[michaelochurch]

I agree with your assessment of academia, but I don't think "startups", as HN defines the term, will improve anything.

Academia's one imploded guild system, but venture capital is just as bad. The transition from a "what you know" to a "who you blow" culture happened a long time ago, and I don't think there's any turning back for the Valley. It's one of the most corrupt economic ecosystems known to humankind. VCs collude and arrange outcomes based on prior socioeconomic value to them rather than allowing the market to determine the actual merit of a company or product, and most of what Silicon Valley-style venture capital is, is taking behaviors (insider trading, market manipulation, anti-competitive collusion) that are illegal on public markets and applying them to unregulated private equities.

The trillion-dollar question is whether it's possible for something else (possibly outside of the U.S.) to emerge that outperforms the Silicon Valley nonsense. Academia itself is done, as far as I can tell. It selects for a naive lack of humility (as does the Valley, where people honestly believe that their engineer positions on 0.02% will lead to investor contact and founder status in their next gig... and, of course, that never happens for socioeconomic reasons) because anyone who is capable of getting a realistic picture of his or her probable future in that game is going to exit.

[evanwarfel]

Ah, perhaps. Our systems will only improve to the extent that someone takes the inherent issues on as personal problems.

And in some sense, what we are saying is that systems with metrics that are only shallow proxies for actual success (citations, valuations) often fall into multi-polar-trap type situations [1].

I fully believe it's possible for new(ish) models to outperform Academia and some of the sillier SV practices. It's a question of getting things right in the beginning.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/