[queuebert]

Besides this, the phenotype that academia reveres is a particular type of low-level bureaucrat that works by quantity, not quality.

For example, I'm in academia, but I prefer to solve interesting problems and create new things of high quality. I have never had to retract a paper, nor has anyone found a mistake in my work. I don't supervise more than one or two students at a time, because I want to be able to devote time to them. People like me languish and do not get promoted to tenure.

I have colleagues who pride themselves on how many e-mails they answer a day and recruit large labs of grad students who download neural net codes, tweak and publish. They talk of "least publishable units, or LPUs" and are always submitting and chairing ... submitting grants, submitting papers, chairing committees, etc. They get tenure very quickly and make a lot more money than I do. But they aren't scientists, they are bureaucrats who send emails. They decide what science is done, because they chair funding committees, so we get boring, incremental science that is stuck in local minima.