Normal Science

Earlier, I had written on the how I thought it wrong to force academic researchers in Computer Science to promise technology transfer and collaborations with the industry. The crux of my argument was that industry and academia have different goals. I want to elaborate on that some more, especially from an academic perspective.

I think academic researchers are too hard on themselves when they judge the merit of their contributions in terms of adoption by industrial practitioners or whoever the perceived end-users are thought to be or by the amount of money they have saved someone. Those are arguably the standards that an industrial software firm would apply to judge the success of its product. Should academic researchers apply the same standard?

I think not.

As Kuhn famously pointed out, the researcher works in a community. The community judges the merit of a researcher's claims based on the paradigm the community follows. The paradigm is everything. The open problems comes from the paradigm. The solutions ought to make sense in the paradigm. A solution that makes sense may open up new problems, which then becomes part of the paradigm. That is what Kuhn calls normal science (as opposed to a paradigm shift, which is not the point of this post). A contribution then amounts to solving a problem within the paradigm.

Clearly, the problems of a paradigm cannot be generic things such as "to make contribution to social welfare" or "to have impact on industry practice" or "to foster end-user adoption". They have nothing to do with a particular paradigm. The problems of a paradigm are always technical in nature. Then why are researchers tempted to judge their contributions by standards that don't apply to them?

You will be surprised how many times a presenter is asked by another researcher from the audience, "...but how much money did you save anyone by applying your techniques?" (I had this asked of me once many year ago and even though I was relatively green, the question felt wrong to me even then), and how many times a researcher touts what he saved the world. Isn't this anti-intellectualism?

I suspect one reason is the excessive focus on churning out publications. Many researchers have become adept at churning them out. I think in many areas of Computer Science, this has the adverse effect of blurring the paradigm. Few people really know what others are doing, except superficially. (I am pretty sure there are some who don't even know what is in the paper that bears their name.) So in this sense, some researchers have unknowingly stopped judging contributions by the criteria of the relevant paradigm. And when that happens, they start resorting to the other non-paradigm criteria, by someone's else criteria.

I do not begrudge a researcher his success in commercializing his research or taking it to the masses. In fact, it is to be applauded, for it points to an additional skill-set that he has. But let us not make that the criteria of judging someone's research contributions.

I also have nothing against those who collaborate actively with industrial partners. To each his own. But that is no reason to apply non-paradigm criteria to those who don't.

At the beginning of his book "The Tacit Dimension" Polanyi mentions how he was struck by how communism required that scientists turn to solving the problem of the current five-year plan. It makes me wonder if he would have found questionable the constant harping about researchers delivering what the industry wants.