Thread by @alexandrosM

Take people who are supposed to be our foremost independent thinkers, put them in a structure that suppresses independent thought, and let's see what happens.

https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1407607032853766150

I'm increasingly getting convinced that we need a truth-accumulation structure that is outside and beside what is called science today. And to get this out of the way, I've got a PhD and a double-digit H-index.

I started a startup rather than continuing in academia because it was clearly the better way to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. I just could not see how chasing grants and doing admin work, with a break for teaching, could possibly lead to new knowledge found

Importantly, for a computer science / distributed systems PhD, with no budget for software engineering, and only code written to barely work to get a paper out, written by people who were smart but not disciplined, there is no chance of compounding progress. Just little spikes.

We literally take our smartest researchers and tell them "you did great work in your PhD, how about we promote you to lecturer, drown you in admin, teaching and grant writing, so you have no time to do what you are amazing at.

To top it off, you'll make no money, so you have no chance of doing anything independently in the future. However, there's hope for you! If you manage to please enough grant-giving institutions with your proposals, you may get a budget to support some green PhD students.

They will take years to get anywhere, and will be out of the university by the time they hit their stride, but it's something, right? Now, you seem not to be doing well with this grant getting business. It may be that you are reading the RFPs a bit too literally.

Perhaps if you get to know some of the higher ups in the right agencies and foundations, they may help elucidate what the grant needs to touch on. Can a more senior colleague connect you? Oh, they don't think your research is worthwhile as your approach is non-traditional. Tough.

And I haven't gotten to the cases of blatant dishonesty and falsification yet. Maybe another thread for another day.