On the Use of a Life
&gt; academia is a lousy place to do novel research<p>This observation seems a bit at odds with the abundance of core technologies that originated in academia. The ENIAC (and a good chunk of the history of early computers), the internet, the world wide web (counting CERN as an academic institution here), most of the core ideas in programming language design (most programming languages we use aren&#x27;t academic, but most of their ideas can be traced back to academia), most of the history of AI (including neural nets), probably most published work on algorithms and data structures, ...<p>And that&#x27;s just talking about CS. This doesn&#x27;t necessarily disprove the author&#x27;s point: most of the things I&#x27;ve listed are quite old, academia may have worsened in the meantime. But I think they glossed over the main advantage of academia over entrepreneurship: shielding the researcher from market effects. Although investors can do the same thing, as a system academia is more reliable, and for some technologies which take very long to develop or are too hard to monetize (such as algorithms) I don&#x27;t think entrepreneurship offers an alternative.<p>EDIT (small addition): I think the author is also a bit quick to generalize from &quot;I had a lousy experience in academia&quot; to &quot;academia is a lousy place to do nover research&quot;.