missions]]
- [[Universities have been pushed more towards applied research since the end of WWII]]
- [[Academic credit is a first-to-the post system]]
-  [[Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering]]
- [[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]]
- [[University professorships are the highest status jobs in academia]]
- [[National labs and other government research centers are a research alternative to universities]]
- [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]]
- [[In academia more grant money leads to more power]]
- [[Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic]]
- [[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]]
- [[Universities can take more than half of grant money as overhead]]
- [[A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility]]
- [[Physical experiments are expensive]]
- [[Younger professors have to spend more time getting money]]
- [[The government grant process depends on politics and committees]]
- [[Any technology that comes out of a university needs to go through their tech transfer office]]
- [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]]
- [[Academia incentivizes novelty, not focus]]
- [[Academia is not a good environment for systems engineering]]
- [[Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work]]
- [[Going outside of the approved process can be a black mark against people in 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]]

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§Academia Constraints

Timesharing could be extended from digital infrastructure to physical infrastructure

Marissa Convo 1/5/2020

# A PI needs to provide evidence that they have access to a lab facility
This creates a slight chicken and egg problem and makes scientists more at the mercy of the [[Distributed Innovation Suppression Complex]] because if the institution doesn’t like you, you’re less likely to have a lab which makes it harder to show you’re right. 

### Related
- [[Younger professors have to spend more time getting money]]
- [[Decisions made by committees lead to median results]] 
- [[Professors do three or more jobs]]
- [[Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers]]
- [[§Academia Constraints]]



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Marissa Weichman

Different institutions have created monopolies on various enterprises

Marissa Weichman Conversation 2020-04-10

# National labs and other government research centers are a research alternative to universities
Government researchers are still in the ‘academia’ game in that they want to publish papers and discover and invent cool shit.  [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]

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.

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?

### 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 4-17-2020]]

[^1]:// According to [[Marissa Weichman]] :



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Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers

The Strengths of the Academic Enterprise

Why would people want to work with PARPA?

National labs and other government research centers are a research alternative to universities

University professorships are the highest status jobs in academia

# Professors do three or more jobs
- Teach students
- Mentor graduate students
- Help run the academic department
- Manage a research group
- Apply for money 
- Do research



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Stagnation

Fair games are self-limiting

Human capital theory of stagnation

# Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers
[[Professors do three or more jobs]] but at the end of the day they are directly judged on their lab’s research output and both directly and directly on how much grant money they bring in. The professor’s lab’s research depends not just on the professor’s ability to do research but (arguably more) on their ability to manage, attract good grad students ([[Graduate students are the labor in academic science and engineering]]), and bring in enough money to keep the lab well funded. The professor’s name and reputation goes on everything that comes out of the lab, so there is incentive to have the biggest lab you can without compromising quality (and possibly there’s even a Pareto-front where you compromise quality a little to 

Therefore, the most successful professors are usually the ones who are the best grant writers and managers. A professor’s success is not entirely decoupled from their ability to do research because [[People who have done a thing should be in charge of a thing]]. 

The more a field depends on large labs and expensive equipment, the less professors do actual research because they need to recruit and fund graduate students. [[Science has become more capital and labor intensive over time]]

### Related
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]



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Buxton Index

It takes roughly 20 years to exploit a phenomenon at scale

EW Dijkstra

Bell Labs and AT&T had timescale alignment

# The Strengths of the Academic Enterprise
66 Institutions have operated continuously since 1530:
- Roman Catholic Church
- Lutheran church
- Parliament of Iceland
- Parliament of the Isle of Man
- Universities

Terms that subtlety change meaning
- Scientist
- Engineer
- Theoretical
- Experimental
- Applied
![](BearImages/27803535-7FCA-430C-B2C3-DE40665BF605-98199-000BD37383818622/B3575AD4-A52E-45FE-B2FB-CFDB3998C3E7.png)
![](BearImages/B6A36F1C-7113-4EF5-B0B3-31EC8CA937C3-98199-000BD380793C254B/1A2E0CF8-86E7-4069-9A02-1A9F54123A71.png)

