/sci/ - Science & Math

Universities are broken. The number of administrators keeps rising, while the number of professors and professor compensation stagnates. But what is happening inside universities? Those overpaid administrators, to evaluate the highly educated professors, pay attention to only one number: # of publications.

What does this mean? That your shitty study with fake numbers that you managed to squeeze inside a "high impact" journal is worth as much as a theory-building breakthrough that will change the world forever. I will challenge any of you to look at any set of even decades-old papers and see how many of them actually had any impact or are even from lines of research that are continued to this day!

What does this mean? That universities select for mediocrity. Who can crank out as many garbage papers as possible, not who can make the breakthrough. And the researcher must keep doing this unless they want to lose their job. A famous example is how Andrew Wiles would dedicate only the latest hours in the night to Fermat's last theorem because if he actually spent a decade not publishing anything, he would be out in no time. Even if he was closing in one of the most important results in algebraic number theory ever.

Consider now a new class of researcher. The "academic-practitioner". This is a highly educated individual who actually practices a profession that compensates him proportionally to the measure of his education (finance, management), but who (like Wiles) dedicates some time every night to actually important problems. Imagine yourself! By day you are a prestigious, important person, making decisions that will steer huge corporations and millions, even billions of dollars. By night you enjoy the privilege of wealth by sitting down and contemplating, like the lawyer Leibnitz who'd practice the beauty of mathematics in his spare time and then, just like that, discovered Calculus. Who do you want to be?