Thread: “Most academic papers are useless.” – Elon Musk

Is Elon Musk right in saying most academic papers are useless?

As a professor at a research university and also a three-time entrepreneur with pro a three-time entrepreneur with products deployed to thousands of data centers, I find that academic papers have the following “usefulness”:

Training Ph.D students: An academic institution’s main job is to train students, including Ph.D students. Academic papers are just like some craft projects in elementary schools. It is a vehicle (or a target) used to train Ph.D students in creative thinking, problem solving, project management, experimental design, written and verbal presentation, team working, etc. The peer paper review system used in academic conferences or journals is like a project/exam evaluation—to set some standard. Yes, inevitably the review can be biased, just like any other subjective measurement, but it does serve the purpose of pushing students to aim high in many aspects. Benefiting from such training, many of my own former Ph.D students have become successful entrepreneurs, or have contributed to large companies like Google/Apple/Uber, etc, and are now playing important roles in these companies. I am sure Elon Musk must have hired many Ph.D students who were trained this way.

It may take many papers to get the 5% that can make some fundamental impacts in industry and future technology. Both VmWare (VMware - Wikipedia) and Akamai (Akamai Technologies - Wikipedia )were first started from some academic papers, just to name a few. As in the startup world, only 5% startups succeeded, but still many entrepreneurs start their companies every month. Why? It is because if you don’t give a try, how do you know you will fail or become the next Google. Yes, there are many crappy papers, just like that there are many crappy startups or big company internal initiatives (e.g. Google +) . Then why would we be so critical on academic papers?

Source: https://www.quora.com/Is-Elon-Musk-r...rs-are-useless

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