| You're not really addressing the point head on. The argument about how science is communicated is orthogonal. The argument is that science academia prioritizes career over pursuing academic science. I won't speak for anyone else but here are three things I think are all true: * We live in a renaissance of academic research that is giving us profound scientific discovery * Prioritizing a scientific career over scientific discovery can lead to a net positive of good scientific results, and, so far, has * Prioritizing a scientific career over scientific discovery produces low quality science Saying that people who know how to maneuver the political academic landscape, to secure a position, also produce valuable contributions might be true (I believe it is) but the argument doesn't address the cost of prioritizing, or promoting, that behavior. I'm reminded of "The Economics of Superstars" [0]. If someone is "better" by a measure of 2x, say, but gets (10+)x the amount of resources, this is not a good allocation of energy. Saying that the 2x person should get more resources is true. Saying that they're justified in getting orders of magnitude more resources, at the cost of everyone else who might use them to better effect, is not. These conversations are subtle. I notice that one of the common crutches is to attack people as "just being bitter". This seems like a cheap attack and I wish you and others would try to be more thoughtful. [0] https://home.uchicago.edu/~vlima/courses/econ201/Superstars.... |