by godelski | 2025-05-28 00:00:49+00:00
Ideally universities were where you could go to research whatever the fuck you wanted.

Historically there was no publish or perish paradigm and you could do this. People did get kicked out for years of no production but it wasn't uncommon for researchers to take a long time to publish anything. Usually it was "hey, just show us what you've been doing". Getting researchers to communicate to the rest of the community. The problem wasn't people sitting around doing nothing, it was them being caught up in their work and not sharing their progress.

Now, things got flipped upside-down. You get fired if you don't publish fast enough. We missed the reason we started measuring publication rates in the first place.

So now we have the inverse problem. People are trying to publish too early. It compounded though. We now changed the peer-review process. That used to be you publish and then peers... review... Responding with papers of their own and such. Journals were less picky, mostly rejecting works for major mistakes or plagiarism. Other than that... well... you can't really verify the correctness of a paper just by reading it... The purpose of journals was that we didn't have the internet and it would cost a lot of money to send every paper to every library. Before, you'd literally just take your "pre-print" and put it in a section of the library at your university where your university peers would make comments. Now we don't talk to the researcher who's next door.

And we now have this thing of novelty that's completely subjective and compounding with how obvious something is only after hearing it and highly dependent on how well it is communicated. Frankly, if I communicate something really well it should be obvious and you should think that you could have come up with it yourself. That's because you understand it! But now that is a frequent reason to reject. We think we can predict impact of work but there's tons of examples where highly influential works got rejected for lack of novelty or seeming trivial. Hell, a paper that got the Nobel prize in economics got rejected multiple times for these reasons. Both getting called "too obvious" AND "obviously false"[0]. We're just really bad at this lol Those rejections don't make papers better, they just waste time resubmitting and trying to rewrite to figure out how to win at some slot machine.

Academia still works and is still effective, but that doesn't mean there aren't issues. Certainly there are often fewer pressures in an academic setting to do research than at a company. The Uni only cares that you produce papers. Even if it is a misaligned metric, the incentive is to just pick easier problems. The business needs you to make something with __short term business value__. Bigger companies can give more freedom, but the goals are different.

Really, the problem can be seen through the Technology Readiness Level chart[1]. Businesses rarely want to research anything below TRL 5. Really you want to be at 7 or 8. Where the problem with academia is the incentives make it so you want to be around TRL 3 or 4, which leaves TRL 1 and 2 vacant. It still happens, just less of it. Tenure can't fix this if you still got grad student who must publish or perish.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons#Critical...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level