Comment by cperciva
13 hours ago
By revealed preference, modern academia is about churning incremental papers in order to obtain tenure and research grants.
13 hours ago
By revealed preference, modern academia is about churning incremental papers in order to obtain tenure and research grants.
Yeah, those greedy guys just want to (1) keep their (underpaid) jobs and (2) have a bit more money to increase pay for their (underpaid) students. :) As with software engineers, and every other job, some academics are crappy and some are amazing. Let's not paint everybody with the same brush. As for incremental, well, the AI you're all so fond of was incremental academic research for a couple decades before it was this sudden world changing thing.
I think they're criticizing the system, not the people who participate in the system.
While i don't disagree that there's a problem with publishing for the sake of publishing, we really do need the incremental papers. GPS (the evergreen science example) is the result of incremental papers starting in the 40s with grants for atomic clocks