[wallace_f]

>smart people in a hypercompetitive environment and they will quickly identify the traits that are being rewarded and optimize for those. What does academia reward? Large numbers of publications with lots of citations, nothing else matters. So, naturally, scientists flock to hip buzzword-filled topics and churn out papers as quickly as they can.

For some other opinions, consider:

1) Paul Graham who states this is the biggesg lesson to unlearn in academia. He states academia selects for people who tend to 'hack,' not learn, to the easiest grades/favors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619

2) Feynman who often stated things like "the pleasure is in finding things out" and that "the whole academic department was rotten."

I'm not convinced academia is selecting primarily the attribute: intelligence.