In many professions including the business of startups and academia you need to be at least as good at selling something as you are at developing/discovering it.
Yes, academia (at least STEM) is such that you need to be good at selling something. The difference is that the goal of a startup is to make money, whereas that's not the goal of research.
We could apply the mentality everywhere. Do you want to tell teachers they need to be as good at selling their skills as they are at teaching?
Researchers are there to research. If a theoretical physicist publishes a lot of papers in high quality journals without bringing in money (because they don't need the money to do the research), they'll be denied tenure. Even when doing experimental work: If I bring enough to buy my equipment, and pay for the staff (e.g. students) and publish good papers, I'll be denied tenure if my colleague who is doing very different research is bringing in a lot more money, because he has decided to target that metric.
Researchers need money to do their research. They shouldn't be asked to bring in a lot more than they need.
While that may be true today, in the research sciences — there should be some kind of middle ground.
Thomas Edison may have been a giant of self promotion. But I would argue Nikola Tesla invented as much or more foundationally important technology we use today. I would argue Tesla like Kariko will never be a wiz at self promotion. But a domain expert should have spotted them early on. I mean isn’t that the job of people who dole out tax payer money for research?
UPDATE. I mixed up Edison and Tesla. Tesla was the champion self promoter.
I think you got this backwards. Tesla made a few important inventions early on and then spent the rest of his life showing off big sparks and scamming investors. Edison's labs were far more influential.
but the people you have to convince are the people who are doling out tax payer money for research. By definition they don't know your fabulous discovery only you know that. So you need to convince someone else that the idea you have is worth investigating and they should give you money to do it. So the people who are best at convincing other people are the people who get the grants and who get to do the research.
Even once you have discovered something convincing other people that what you have discovered is worthwhile is not easy, as this article shows.
Being a good fundraiser is more important than technical skill in both research/academia and also in startups.
I don't disagree this is the reality. What I am trying to say, is that I hope the people who dole out taxpayer funds can spot people like Dr. Karikó and support them.
Let me try a sports analogy. In American football, each team takes turns (rounds) to draft new players. There are college players who are already famous, had fantastic careers at the college level, and all the scouting agencies said they are can't miss. Then there are college players who played for unknown schools and the scouts don't even have a grade for them. As a result, teams dedicate the first three rounds drafting the players everyone says are can't miss (the good fundraiser in the Academic world). However, the great teams are the ones who can find the hidden gems and draft unknowns in later rounds because they can see the talent (the hypothetical talent scout who spotted the potential of messenger RNA research 20 years ago).
there is more to the analogy too. Once you have convinced a large player that your offering is important and have raised money successfully, everything gets a lot easier. Have a big grant and work at a top University attracting more money is a hell of a lot easier. Get into YC, guess what raising your Series A just increased in probability by about 20X.
Even the concept that the flow of traffic is more important than the pedestrian's flow is indicative of the change in attitude. Somehow the car has come to be most important while the pedestrian is a nuisance. Both own and pay for the road but the pedestrian is a second class citizen (obviously some people will moan on about road tax and fuel tax, but these taxes don't come close to paying for the road infrastructure, I doubt they would even pay the rent on the area dedicated to roads in one major city - say NYC).
"Even the concept that the flow of traffic is more important than the pedestrian's flow"
Is it? It seems like in the example, both parties are following a signal. Cars must yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. Sure, some places have jaywalking laws when not in a crosswalk (in some cases including implied/unmarked crosswalks), and most require impeding traffic as a component. A few places could move towards common sense of adding impeding traffic as a requirement. Nothing I've seen says pedestrians are second class. It's like saying that one should be allowed to run a red light. Everyone can wait their turn.
Look at the amount of road space, infrastructure, resources devoted to cars vs. pedestrians. The typical way for pedestrians to cross a busy highway for example is via a bridge - the pedestrian has to put up with going up and down the stairs. Pedestrians typically have to go out of their way to cross streets even at level. Traffic lights have “beg buttons” for pedestrians to use, god forbid they interrupt the flow of first-class car drivers for a minute more than necessary.
