academia is too broad of a term. most of math, physics, theoretical CS, paleontology, material sciences, engineering, and some branches of economics, biology, engineering, (computational) neuroscience, (computational) linguistics, statistics etc are doing well and overall reward intellectual freedom and deep work. in terms of people this is a small minority of total academics, probably <5%.
It is true that many subfields, or even entire domains of science are diseased disciplines. Most of the research ismarginal, irrelevant, reinventing the wheel, trivial, tautological, p-hacked and often even fraudulent. One can point to the usual suspects in the humanities and the social sciences but disciplines where the majority of research is noise, nonsense or even net-negative plausibly also includes machine learning and (I’m told) medicine.
Is that disappointing? Perhaps. But this still describes hundred of thousands or millions of people all over the world pushing the frontier of knowledge.
academia is too broad of a term. most of math, physics, theoretical CS, paleontology, material sciences, engineering, and some branches of economics, biology, engineering, (computational) neuroscience, (computational) linguistics, statistics etc are doing well and overall reward intellectual freedom and deep work. in terms of people this is a small minority of total academics, probably <5%.
It is true that many subfields, or even entire domains of science are diseased disciplines. Most of the research is marginal, irrelevant, reinventing the wheel, trivial, tautological, p-hacked and often even fraudulent. One can point to the usual suspects in the humanities and the social sciences but disciplines where the majority of research is noise, nonsense or even net-negative plausibly also includes machine learning and (I’m told) medicine.
Is that disappointing? Perhaps. But this still describes hundred of thousands or millions of people all over the world pushing the frontier of knowledge.