all right we are live I am back at home I am recovering from a cold little bit
so i might sound a little funny but let's go for it so I want to talk a bit about
why I think that the kind of university based academic system for producing
research is actually a pretty good and durable institution over the past you
know century or or even more and I think that this is an interesting time to
think about this because there have been recently been a lot of you know
criticisms of academia and you know thoughts about alternative models of
producing or funding research or basic research and I think it's interesting to
think about a lot of the stuff and I think a lot of the criticisms are you
know they do have merit and they're important to bring up I definitely think
that and also I think that brainstorming alternatives and trying out alternative
models is great like I totally encourage you know the more ideas and the more
experiments we run with these institutions I think that the better off
society will be but I think that you know I want to kind of you know being
part of the traditional university based academic system right now I want to kind
of give my views from that side these I think that they haven't often been heard
because it's often a lot cooler to be anti-establishment right to be like oh
yeah we're like totally going against the man we're gonna be really indie and
we're gonna do stuff a completely radically different way and it's kind of
boring to be like yeah I'm part of the man I'm part of the institution and
here's how you know things are here's the status quo it seems very stodgy or
conservative or just boring and status quo so I'm gonna play that voice right
now and we'll see where it goes so I am you know obviously in a traditional
academic institution doing basic research so I think that this actually
came out of some conversations I had with a podcast episode with Steve Krause
which I'll post soon about independent versus traditional academic research and
during the course of that conversation I came up with this this tidbit here
which I'll try to summarize so I think the basic idea is here's a simplified
model of how you know impact I guess ultimately is made in if you're doing
basic research right if you're doing research that is not directly applied to
something so the model I have is that it's a numbers game that let's say there
are I'm just making up a number let's say there are ten thousand people in a
field in a particular field ten thousand people this year who are going to be
publishing papers about their research they're doing independent research
projects you know they might be correlated you know there I may get
similar topics ten thousand and they each publish one paper about their
research project and of course some of these papers will be similar some of
these papers will have similar themes be different takes on the same same idea
but let's say this year there are ten thousand papers published great and then
next year there are ten thousand more papers published great the next year
there are ten thousand more papers published great so out of the ten
thousand papers published this year I'm just again this is a hypothetical model
chances are that in ten years time you know maybe ninety percent of those ten
thousand papers are gonna be irrelevant they're kind of intellectual dead ends
they didn't really lead anywhere intellectually so out of those maybe
only what a hundred papers remain right a hundred out of the ten thousand remain
somewhat promising or interesting and those 100 that is at ten percent
yeah that ten percent in a decade's time will have seeded other maybe interesting
paths to follow kind of other interesting things and move the field
forward in a meaningful way and then maybe in another ten years or twenty
years maybe out of that original ten thousand maybe only one percent or half
a percent or 0.1 percent maybe only one paper or five papers or ten papers from
that ten thousand ends up having like truly groundbreaking impact let's just
say five out of ten thousand right is that half half a percent I think
when my math is math is off whatever okay so let's say five papers out of
that 10,000 this year or even one paper out of the 10,000 a year let's go really
really small ends up having a dramatic effect on society somehow whether it's
leading to the invention of a new kind of technology or affecting global policy
or affecting economics or affecting how people see the world or or inspiring
someone or a group of people to make social change in a positive way
something groundbreaking right it's one out of that 10,000 papers or something
okay so then you can you can think about and and you know critics can be like oh
wow that seemed really inefficient like what are all these 9990 other
researchers doing with their time like why did they just waste their time
making stuff that was totally useless well the the you know my kind of my
response to that is that they didn't know that it was gonna be useless at the
time right nobody knows what the ultimate impact of their work is gonna
be and if you told people you have to work on something that must have impact
in ten twenty years or so that that just is requiring you to predict the future
right and like no one can feasibly do that so instead what a healthy fiber is
it seeds the world with ten thousand let's say hypothetically ten thousand
new interesting validated ideas every year that's been experimented on that's
been prototype that's inbuilt that's been tested that's been validated that's
been written up in a very rigorous way put them all out there fully knowing
that all of us in this profession know that we are probably going to be one of
the 9999 people right we're probably not gonna be that one that's gonna
completely change the world that's okay because collectively as a field if we
all keep moving forward doing things that are interesting to us and maybe to
the world we seed the world with these ten thousand new papers and new valid
ideas every year then eventually that one will come up somewhere but it's
probably not gonna be mine it's probably not gonna be the people I knows but it's
gonna be somebody in the field and if we don't foster that system there
will be zero things that will eventually change the world right so that's the
model I'm working with now now given this model that means that what with
really I think vital in this model is is independence and and I mean that in a
few ways one it means that I feel like ideally those ten thousand people or ten
thousand research groups or 10,000 things producing publications should
work in independent places as much as possible they shouldn't all be working
