Member-only story
My view is that the day-to-day in academia involves shallow and defined “doing” under implicit ideological constraints instead of deep and undefined “thinking” free from ideological constraints, and thus academia may be detrimental to the search for truth.
I do not regret being outside of academia despite spending the first half of my life there and attaining a doctorate in theoretical physics, since I believe it would actually confine and stifle my thinking. This is unfortunate since academia in free open democratic societies is supposed to be where the intellect can roam free unrestrained by contemporary fashions or political constraints on what constitutes permitted or correct thought.
I plan to write another story about how non-ideological incentives to publish to “show” the doing of research gets in the way of actually doing research and making original important contributions, but for now I will just link to an opinion piece that sums up the issues very nicely. It’s written by two senior applied mathematics professors who are fellows at the National Academies of Sciences:
I will focus on the effect of ideology in academia, and how it may hinder the search for truth, with a specific example.