Pedestrians are totally treated as second-class almost everywhere.
"The typical way for pedestrians to cross a busy highway for example is via a bridge"
I'm not sure where you're from, but I have seen very few of these. Usually the ones I've seen are over a very busy road with few to no intersections and a lot of foot traffic. These are beneficial to the flow of both car and foot traffic instead of using long cycle times.
“beg buttons”
I'm sorry, but that is some extreme spin. What do you think happens at traffic signals? Those signals use sensors to identify when cars come up to them. These sensors don't work for pedestrians lacking large amounts of metal to trip the fields. So yeah, they have a button to tell the machine they want to cross. Usually, the lights change just as fast if not faster than if a car pulls up at a red light.
When in a shared space, everyone must wait their turn. If you don't, you end up with people steeping out in front if cars and people running red lights. Taking turns is part of a functioning society.
Pedestrians are second class in most crossings though (at least in the UK).
For traffic lights that are always green except when a pedestrian wants to cross we do have the “beg button” but the problem is that there is usually a reasonable delay before the lights turn red to stop the cars.
Obviously there needs to be some sort of delay between sets of red lights otherwise someone could just spend the day pressing the button and crossing all day whilst the traffic backs up. But the delay is front loaded. There doesn’t need to be such a long delay before the lights turn red if the lights have been green for a long enough period prior to that. Poor implementation.
I’m sure there’s a study somewhere where they decided to go with the pre-delay for some reason, but I’ve never found anything.
> I'm not sure where you're from, but I have seen very few of these.
Well I’m not sure where you’re from but I have seen tons of these pedestrian bridges :) wouldn’t it be better to inconvenience the car by building an overpass? The car has an engine and doesn’t get tired.
On beg buttons: I did not invent the terminology. Look it up.
Please be more charitable. I legitimately looked. All I found were biased pieces calling them beg buttons. I'm asking for an unbiased source calling them that. It seems the real term is a pedestrian call button.
I’m sure you’ll find a way to disqualify that also, but well. By the way this was like the fourth result on a ddg search, there are many more if you care to actually look and read.
Oh now I know you are a troll. It would be cheaper to build level intersections with traffic lights. Why then are billions spent on wide freeways, exchanges, overpasses when it’s road over road but when it’s about pedestrians then sure, do whatever is cheapest because they’re already on foot, how much of a hurry can they be in?
Neither. Both cost significantly more to build and maintain than at-grade intersections. That's part of the reason more and more grade separated highways are being demolished and replaced with surface roads.
Yes they cost more than at-grade. At-grade is the most common. I'm talking about high volume areas for both traffic and pedestrians, usually involving 6+ lanes of traffic (even if the roads are at-grade) or a need for foot traffic to cross an interstate where no road intersections exist. These are scenarios where at-grade crossings would be extremely inefficient and probably cost more in wasted time, fuel, etc than the infrastructure cost of an elevated foot bridge. Some places like Vegas have the money to erect elevated foot bridges on the strip even though the intersections are at grade. Of course many places don't need dedicated foot bridges when existing overpasses exist with sidewalks, such as with 676 in Philly.
At high volumes of foot traffic the high cost of sending pedestrians up over a footbridge is greater over the lifetime of a bridge than doing the same to cars.
Consider the physical risks pedestrians takes vs cars over a bridge, the lost time on each journey for cars vs people going over a bridge, fuel costs from additional car trips vs additional fuel cars expend going over a single bridge etc.
Even relatively modest levels of foot traffic pay for a cheap bridge that’s going to last ~50 years.
Not to mention speed limits. Around here almost all traffic exceeds the speed limit, yet plenty of drivers still complain about pedestrians not adhering to the rules.
