> The big advances all seem to come from big corporate labs
That's an interesting claim, and I'd encourage you to find some statistics to verify this hypothesis, because in my experience, that doesn't ring true.
From my subjective perspective, it seems that academic and industrial research labs innovate at roughly the same rate per-capita. I was a PhD student when Microsoft was dominant, hiring the best faculty from all top-4 CS schools (CMU, Berkeley, MIT, Stanford), and they certainly produced a lot of papers, and did seem to dominate conferences, but the actual innovation in computing came from Apple and startups, which did not have "research labs". Microsoft, including its giant industrial research lab, certainly was not the driver of innovation in computing!
And here are some numbers to back that up: Microsoft's R&D budget in 2011 was 10x the budget of the entire NSF -- for all sciences. Yet, Microsoft was clearly not producing more than 10x the scientific output of all NSF-funded academic science.
So it would help to have some statistics for the claim that industrial research innovates more than academic research. They certainly pay more, and often hire more people, but per-capita they don't seem any more productive or healthier than academics.
Apple does very little research, in the conventional scientific sense we're discussing here, I think that's pretty uncontroversial. They produce few if any papers. They are (or were, under Jobs) very good at coming up with new ideas that strongly appeal to the buyer and which got them a reputation for innovation, but which probably wouldn't be considered clever enough to be research papers. At least not top tier papers.
For example, exposé is a widely imitated feature and was considered very innovative at the time, but it wouldn't be seen as serious computer science. The iPhone is/was widely considered innovative but had basically no new research tech in it, given that capacitive touch screens weren't developed by Apple. It was just a really nicely implemented mobile computer. Actually the innovations in the iPhone are nearly all packagings of tech developed by third party firms that Apple then buys or buys exclusivity rights too. At least, that's true in my view.
Microsoft's R&D budget I think is also a victim of definitions. Software firms normally report all product development as R&D, right? I think these days they may even report datacenter builds as R&D. We can see this on Microsoft's investor website:
"In addition to our main research and development operations, we also operate Microsoft Research. Microsoft Research is one of the world's largest computer science research organizations"
i.e. the kind of university type "scientific" research we're discussing here is only a sideshow in Microsoft's R&D budget.
You're right to call me out though; I don't have any stats to prove that industrial research does more than academic research. It's not a statistical argument to begin with, just my own own perception ("all seem to"). I read a lot of CS papers and the best ones have corporate email addresses at the top - the second best, a mix of corporate and university addresses, the third best, only university addresses. If you asked the man on the street to name the biggest innovations in computing in the past 20 years they'd probably say things like, uh, smartphones, YouTube, AI, blockchain, etc etc. All things that have little connection to universities, with AI being the closest but it was Google that revived that whole field and has been pushing it forward ever since. Neural nets weren't receiving much investment by the academic community before that.
Anyway, that's CS. CS really isn't the problem here. The pseudo-science is elsewhere.
I absolutely agree that a lot of science can be done very cheaply. Some of the most impactful papers were done by people who weren't in an institutional framework, even in the modern era (Satoshi being an obvious example). Additionally it seems most of the really problematic fields are ones where the budget gets dispersed over large number of people writing very cheap low budget papers, hence millions of social science papers with tiny sample sizes.
I'm a big supporter of industrial research though. Many great papers come out of industrial labs. Modern computing is practically defined by such research. The big advances all seem to come from big corporate labs (Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, Google, DeepMind, IBM, Sun, Microsoft, etc). The research is powerful because it's funded by people who expect some sort of meaningful results and supervise the work to ensure it doesn't go completely off the rails. Academic institutions have developed this totally hands off attitude that makes research more or less unaccountable to any standard beyond "will it get published", which in turn can be rephrased as "are the claims interesting".