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The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia

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146 points MaysonL | 1 comments | 12 May 25 02:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.263s | source
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gotoeleven ◴[12 May 25 04:01 UTC] No.43959536[source]▶
I didn't look at every one on the list of these 1000 NSF grants that were cancelled:

https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...

but I think if you skim the titles you can sense a theme.

Here's the very first one: "Cambio: A Professional Development Approach for Building Latinx-focused Cultural Competence in Informal Science Education Institutions" for a whopping 2.8 million dollars.

This is not basic research, this is not important research, this is left wing politics parasitically attached to scientific institutions.

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userbinator ◴[12 May 25 04:19 UTC] No.43959617[source]▶
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.

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1. AStonesThrow ◴[12 May 25 05:19 UTC] No.43959858[source]▶
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.