This is great! I agree with a lot of what you’re saying here and am glad someone is writing these ideas up. Two points of possible disagreement (or misunderstanding on my part perhaps) are:
I think that competitiveness can certainly be helpful, but too much can be detrimental. Specifically, I think competitiveness needs to go hand-in-hand with cooperation and transparency. Work needs to be shared, and projects need to encompass groups of people. Trying to get the most ‘effective research points’ from amongst your colleagues as you work together on a group project and communicate clearly and effectively with each other, great. Hiding your work and trying to wait until you have something unique and impressive to share before sharing anything at all, then reporting only the minimal amount of data to prove you did the impressive thing instead of sharing all the details and dead-ends you encountered along the way, not good.
Long-run research track records are necessary for success
I’m not sure how ‘long term’ you mean, but I think we do need a lot of new people coming into the field, and that we don’t have multiple decades for reputations to be gradually established. In particular, I think a failing that academia is vulnerable to is outdated paradigms getting stuck in power until the high-reputation long-established professors finally retire and no longer reject the new paradigm’s viewpoints in reviews and grant requests.
Coming from academia to industry was in a lot of ways a breath of fresh air for me, because I was working together with a team that actually wanted the project (making money for our company) to succeed. Rather than working with individual professors that wanted their name on papers in fancy journals. That is near, but not quite matching what should be the goal: ‘we want as much accurate knowledge about this science topic to be known as soon as possible by everyone, whether or not we get credit for it.’
Anyway, some thought as to how to get the best of both worlds (industry and academia) may be worthwhile.
This is great! I agree with a lot of what you’re saying here and am glad someone is writing these ideas up. Two points of possible disagreement (or misunderstanding on my part perhaps) are:
I think that competitiveness can certainly be helpful, but too much can be detrimental. Specifically, I think competitiveness needs to go hand-in-hand with cooperation and transparency. Work needs to be shared, and projects need to encompass groups of people. Trying to get the most ‘effective research points’ from amongst your colleagues as you work together on a group project and communicate clearly and effectively with each other, great. Hiding your work and trying to wait until you have something unique and impressive to share before sharing anything at all, then reporting only the minimal amount of data to prove you did the impressive thing instead of sharing all the details and dead-ends you encountered along the way, not good.
I’m not sure how ‘long term’ you mean, but I think we do need a lot of new people coming into the field, and that we don’t have multiple decades for reputations to be gradually established. In particular, I think a failing that academia is vulnerable to is outdated paradigms getting stuck in power until the high-reputation long-established professors finally retire and no longer reject the new paradigm’s viewpoints in reviews and grant requests.
Coming from academia to industry was in a lot of ways a breath of fresh air for me, because I was working together with a team that actually wanted the project (making money for our company) to succeed. Rather than working with individual professors that wanted their name on papers in fancy journals. That is near, but not quite matching what should be the goal: ‘we want as much accurate knowledge about this science topic to be known as soon as possible by everyone, whether or not we get credit for it.’
Anyway, some thought as to how to get the best of both worlds (industry and academia) may be worthwhile.