Not at all. The point is that some academics are useful and some are not; there is no market process that forces them to be so. It may be that some of the academics are able to continue doing exactly what they were doing, just for a private employer. But I would not bet on that outcome for most.

To be fair, he didn't say "does not apply here" with certainty; he said "does not appear to apply here", implying some degree of uncertainty.

As Bugmaster says, I don't claim certainty.

But we can look for evidence. Are there any technologies that go missing after the destruction of the library (similar to the loss of Greek fire that happened 600 years later)? Or perhaps an industrial regress that might inidicate missing knowledge? And if there is no evidence of any such, how should we update?

Yes, I'm surprised so many people are trying to argue that the lost knowledge would have been useful. This may be true, but is it really relevant? Well, apparently it is to Salemicus.

Although it's worth noting here that going by the other threads Salemicus is using an unusual notion of "useful". In fact it's specific enough that it allows us to answer the question

Are artists useful? Musicians? Enterainers?

with "yes", "yes", and "yes". This is sufficiently different from the ordinary notion of "useful" that I suspect a different word should be used for clarity. Maybe "valuable"? (I mean, I'd say that the knowledge is valuable in the ordinary sense regardless of whether it's valuable in the sense I've proposed -- because, you know, terminal values -- but from here on out I'm talking about the sense I've proposed, not the ordinary sense.)

Which raises the point -- we'd certainly consider that valuable now. I.e., I think you could get people to pay quite a lot to recover whatever lost knowledge was burnt, even if it's not very useful in the ordinary sense. Should this be counted? I.e., if we're going to measure the value of something by how much people are willing to pay for it, as Salemicus does, should we count that only in its own time, or cross-temporally? The former is the usual way of doing things, but Salemicus hasn't specified, and I have to wonder if there's something to the latter way of thinking, even if it's impossible to compute...