Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Professors Promoted from an Unweighted Citation Graph

@BasedBeffJezos tweets:
The problem with academia is that the selective pressure is induced peer to peer through an unweighted citation graph.

OTOH, industry is a weighted graph of capital flux according to the utility of a product. It has a much better algorithm for focusing search over design space.

What he is saying here is that professors get promoted by showing that their friends cite their papers. Companies succeed by people buying their products.

The latter works well because products have to be commercially useful in order to sell a lot. But academic citations can be inflated even for worthless research.

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