Yeah this article is pretty amazing. Fun what happens when you fuck over all your students :) :) :) For the first half of the article I was wondering where the grift would be and...lo and behold.The paper was published on 14 October 2020 to fanfare. Dias and a co-author, Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), also announced their new venture: Unearthly Materials, a Rochester-based company established to develop superconductors that operate at ambient temperatures and pressures.
Nobody shoots private industry in the foot like private industry.
I'm gonna push back on that idea a little. Firstly, this was an academic scandal, with an eye toward industry. But more to the point, I have worked in academia and private industry both fairly extensively, and I've found that private industry generally does more rigorous science (though often not as exciting). The caveat is that I work in biotech, so I don't know how that relates to physics. I would imagine it's not so different, though, because the incentive structures dictate everyone's behavior (but to be fair, biology experiments are notoriously opaque and hard to reproduce even when the hypothesis is rock solid, so there's a lot more room for obfuscation than in a harder experimental science). In academia the financial incentives come from grants, which generally result from publications, which generally result from high impact discoveries. So the incentive boils down to "make high impact discovery." In industry the incentive is to move product, and moving product doesn't happen if the product doesn't work. The product won't work if the science behind it is faulty. So the incentive is to weed out bad science, and only pursue the most reproducible work. This leads to a relative lack of risk taking, but generally more faith that what comes out of it is solid. I can tell you from years of experience that the attitude in academia is "defend this at all costs" and in industry it's "kill this at all costs". Totally different mentalities. But again this is biotech. I realize fully that not all industries follow this trend, especially, say, venture-backed tech. I would imagine that the academic side of tech is way more upstanding than the industry side, but that's a hunch based on little-to-no first hand knowledge.
I dunno, man. My comment was mostly a flippant quip, and yeah, of course I'll concede that most fields runs most of the gamut of incentive structures, but the distribution can vary widely between fields. If that makes sense. My discipline's definitely more of an outlier; very little overlap with industry. Ain't nobody but the taxpayer gonna foot the bill, because there's never going to be a product. It's pure research. Pretty sure I could convince people that the $2 billion dollars for the main experiment I work on was well spent, if I'm granted 30 minutes and a whiteboard. But anyway. The profit incentives that come with for-profit products seem problematic for a lot of people. Especially when the amount of potential profit is billions of dollars, like for a room temp superconductor. It's not like the guy in this article, Dias, thought he had anything worth two shits, but he still decided to ride the hype train for some short-term recognition. I'd be tempted to say "the system works!" if it didn't damage public trust and perception. Maybe his calculus his that he'll still be able to land a gig for a private company, because he's toast in academia. I know this is childish, oversimplified, and probably at least a bit of something I tell myself to feel better about having very little income compared to private industry salaries, but I still think there's a nobility in academia. At least in the hard sciences. No, the academic system is not as infallible as I once thought, but it's been really nice to realize that my peers aren't doing what they do for the money. Some of them make a very comfortable amount of money, don't get me wrong, but most of them could earn a lot more in industry, and for less work. Fuck tenured professorship though. I'm not sure where the stereotype of the lazy tenured prof comes from (humanities? note: this is not my perception, I'm trying to guess common opinion), but half of the profs I had in physics seemed miserable. Overworked. Health problems. What is "this"? All of the best researchers that I know in the public sector have very little issue with taking an L and moving on if they were wrong. Again, there's probably a major difference inside academia between fields with a lot of industry overlap vs. not. I'm cool with not a huge income, but I think having kids would change the game. Already made the choice not to ever do that.I can tell you from years of experience that the attitude in academia is "defend this at all costs" and in industry it's "kill this at all costs".
“This” is whatever hypothesis you’ve tied your success to. Some of the issues I’ve discussed above maybe are unique to pharma, where I work. And in no way did I mean to imply that academia isn’t a good career populated with almost all good people. Just that the incentive structure, which can affect good people too, is such that it encourages putting one’s best data forward, say. This is obviously a ton harder in a hugely collaborative gazillion dollar field such as the one you work in…Lot of small time scientists work sort of on an island. Also, the bigger the claim, the easier it is to poke holes in. The superconductor thing reminds of this thing that happened maybe 10 years ago where a researcher in my field claimed she could make induced stem cells by just bathing them in acid in some specific way. Took like 5 minutes to rip to pieces. Some people really want that paper in Nature. For real don’t mind me though. I’m just kind of a jaded asshole because of some experiences I’ve had when my (very well connected and basically bulletproof) data didn’t align with the big lab’s big money hypothesis. They’ll skewer you.