Comment by malfist
13 days ago
You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because some PhD students make "low quality science" doesn't mean we end academia. After all, who is going to do the high quality science if you get rid of all the scientists?
Lots of scientists work in industry. Look at AI, rocketry, semiconductors, drug design, robotics, anything related to manufacturing. Academics are in the minority in these fields. You could eliminate all such jobs and there'd be plenty of science being done.
That's applied science. You don't have companies doing basic research because it isn't immediately profitable. You have to do both, basic research to learn things, and applied science to utilize it and make it commercially valuable.
Businesses have a long history of funding research with long time horizons. Look at quantum computing.
Whether that's basic or applied, well who really cares? The distinction is an academic invention because there's no definition of what basic research means and how it's different to applied. Was the transformer algorithm basic research? It's certainly become a fundamental general algorithm, but read the paper and it was designed to help Google Translate.