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A comment on You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation.

Re:You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation by bvc35 on Friday August 10, 2018 @02:57PM (#17735899)
The bulk of academic work is chasing grants, not "curiosity driven research". If universities want professors not to leave in droves to tech companies that will consistently give them funding and cut away the bullshit that eats up the majority of a professor's time, they should try competing, rather than bemoaning that professors are no longer following the sacred path of academic asceticism.
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Re:You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation by Fomite on Friday August 10, 2018 @07:43PM (#17737470)
While I would like to stop chasing grants as much as the next tenure track assistant professor, I don't think it's fair to characterize "the bulk" of academic work as chasing grants.

If anything, it's responding to emails ;)

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Re:You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation by _emacsomancer_ on Friday August 10, 2018 @10:13PM (#17737902)
Emails and sitting in meetings (e.g. https://twitter.com/research_tim/status/1017506139137826819 ).
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Re:You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation by stochastician on Friday August 10, 2018 @03:26PM (#17736094)
I do not think this is what the piece is arguing. Rather, the concern is that by creating these 80/20 splits, the core values of the university are compromised. There's nothing a priori wrong with industrial research, it's this attempted hybrid that's problematic. Hence the title, "you cannot serve two masters".

Quoting the piece, "Part of the point of being a big company is to control your environment by crushing, containing, or co-opting inconvenient innovations." I think the author is arguing that attitude is fundamentally at odds with the values of the academy.

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Re:You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation by rlkf on Friday August 10, 2018 @04:26PM (#17736492)
If BigCompany expects its research center to crush inconvenient innovations, they're not really running a research center, they're just calling it that because they like the titles.
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Re:You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation by hnbroseph on Friday August 10, 2018 @04:40PM (#17736575)
i read "inconvenient" as "competing". if your r&d can lead to a few choice patents (or you "just" buy them) you can sometimes hamstring competition or get little graft by leeching off competitor's developments.
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Re:You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation by buth_lika on Friday August 10, 2018 @10:44PM (#17737986)
The point of being a big company, not the point of running a research center.
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Re:You Cannot Serve Two Masters: The Harms of Dual Affiliation by Miltnoid on Friday August 10, 2018 @03:40PM (#17736192)
Top conferences accept papers with a large expected impact, not necessarily papers the authors were really curious about. It's deeper than merely what time is spent on, it's also where accolades are given. The facebook thing shows real problems to the researchers and provides good data, good starts to high impact papers.
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