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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28978 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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What exactly is a superstar researcher? What kind of deliverable or output do they produce?

The cynical side of me is thinking that there really is nothing of value being generated here. That it’s just another mechanism to funnel more tuition, endowment, and federal funny money into the hands of friends and allies.

What exactly is a superstar researcher? What kind of deliverable or output do they produce?

To the university, their main value is prestige (but also occasionally lucrative patents). For society as a whole, it greatly depends on the field the researcher works in. In humanities, it is sometimes hard to quantify the worth of a researcher's output but in science and engineering, it is often more clear-cut. To take one recent example, Jennifer Doudna became a superstar researcher for her part in discovering CRISPR, which seems likely to have a lot of value to society.

In my opinion, you have a level of cynicism about academic research that does not seem warranted. I agree that a lot of research is not useful and some is also in service of a political agenda, but over time a lot of tremendously useful/important scientific discoveries and inventions have come out of academia. I heard that once, superstar researchers in physics even invented a new type of bomb.

I heard that once, superstar researchers in physics even invented a new type of bomb.

That was over 75 years ago. What have they done for us lately?

How about the discovery of graphene or the development of quantum computing? Going back a little further, how about high temperature superconductors (not to be confused with room temperature superconductors)?

Graphene brings us up to 1961, though it's small potatoes compared to nukes. High temperature superconductors came out of industry. Quantum computing also largely came out of industry.

  1. I should have said something more like "techniques for producing of graphene" (early 2000s) than discovery of graphene (1961 as you said).
  2. I don't think you can seriously argue that quantum computing "largely came out of industry." The idea was, in the first place, entirely dreamt up by academics like Richard Feynman, David Deutsch, Umesh Vazirani and others. The first truly convincing application of quantum computers was the factoring algorithm discovered by Peter Shor, another academic. Quantum error correction, which is necessary for quantum computers to work in practice, was also developed by academics. And even experimentalists actually building quantum computers for corporations, like John Martinis, were trained by and worked in academia until fairly recently (Martinis was hired by Google in 2014, but had already worked on quantum computing in academia for years).
  3. You're mostly right about high temperature superconductors, but even there, the discoverers were trained in academia.

Thanks for answering. I’d suggest that cynicism does seem warranted after the past few years.

Someone downthread suggested that there’s not a lot of difference between the superstar researcher and the median researcher. I really have no way to know if this is true or not. Your response talks about all the benefits of university research. I’m not suggesting that there is zero benefit to university research. I’m just highly skeptical that the marginal benefit of this spousal hire policy is realy worth the cost. Of course academics will defend the policy. From the outside though, it sounds like bullshit.

I don't totally disagree with you. As I said, I think academia produces a lot of things of zero, or even negative, value and a lot of humanities research doesn't impress me much. I'm also pretty open to arguments that as a society we invest too much in academia or that academia should be greatly reorganized to be more cost-effective. I could even understand someone who believes that the net benefits of academic research are not worth the cost (though I disagree). But the view you seemed to express above, that superstar researchers don't produce any deliverables and that academia produces nothing of value, seems clearly wrong to me. My experience has been that in science and engineering, superstar researchers generally do have impressive achievements (though this is not quite the same thing as claiming that their achievements are worth the amount of money spent on them; I believe that too, but it's a different claim).

As I said in my original post, I personally am ambivalent about spousal hiring.

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