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Academia Is Aging

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This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
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Academia Is Aging

Robin Hanson
Nov 24, 2009
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Academia Is Aging

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Eric Drexler dissaproves of this NIH awardee aging trend:

NIH grants vs. investigator age, compared to Darwin's age during his formative research.

It has become increasingly difficult for young U.S. researchers to win funding for their ideas. … Both Darwin and Einstein were in their 20s when they discovered principles that revolutionized human thought.

He’s probably right that this trend is bad, though it isn’t obvious what is the best funding age distribution.  What seems more obvious:  we didn’t have the optimal age distribution in both 1980 and 2006.   Since it is hard to believe the optimal age for researchers has changed that much in 26 years, one of these eras probably failed to fund the right age folks.

How could an academia optimized for research progress get such an obvious parameter that wrong?  Most likely, academia is nowhere near such precise optimization; it has at best only crude tendencies to promote research progress.  Academia serves other functions.

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Academia Is Aging

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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 15

How come this blog post is dated October 30th and post you link to at metamodern.com is dated November 27th?

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Overcoming Bias Commenter
May 9

How come this blog post is dated October 30th and post you link to at metamodern.com is dated November 27th?

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