The designs of most cities in the U.S. absolutely treat pedestrians as second class citizens compared to automobile traffic. I'm currently working on a project that demonstrates exactly this (among other things) in Dallas. It's both sad and amusing how true it is.
The best example is that even your curious question comes with a car-minded implicit assumption that it's the pedestrian who is crossing, not the car. In a pedestrian-centric design, cars are the ones who cross. See https://youtu.be/_ByEBjf9ktY?t=690.
Pedestrians have to ask to cross the road by pressing a button, so that the usual signal cycle for cars is interrupted, to let them cross. Cars don't have to ask. That means the crossing inherently prioritizes cars, and pedestrians are a second class user.
Cars do have to ask - there are sensors in the pavement to manipulate the signal. Some lights have no sensors and merely time it for each group. Some one way streets are designed to use the same light as the cars to signal parallel foot traffic as well.
How can you explain pedestrians as second class users if they have the right of way and do not have to wait at non-signaled crosswalks?
There seems to be a mix of who gets priority based on things like volume and efficiency, demonstrating that neither pedestrians nor cars are a lower class than the other.
No other country has anything to teach the USA. The USA is unique and special for a large number of reasons and so foreign methods won't work here. If I recall they even drive on the other side of the road in the UK, that will never catch on here.
I would disagree. All of what we are seeing from this latest surge in AI is essentially jumped up predictive text. To get to C-3P0 there is a whole additional layer of Intelligence needed. C-3P0 can make plans and execute those plans. This latest wave cannot reason about the world, it does not know or understand the world it just assembles words (and here motions) in a way that we value. It is not planning anything.
That's the easy part. Making high level plans is trivial compared to the fine motor control and dexterity and sensing necessary to do things like turn a T-shirt inside out or install a fitted sheet or crack an egg or whatever. If you give me a robot with all the fine motor skills necessary for all the steps to cook a meal but no planning capability whatsoever, I'll have that robot cooking your dinner within a year.
I think you're giving C3PO too much credit for the bumbling idiot he usually is when on screen. Well aside from calculating the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field, but I'm sure GPT 4 will let you know what that is just as easily, as well as translating any language into any other language which is supposedly 3PO's whole schtick.
> cannot reason about the world, it does not know or understand the world it just assembles words
They can reason a surprising amount given that they only work with text. With vision/actuation encoding there's potential for far more. Remember, it doesn't have to be smart or conscious as long as it gets the job done with cold hard statistics while just appearing as such. A submarine does not swim but crosses the ocean just the same.
> as well as translating any language into any other language which is supposedly 3PO's whole schtick.
To be pedantic, language is only half the job, as a protocol droid it's C3POs job to understand social protocols, ie etiquette, and knowing what one culture might misunderstand about another and smooth over any faux pas, a task that requires considerable empathy and attention to subtle emotional cues.
i'm very curious to know what it would take to turn a language model designed to respond to prompts, and create something that can proactively interrupt a situation - to realize when it has something to contribute, and keeping its virtual mouth shut otherwise.
Well on one hand that's something that even humans can't do that well, on the other there already are a load of reddit bots that search for relevant strings in posted comments and reply when relevant. I suppose it would be a more advanced version of that, just interjecting when the probability that it knows what info follows is large enough, just replace the stream of new comments with a speech to text engine.
I'd agree with this although I understand where the idea comes from. It is difficult for people to understand what is and is not a science and it is easy to think that computer science is not a science even when you study it.
The way we learn and study topics is divorced from the original method of discovering those topics. The way people learn Computer Science is generally by absorbing the information, not by doing the experiments. So it is difficult for people to understand that the way we have this knowledge is through hypothesis forming and experimentation i.e. Science.
I'm having a very similar issue getting https://brisktest.com/ out there. People complain about things like the speed of their build system, but convincing people that your CI system is faster just seems like an uphill battle. Maybe the era of launching new indie dev tools to developers is over and you just need a massive marketing budget to bombard devs with advertising and lots of sponsored content.
