[jollybean]

Academia is not protected because of some intellectual notion of 'innovation' so much as they are on the right side of the bias presented in most publications. Most writers and commentators I think have venerable views of academia and probably err towards supporting that narrative publicly.

While it's true that Profs may be under excessive scrutiny in some ways, which frankly might make them skittish - they are obviously not under 'the most important' kind of scrutiny which relates to the material legitimacy of their work in terms of 1) reproducability 2) fudging results and borrowing ideas and 3) misappropriation of credit 'up the chain of power' and 'from other peers'.

Hence this article, and some other issues of legitimacy within academia.

I think almost everything boils down to the fact that the low-hanging fruit have been had in science, and though there are 20x more scientists alive now than just a few generations ago, in many ways we're getting diminishing marginal returns - and even worse - it's incredibly hard to know which teams to back, and which not to.

In the fog of war for funding, it leaves more room for back-stabbing than in most other places, even in the corporate world where at least there is some degree of job security.