The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia

Besides the usual DEI stuff, some of those titles sound like the output of a stochastic generator trained on buzzwords:

"HSI Implementation and Evaluation Project: Using Peer-Enhanced Blockchain-Based Learning Environments to Promote Student Engagement and Retention"

"Blockchain-Based Learning Environments". That's my WTF of the day.

You do realize VCs were putting billions into this shit a few years ago right?

Maybe DOGE should have shut down YCombinator.

VCs also put lots of money into Theranos, it doesn’t make it a good idea.

Theranos was a great idea. The problem was that they couldn't make it work and they lied about that to everyone involved. That's different from it not being a good idea in the first place.

I used to play on a TinyMUSH server where many of the other players were buddies from back in my college days (early 90s). Despite being "all grown up" we still liked to program toys that did silly things, demonstrating to our peers that we had senses of humor, and parodying the silly academic world around us.

One of my friends designed a toy that was called a "Thesis Generator" and whenever it was activated, it selected various words from a list to create a ridiculous word-salad Master's Thesis title. Honestly, most of its output was more or less believable and less absurd than some of the real theses I've seen, written by real students, and probably even passed peer review.

It seems like the pressure is on both ends, for academics to produce something really novel and tightly-scoped, and so they're going out of their way to find the perfect niche to research, and the academic review team wants to read something really Impressive and Scholarly, and those incentives tend to disconnect them from things like reality and sanity.

A good idea is an idea that possible to turn into reality, else it is just an idea.

But that's what venture capital and research should be about, financing ideas to see if they can be realized.

I mean, the people who put money into Theranos later should have done better due diligence, but I don't fault the initial investment.

I wonder how much of this is “don’t hat the player, hate the game.”

As a society, we decided that academics must get funding outside of their department. We also chose that funding bodies liked blockchain for reasons unknown. There is probably a professor somewhere who is working on peer incentives to support education, and realized the work would get funded if they stored the incentives in a blockchain rather than a database. If this professor had stronger professional ethics - someone else would have the same realization.

Is it the professor, the department, or the funding agencies fault?

Fortunately, VCs weren't doing that with taxpayer's money.

> Is it the professor, the department, or the funding agencies fault?

Like so many things that are being turned upside down nowadays, I think the author already answers it:

> Before we go any further, let me be clear: this isn’t about […] ideologies.

The author did not give arguments for this claim.

Theranos wasn’t a great idea or even a good idea. The “idea” was

1. Get a drop of blood 2. … 3. Cure all diseases

That’s not even an idea. It’s just magical thinking.

Given that the highest-earning income tax bracket's tax rate in the US fell from ~70% to 37% since the 70s, one could argue that VC money used to be taxpayer's money.

Nice visualisation here: https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/personal-finance/hi...

How do you know if you can or cannot turn the idea into reality without trying?

Not really. That might pertain to angels but not to VCs. They don't operate with private (individual)owned, post-tax dollars. They are businesses and operate with pre-tax, business money, not even theirs - but bank loans.

This. Even worse: every good idea is the one that looks bad to a layman, otherwise there won't be an opportunity there: if an idea is obviously good, a lot of people already came up with it a long time ago.

No it wasn’t. They never promised anything like that.

Theranos technology was the proposition to run smart blood tests on very small volumes of blood drawn from patients on-site. That’s really about it. They couldn’t deliver this service but they never promised any cures, bro.

By conducting a throughout literature review over possible methods, consulting the experts, and checking if your proposed method is within laws of physics?

I agree. If Albert Einstein had gone with your sensible approach he could have quickly ruled out his silly idea of relativity as impossible and gone back to his more important work of approving patent applications.

Venture capital is not a good way to fund theoretical work. And Einstein didn't lie about his achievements.

It was implied which led to fraud convictions. Elizabeth Holmes made misleading claims that gave the impression their technology could revolutionize disease detection and management for example by speaking about a future where people could test themselves regularly and catch disease

The fraud in Theranos for which Holmes et al were ultimately convicted was running regular blood tests (i.e., those any certified lab would run) on samples which were too small so that the blood tests gave essentially random data. Yes, they made much more outlandish claims about what they could eventually do (and at times veered into making those claims about what they could do at the present), but the actual fraud was that they couldn't even do what they were certified to do.

That there could be useful LLMs was theoretically argued about; essentially VC funding answered what wasn’t happening in academia.

In the case of LLMs I would say that VC funding made the engineering possible. The theoretical breakthroughs were largely made in IBM and Google. OpenAI certainly made some improvements to architecture and training, but ultimately they implemented a refined version of a transformer-based LLM.