As a current CS PhD, I feel there are elements of truth in the letter, on the whole, it's a bit too dismissive of the value of academia.
Yes, a lot of research in academia ends up going nowhere, but that's not always obvious beforehand. Research is an inherently chancy endeavour with a low chance of success. But academia is still a source of important research. To name just two examples, much of the major deep learning research which everyone is jumping on these days was kept alive and done at universities. The CRISPR/Cas9 breakthrough in biology was done at universities.
It is true that there is a huge pressure to publish which leads to a lot of crap being published but that doesn't mean the academia is not valuable and it seems like a hard problem to figure out the right incentives (which we should of course work on). Maybe something that gives a weighted rank of the papers would be better able to put value on the research you've done and make purely the # of papers less of a unit of currency in the academia. Citations do that to some extent but they're still not a great solution.
Egos are a huge problem, but that's true in every sphere. Academics are humans too...
Yes, that's what's missing from this article: recognizing academics as humans and not perfect idealistic beings.
To me criticisms like this need to at least suggest paths towards solutions. If the system is already as good as it can reasonably work, how can we criticize it?
It needed at least to suggest paths for researchers outside academia: will we get more research done outside? Will it fit better those idealistic goals?
Yes, a lot of research in academia ends up going nowhere, but that's not always obvious beforehand. Research is an inherently chancy endeavour with a low chance of success. But academia is still a source of important research. To name just two examples, much of the major deep learning research which everyone is jumping on these days was kept alive and done at universities. The CRISPR/Cas9 breakthrough in biology was done at universities.
It is true that there is a huge pressure to publish which leads to a lot of crap being published but that doesn't mean the academia is not valuable and it seems like a hard problem to figure out the right incentives (which we should of course work on). Maybe something that gives a weighted rank of the papers would be better able to put value on the research you've done and make purely the # of papers less of a unit of currency in the academia. Citations do that to some extent but they're still not a great solution.
Egos are a huge problem, but that's true in every sphere. Academics are humans too...