![](BearImages/FE6D56FC-A07D-4886-8D61-B5BC8D4A9850-98199-000BD378FD30AED1/74D3A943-967D-4BDD-B4D7-93DAF67FDAE0.png)
![](BearImages/97F9B1FD-3919-4801-8FBE-C2BE204EFFCD-98199-000BD385AD0F00DA/EFE0B975-7886-4462-BFB3-30F1AB1843F0.png)
- Introduces the [[Buxton Index]]
- ::Has anybody ever done buxton analyses of institutions?::
- 
![](BearImages/03FD1C6A-AF2D-4406-ACE1-0A9442D7A233-98199-000BD3E366741515/FF1E0D48-0E57-4C61-A561-6AD90EDFC410.png)
![](BearImages/AE3FAED3-4B17-41C7-BDE1-FEC9ADFDADC1-98199-000BD3E9CDFDC925/D0C63DD8-893E-4B33-9F1A-CDF70CFFEF63.png)
::this seems like a false dichotomy - there’s tons of tacit knowledge in universities:: 
![](BearImages/F9120BF1-97AD-4A04-B841-19D961F97C90-98199-000BD411B96889CA/AC0EB00D-7BFB-4A59-AB49-87EC35160DF6.png)
- [[The boundaries between industry government and academia are fuzzy]]
-  [[Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution]]
![](BearImages/E283E18C-BE97-4A60-8417-369BFA2D4C43-98199-000BD42B2FAE7B55/9289B9A0-8F2D-4DC5-BF5D-AC3C681E1C90.png)
![](BearImages/2DB6327E-C76E-4A49-9523-73F4EDCEDDC5-98199-000BD457946413EA/71EB2C93-A4E1-4AEB-B548-9A6EF739F738.png)
- ::Tension around individuality in academia::
- 
![](BearImages/4AC35689-A04B-4A8F-9522-844D81AABC6C-98199-000BD45FAD1A25F0/1D6AAC6A-C0E2-4B13-B5F5-B81CB17E9723.png)
![](BearImages/3E2EE8CD-D010-44F3-8DFE-9F5B90429A81-98199-000BD463E28FB63E/7879CD8C-F39E-4451-9EBA-765A4EC792E9.png)
- ::Against collaborations!::
![](BearImages/E6F8AEB5-658F-4328-9524-AD6622CEF342-98199-000BD47873568D78/14A46378-6FE8-486B-97BF-E67243191D24.png)
- ::This is a *very* complementary view of academic scientists::
- 
![](BearImages/0596ED5B-4BD0-4206-84BB-AFAA0F14F946-98199-000BD483EDDCF168/0FF25678-E617-42DC-9EE7-12780F755820.png)
	
![](BearImages/A0B7ACA2-4C5A-44B2-8EE4-FEEC5449FDCB-98199-000BD4C573068459/426362D2-9D98-4080-9AE9-8F9ED8CFE153.png)

### Published
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
- [[Professors do three or more jobs]] 

## Authors
[[EW Dikjstra]]
## Link
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pnck24xqtp9ikdv/ewdijkstra%20archive%20the%20strengths%20of%20the%20academic%20enterprise%20%28ewd%201175%29_2020-09-19%2016.13.52.pdf.pdf?dl=0



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# University professorships are the highest status jobs in academia
Which is kind of weird, considering how many other annoying things professors need to do. [[Professors do three or more jobs]].

Why is this?  Part of it is a feedback loop where the best researchers become professors so professorships are associated with the best research so the best researchers become professors. 

Hunch: in the research world in the past it was easier to go from not being a professor to being a professor so there was less pressure to get on tenure track asap. 



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Ben's working notes

Professors do three or more jobs

Links to this note