I imagine some of them think that the industrial sector could replace academic sector for foundational scientific researcher ("the free market solves all known problems"). I imagine others believe we are headed for a huge crash that affects the whole world, in a way that having a large academic scientific establishment will not help. Just go live in a bunker in NZ until society rebuilds itself, or whatever (Altman). I suspect a few of the folks are just looney, and don't think rationally (Thiel).

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cucumber3732842 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>some of them think that the industrial sector could replace academic sector for foundational scientific researcher

Probably can't happen without huge changes to the tax code IMO.

That said, I think bringing the amount of research science we have under the umbrella of academia has been bad because it's basically introduced a plausible deniability and reputation laundering layer that furthers the 3-way revolving door between academia, government and industry.

	▲	dekhn 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think industry can replace academic research for a more fundamental reason. It is rare for industry to willingly research things that are not on a direct path for profitability. Profitibility is calculated in a very local manner (direct cost and revenue); it doesn't consider indirect benefits, such as a basic biology research team discovering some fundamental new detail of biology which allows another team to do a better job discovering a new pharmaceutical drug. It does happen sometimes; my employer is a biotech/pharma that does a huge amount of basic research in addition to its focused pharma research, because they know that the basic research occasionally makes discoveries that greatly improve the pharma process. IIUC, industry does get R&D tax credits- but that's probably not a good incentive system for basic research in industry. What's happening now is that a small number of science-friendly rich people are making foundations/institutes that carry out basic research (Zuckerberg/Chan, Schmidt, and a few others) but it's unlikely those will completely supplant academic research at universities funded by NIH/NSF/DOE.