I mean.. if dissemination of knowledge _truly_ is the end goal here.. and not just giving a free corporate lunch out because the job market is the broken and dysfunctional.
And you are confused. The immediate goal/purpose of academic work is to create knowledge. I said nothing about the underlying purpose of this goal. The ultimate purpose of this goal is to provide the foundation for a better society, which includes the knowledge being used to build better technologies, products, and processes by for profit companies.
The antipathy towards profit is one of the many great contradictions of the Left. They will willingly make the public worse off in order to prevent a private profit.
You literally said "The whole purpose of being an academic is to publish and disseminate knowledge." You are now saying this means something different than it's apparent reading?
> which includes the knowledge being used to build better technologies, products, and processes by for profit companies.
Why then do you think these entities are entitled to the output of academics without paying for it, or as a compromise, contributing back to the pool of global knowledge in kind?
What I'm getting at is the way you and the GP have framed this position is that you might then consider it wrong for an academic to charge for access to their work or for themselves to start a business and profit from it. That seems off to me.
> The antipathy towards profit is one of the many great contradictions of the Left.
This is an oversimplification of an easily understood nuance. For profit companies are obviously fine but we might also want a measure to determine if any one entity is contributing more to society than it is extracting from it.
In lieu of this perhaps forcing companies to contribute back to the same body of public knowledge that they obviously benefit from is not some great contradictory injustice.
> They will willingly make the public worse off in order to prevent a private profit.
Since business have no natural right to exist we, as people, have every right to exclude some of them from operating or even existing at all. Is my aversion to slavery actually a disguised antipathy towards profit?
[0] https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/advocacy/info-2019/gen...
Because historically speaking, private profit does not fundamentally "provide the foundation for a better society". If we had more benevolent actors in my lifetime, I'd feel differently. But it's always a monkey's paw. I see no contradiction to be afraid of being exploited when everytime a cool idea scales massively it ends up exploiting me.