for one institution because if they're all working for one institution then
you're gonna not have as much independence in thought and in in styles
and in approaches and and this is just just lack of diversity right um you know
of course there are large companies and institutions that fund research that
have you know really big research arms that have quite a bit of diversity in
terms of their portfolio what people do but still it's not gonna be as diverse
as if these people are in different places running their own labs and doing
their own thing so that means what we want independence in terms of location
and like place where they work so ideally you want these ten thousand
people to be distributed and decentralized so that they can be
independently more or less coming up with ideas so you want independence but
at the same time you also want some kind of community and cohesion because you
don't want people going off and all sorts of different random tangents you
want some kind of it some kind of community that's built up so that
there's some kind of a coupling so that they're armed they kind of reinforce
each other give each other feedback in this kind of academic community forms
the other form independence I think you want is you want independence from
direct economic or corporate interest right so ideally you want your work to
not be directly impacted by any individual one company's interests and
such and you know there are companies that have been able to run research labs
that you know that they can't they try as much as possible to keep things as
dependent as possible but it you know it works to varying degrees right like it's
still not gonna be as good as if you're in an institution that's not associate
with a company in terms of just pure independence I get companies don't get
me wrong you know companies do a lot of really interesting research both in
basic research and in Applied Research I have many colleagues who do really good
work in that but I think as a whole if your entire portfolio is company back
you're still gonna have some biases and some some kind of some kind of skew in
some kind of places you don't cover which is you know that's why I think
having a vibrant portfolio of Industry work and also University work is good
anyways my I'm running out of time here but the punchline here is that I think
it's really important to have this sort of independent decentralized institution
set of institutions where people can do this work at this kind of scale and
currently in our current society at least in the United States where I live
and work the model has been that these independent research labs are affiliated
with universities and the reason why is that the universities provide employment
for professors and research staff to give them a paycheck via things like
teaching academic service and other sorts of things and an institutional
kind of support for them lab space student access you know all the sort of
stuff and then that is what enables them to do this sort of independent
decentralized work so in order to get let's say that hypothetical ten thousand
papers a year you need you know ten thousand universities I'm just making up
a number again you know you you want all of them ideally to be in different
institutions around the country with different types of students with
different kinds of work surrounded by different cultures etc etc of course
this is an idealized model you know the real world has a lot of couplings and
dependencies but that's kind of what we're aiming toward and I think that the
issue fundamentally with a of alternative models at least in our
current world at issue is alternate models is that they cannot achieve that
scale right like how are you gonna get up to 10,000 right you can fund one or
two or three or four or ten or at most a dozen or two dozen people on in very
independent settings outside of say a university or a large or a large company
but the thing is you're not going to get to that scale 10,000 right and and my
point is if you don't get to that large number that large and it's very hard to
see the field with enough new ideas to to be able to kind of survive that in
end of a bill ten thousand and one culling that's gonna happen in a few
years right like if you fund an independent group of five people chances
are those five people are not gonna be the ones who are gonna hit something
that's really impactful down the line um it's the same thing like chances are I
am NOT going to be the one to hit something really impactful I aligned but
I'm in a system where there are 10,000 of us and one of us is going to hit
something interesting that's gonna be impactful down the line so you know the
issue with funding stuff in a very independent setting is that you just
don't get to that number so that it's just really hard to actually by
definition do do long term impactful work because in basic research the
harder the research is the less just the less certainty that you'll know that
your work will be impactful down the line and without I think a nice coat
without it without large and scalable enough and distribute enough institution
that we currently have in our university system it's just very hard to be able to
make that impact at scale I'll talk more about this I think in other videos I
think that that independent efforts in research can make an impact if they're
targeted really really specifically or in a very applied area but I think that
it's gonna be very hard for them to make the kind of impact that people can make
in a traditional academic setting just you know not because people are smarter
or more capable or anything you know this is not a value judgment about
individual people this is just just an argument from scale like if
unless you can find alternative model that scales as well as our current
university system at the moment it's gonna be really hard and you know who
knows what's gonna happen universities in the next decades or centuries or
whatever you know in a century from now it could be a really really different
model for all I know but for now I think that it is really hard to beat that
scale and that decentralization and that independence from individual corporate
interests that that the current university academic system gives us for
pushing this research for it so that you know any one research group such as
myself you know it we could be doing some interesting work if there's some
work my biggest work might not be good but like given this distributed nature
in a lot of groups I think the good stuff will eventually rise to the top
okay until next time
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