[mkramlich]

understood

personally I think HN has both a pro-PhD, pro-academic, and also an anti-PhD or anti-academic segment. Sometimes within the same people! I certainly do.

I think it has both strengths and weaknesses. I think to the extent that universities and PhD track stuff serves an unnecessary and embarrassing anachronistic echo from the Middle Ages then that is a bad thing. But to the extent it helps teach disciplined thinking, cultivate a new generation of teachers and researchers, and helps to cull out noise or invalid/false/dumb contributions to the advancement of an art, it's a very good thing. The weed-out effect is good. I think some antipathy comes from the folks who perceive there to be a lot of non-weeds outside academia, and weeds within it. All discipline and curation is good. But it's not the unique providence of universities or professorship tracks. A lot of programmers have a libertarian bent too and dislike profit-maximizing monopolies or priesthoods, and universities/academia has at least a little of that aspect to them.