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While communities are prone to confirmation bias and groupthink, or "echo chambers" they also reinforce social norms, provide feedback on statements, and connect people. This is not restricted to online social networks. University communities have people who "think different". Often this leads to wider perspectives, more meta-level discussions, and more historically informed viewpoints.
University communities however may not include marginalized experiences, "man on the street" opinions, or "what do the unwashed think." Though this is somewhat less likely as academics do spend time outside of the university grounds like other members of the surrounding population and are exposed to other people and their ideas.
And the article plays back and forth with it's own claims, one momeng saying it will answer the question then saying later it is yet to be determined and then again saying it will quantify it...
Got quite deep into it, but had to give up along the way.
It was somewhat fun to read but could not get what was the point they wanted to make, other than play what appears to be very self indulgent word games. Maybe this is what is required of academic writing nowadays?
Especially gross for academics
I'm not really meaning to attack you, even though it sounds like it - but just noting a certain irony of judgement about in-group signifiers without acknowledging that one is always signifiying.
One cannot escape signification. And to judge it as something to be avoided (as opposed to observed and noted), is... well... IDK. No man is an island and all that. Even stones cannot escape being signified, but they are incapable of signifying. Humans on the other hand. Cannot even escape the process of doing the signifiying. There is no "gross" as it is a social phenomenon and all ingroup/outgroup dynamics always hold, and all such organizational referents happen across the domains, regardless, and no-one is above this, no matter how much we wish to absolve ourselves of this process.
And that was a hell of a signifier, on my part. (one signifying I'm a wannabe academic with no actual formal education, I suppose).
EDIT: Further - what exactly do you think the point of Academics is? To get published, and how do you get published? Via RECOGNITION OF PEERS. So this fits fully hand in glove with entirely WHAT academia is. Academia is a social function, it is not a sterile lab with pure physics and escaped from the social dimension.
I guess I am critiquing you, despite what I said earlier, as I've thought about it more, and think - this sounds very much like something someone who works in a pristine 'logical' domain of computing thinks academia should be, not what it is. It further reinforces the fact that comp-sci people SHOULD take social sciences to understand such things, and it also explains why Elon is such a shit lord cuz he thinks the greats like Norbert Wiener and other systems theorists were abstracted away from society, when they knew full well just how integrated society is in everything.
My opinion expanded:
It's gross for academics to create in-group echo chambers because they are supposed to be exploring new things, or reproducing novel things, or otherwise expanding our world.
The social dynamics in-play for getting work published, cited, and elevated are, in my view, a corruption. It's obvious charismatic and connected people/institutions corrupt the publishing system (so practical science in general), distorting research, and causing real harm in the world at large.
Academic influencers are no different than other social media influencers but their reach into the serious real world of consequences is more real.
https://www.acs.org/pressroom/reactions/library/alzheimers-r...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1497700/
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/09/career-research-miscondu...