The Good and Bad Of Academia
Hanging at non-academic conferences lately, I’ve noticed how their cultures differs from my familiar academic cultures. For example, in a “pitch culture”, speakers focus on showing energy, prestige, charisma, social support, and momentum, and try to induce enthusiasm. They try to accomplish concrete projects they see as important in the grand scheme of things. All of which I like.
But in such contexts, I also miss key features of academic culture. For example, the priority on original insight. Their use of precise language, and announcing their main claims clearly up front in such precise language. Academics set their work in the context of related prior work, to make clear both their original contributions, and that they’ve done their homework. And they invite strong criticism, often scheduling time for assigned discussants to critique particular presentations. Anticipating criticism, academics identify and respond to particular problems before others express them. Such habits would help to cut the bullshit from many non-academic contexts, even if this might also cut enthusiasm or bonding.
There are of course also many things I don’t like about academia. Such as using language styles more to impress than to communicate, treating prestige as if it counted for strong evidence, insisting on either strong methods or silence, and ignoring most everything done by non-academics. Worse, academics also seem oblivious or indifferent to the intrinsic importance of topics; they often treat the existence of a prior literature near a topic as the only needed or wanted reason to consider a topic.
Yes, we should worry that the good and bad features of academic styles are a package somehow, so that one can’t get the good without the bad. I don’t see how that could work, but I have to admit it that non-academic communities are reluctant to adopt the good academic styles that I value. When I’ve made such suggestions, I get half-hearted lip service to the idea, but little energy or movement.
Added 16Feb: In pitch culture people more bid to be treated as elites, while in academia they more bid to be treated as experts.
The truth is we need a natural reservation for weirdos and nobody is providing us with it
"prestige, charisma, social support" Why do you like these things? They're all appeals to cognitive biases. You go on to say you *don't* like the focus on prestige and social support among academics. (and I don't either).
What I'd like to see is a communication medium that has explicit features to minimize these biases. A communication medium that facilitates communicating claims and justifications for claims and counterpoints to claims and similar topic-oriented items, and prohibits or at least makes difficult appeals to prestige or impressive language or charisma. For example, discussion can be anonymous, as in the Delphi method, and there can be judges who filter out appeals to prestige or popularity, and the discussion can focus around building a graph of justifications so it is not essay-format and you can't win points with impressive language. Maybe someday I will build it.