i've also been told that bell labs strength comes from the opposite of what you speak. from a culture of intellectual freedom. from a culture of "no committees." they hired the smartest people they could, let them work on what they wanted to, made sure they had every resource they needed, engaged socratically on project progress and otherwise stayed out of the way.
in terms of people using their own tools? that's specialization. if someone spends a lot of years on something, that's what they become an expert in, they will try and apply it and that's what they should do.
while i certainly believe that science can and should answer the calls of society to make the world a better place. it seems that time and time again this happens through the magic of basic research where scientists pursue their interests without regard to this ultimately producing discoveries that are sometimes combined and then give rise to practical and translational applications.
Covid vaccines were a recent example of similar pressures. The academia and the big pharma – the establishment – managed to create many effective vaccines in a record time, because people had real reasons to achieve something.
In an academic setting the person with the strongest argument generally has a long term advantage. That gets compared to the real world where entities like the churches, political parties & <insert any groups> just don't work that way. Many organisations can go for multiple generations with charisma being a superior strategy to argument. In academics they remember the people who went it alone with the most technically correct argument in the face of general opposition (names like Galileo and Socrates spring to mind, along with legions of unpopular and unlikable men who nevertheless earn places of high honour for their contributions to the world's knowledge).
The academics perpetuate that with a series of exclusionary, weird and crufty traditions that frequently date back centuries. It isn't perfect but it has proven an effective culture at grinding out slow productivity gains.
This is a remarkably naive view of how contemporary (and likely, any) academic institution or academia as a whole operates. Do you actually believe this?
Nevertheless they are much closer to the ideal than pretty much any community you can name. Especially on the scale the academy operates at in both time, space and social influence.
The academy condemns people who publish fraudulent studies. The US political class is mostly at peace with the legacy of a George W. Bush or equivalent. Mild admiration for his political technique. Relatively popular president compared to the last 2. This is a difference of culture.
> There's nothing magical about the academy.
There is nothing magic about anything. Magic isn't an influence over our daily lives. :)
Things are still different from each other in observable ways.
They all fail at that goal and become just another research institute no better or worse than the entities they purport to replace.
If you ask me why, it’s because they forget and do the one cardinal mistake - they hire professors from existing academia or industry. By the time you finish your PhD (leave alone the rest of Tenure track), it has been subconsciously indoctrinated in you to only care about YOURSELF. And worse, that the only way to do that is to specialize in a specific topic and then keep convincing everyone that this is the topic that will cure cancer, eradicate Covid, solve the South China Sea crisis and then finally eliminate aging altogether.
In the Manhattan project, the only qualifications required were that you were a physicist and smart one at that. You gave up on your own research and focused on what needed to be done whatever field it may be. In the cancer moonshot program every guy they brought in tried to cure cancer with his own tool. They always want to do their own thing. Guess what nothing has been cured and hundreds of billions have disappeared.
For better or mosty worse Neuralink seems to be the one place bucking the tend. Worse because they seem to be driven by a guy who really doesn’t care about humanity, is of extremely questionable ethics and what they’re trying to do will likely be used for bad things more than good anyway (once it leaves the clinical realm).
If someone gives me $50MM and asked me to cure cancer I’d probably run around the US top institutions and identify truly smart 1-2 year PhD students and recruit them with insane amounts and try to Train them “in the old ways” so to speak.