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A comment on AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology. Parent comment

Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in... by calf on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @12:57AM (#25262790)
That's all nice in theory, but what's the compelling empirical evidence for corporate science vs academic research? A professor might conversely argue the open nature of scholarship and freedom of inquiry as being essential to basic science, and capitalist businesses fundamentally cannot provide that. So it goes back to empirical support. And last I checked, companies still need a pool of trained PhDs to choose from, and those come from academia, for good reason.
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Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in... by Jach on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @09:06PM (#25272489)
Elsewhere in the thread makes plenty of cases for corporate advances, even (or perhaps especially?) in the 20th century with e.g. Bell Labs et al. I think the empirical results are pretty good for corporate science.

As for 'needing' PhDs, I'm not sure. Having some can be convenient, yes, but in many cases not necessary. In some fields the only way to get caught up (i.e. no corporation will train you directly) may be with academic foundations but is a PhD necessary or just some relevant graduate work?

As an example N=1 to show a PhD is not needed always, Jeff Jonas formerly held the title of IBM Chief Scientist where he did some state of the art work in entity resolution. He didn't even finish high school.

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Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in... by calf on Thursday December 03, 2020 @07:55AM (#25288360)
That's an interesting way to make selection bias sound like "pretty good"; I disagree on the face of it, even if I am open to considering the idea of completely doing away with academia. I don't know and am skeptical, but intuitively, the day that would happen is the day that Nobel prizes are routinely awarded to FAANG companies and not to academics.

Further, since your original position was strongly that academia is useless, it is your onus to back up the implication that PhDs are not (generally) needed/useful, and using "well hmm, not sure if absolutely necessary" logic is fallacious and clouds the issue.

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