Fund ideas, not pedigree, to find fresh insight
I think people are hesitant to over-criticise academia. Maybe they can already hear the resulting anti-science sentiment, and fear losing hard fought ground if academia is called into question.<p>However, I think there are serious signs that we should be looking for radical changes to the metstructures of academia. They&#x27;re not necessarily related, but they point to something being really wrong.<p>First is the replicability crisis. Have we actually been accumulating knowledge in fields where this is bad? Do we know more about human behaviour due to the human behaviour research done in the last generation? What&#x27;s the point of all these &quot;more research needed&quot; conclusions. The process of academic publishing and peer reveiw directs this whole thing, and it doesn&#x27;t seem to be all that well directed..<p>While we&#x27;re on publishing, everyone in academia complains bitterly about the publish-or-perish problem and about grant&#x2F;funding politics.<p>One of the big complaints about  grants is that senior academics spend all their time on grants and administration. Success in many fields is more a function of being good on administration and politics, than being good at research.<p>While we&#x27;re on administration... the number of administrators (not teachers or researchers) has skyrocketed over the last 2 generations.<p>Ultimately, I think that the &quot;scientific method&quot; in practice is in large part embodied the academic publishing system. ...the algorithm determining how science works.