Academia is sufficiently dysfunctional that if you want to make a great scientific discover(y) you should basically do it outside of academia.
I feel like this point is a bit confused.
A person believing this essentially has to have a kind of “Wherever I am is where the party’s at” mindset, in which case he ought to have an instrumental view of academia. Like obviously, if I want to maximize the time I spend reading math books and solving math problems, doing it inside of academia would involve wasting time and is suboptimal. However, if my goal is to do particle accelerator experiments, the easiest way to do this may be to convince people who have one to let me use it, which may mean getting a PhD. Since getting a PhD will still involve spending a bunch of time studying (if slightly suboptimally as compared to doing it outside of academia) then this might be the way to go.
See, we still think that academia is fucked, we just think they have all the particle accelerators. We only have to think academia is not so fucked that it’s a thoroughly unreasonable source of particle accelerator access. We can still publish all our research open access, or even just on our blog (or also on our blog).
I feel like this point is a bit confused.
A person believing this essentially has to have a kind of “Wherever I am is where the party’s at” mindset, in which case he ought to have an instrumental view of academia. Like obviously, if I want to maximize the time I spend reading math books and solving math problems, doing it inside of academia would involve wasting time and is suboptimal. However, if my goal is to do particle accelerator experiments, the easiest way to do this may be to convince people who have one to let me use it, which may mean getting a PhD. Since getting a PhD will still involve spending a bunch of time studying (if slightly suboptimally as compared to doing it outside of academia) then this might be the way to go.
See, we still think that academia is fucked, we just think they have all the particle accelerators. We only have to think academia is not so fucked that it’s a thoroughly unreasonable source of particle accelerator access. We can still publish all our research open access, or even just on our blog (or also on our blog).