[armitron]

I'm afraid it's not simply a matter of wasted money but one of profound institutional rot that drives away large numbers of the best and brightest. The article outlines this by focusing on the proto-scientist archetype and the spiritual, uncompromising pursuit of Truth. Today's academic culture is for the most part completely antithetical to a person possessing these attributes.

That some can endure the suffering and keep working in this sort of environment does not reflect well on today's institutions and doesn't inspire much optimism for the future of academia.

[jltsiren]

It's not the academic culture in my experience. It's the most competitive subset of the academia. Things tend to be worse if there is top-anything involved, if the field of study is supposed to be important, or if the field receives a lot of funding. These factors all attract the kind of people who respond strongly to incentives and often try to game the system.

I have two home communities in the academia. One is string algorithms, compressed data structures, and things like that. It's a small community where people enjoy what they are doing and have somehow found a way to make a living out of it. The groups tend to be small, the atmosphere is friendly and honest, and the results rarely appear in top conferences.

Then there is a subset of bioinformatics and genomics, which often uses results from the other community. This is supposed to be important, so there are a lot of big well-funded labs from top universities involved. Stuff sometimes gets published in prestige journals, administrators from funding agencies (particularly NIH) are trying to direct the research, and even the Big Tech is trying to grab their share of something. I haven't seen fraud, but everything is so serious and competitive and there is a constant pressure to get things done before someone else manages to publish something similar.

I don't know how things are further downstream, and I'm not interested in finding out.