u/NeighborhoodFatCat

Published in Nature.

You might enjoy this paper.

Here are some existential thoughts related to academia and research I've had for a while. This is not ChatGPT generated and is mostly geared towards STEM.

1. While research is "infinite", practical research that has non-trivial, real-world impact is finite and has largely dried up in most fields. Low-hanging fruits are mostly picked over decades ago.
2. "All research is valuable (eventually)" is a lie. It is just not true. Valuable research is valuable, and all research that turned out to be valuable were deemed valuable to begin with. There is no "sudden impact".
3. When a field is considered to be "solved", this means there really isn't any more research left. There is no getting around this reality. Nobody cares about solving a solved problem.
4. Everybody is publishing junk, nobody is reading anything. We have the statistics now. Tons of research paper are sitting at under dozens view counts after a decade.
5. Many research groups/teams are trying to solve problems that are fundamentally better done in industry.
6. Slops are getting accepted. Slops are getting cited. Slops are building upon slops and creating entire research areas that shouldn't even exist.
7. The bar for publication nowadays is: "if something sounds true, then it doesn't hurt to be published". Never mind that true things can also be extremely trivial observations.
8. Academia is failing because it is failing their students by teaching them impractical things decoupled from the real-world, while pretending to be teaching students how to "think". Turns out being able to "think" is quite subjective.
9. Industry and academia are decoupling (or rather, divorcing). Industry ignores most of what academia is doing and chuckles when academics give each other awards for "contributions", especially for industry-oriented fields with tons of rules and regulations and real-life complexities. Academics are pretending they are changing the world while actually getting ignored by the real-world.
10. No matter how complex research gets, and no matter how much mathematical preliminaries, related works, technical terminologies and technological components are involved, you still need to fit all that into 6 pages.