I'm not sure modern academia has very much left to do with scholarship in the sense quoted in this article.

This is unfortunate.

scoobertjtwiffl 2 hours ago | parent [-]

And what pray tell do you think modern academia is about? I have trouble understanding why so many Hacker Newsies have such disdain for a class of people whose main objective in life is to discover and share knowledge, and have sacrificed tremendous amounts of their time, and potential money, to do so.

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cperciva 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

By revealed preference, modern academia is about churning incremental papers in order to obtain tenure and research grants.

	▲	scoobertjtwiffl an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, those greedy guys just want to (1) keep their (underpaid) jobs and (2) have a bit more money to increase pay for their (underpaid) students. :) As with software engineers, and every other job, some academics are crappy and some are amazing. Let's not paint everybody with the same brush. As for incremental, well, the AI you're all so fond of was incremental academic research for a couple decades before it was this sudden world changing thing.

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appreciatorBus an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There are whole disciplines whose telos is now activism rather than knowledge production.

https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites...

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scoobertjtwiffl an hour ago | parent [-]

There are whole companies whose only goal is to make money for shareholders! Most people on HN work for them!

	▲	expedition32 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		And those companies make money from government sponsored R&D. and educational pipelines.