If most people realized that, we would have much less problems: academics are often shrouded in an aura of virtue and wisdom they don't deserve in the least. Like what you see in this thread, that their narrow (or worse, illusory) knowledge will somehow help them being good rulers/leaders.
However, scorn and ridicule are also reasonable at times. And it started a conversation.
Academics really are naive and out of touch people. In a weird sort of way, being an academic means sacrificing your personal growth for either a) a deep love of their area of research or b) love of teaching. This means that the wider life skills one gains as an adult, they never get. They get to avoid consequences for being wrong but at quite a price. One of the worst things I have seen are what happens to academics who leave for the private sector later in their career. When they can't make it in the private sector, it is pretty crushing to many of them.
That being said, one of the prices of being an academics is being very "out of touch" with the rest of society. And that will take away your ability to read political situations or govern things well. Academics injecting themselves into such situations will almost always be disastrous as a result. Its just a consequence of how academia works. It doesn't have to be that way, but unless academia changes profoundly, it will be.
Academics do just fine picking up "adult life skills". Only a small minority of academics find academic employment from their mid-thirties or so on, so everyone moves to other sectors for the rest of their lives. It is not as if they are just hapless misfits or on the dole for the rest of their lives.
Although in reality it probably doesn't make sense to talk about the private sector as some homogeneous representation of the rest of society in the first place. Many people outside of academia famously struggle to adapt their presumably well developed "wider life skills" to significantly different environments, like switching industries or going between large companies and small ones. There's really no universally applicable life skills or experience that everyone except academics pick up.
> Academics really are naive and out of touch people
That's a hilarious juxtaposition of sentences.
The first sentence seems to suggest: you are naive.
The second sentence indicates the writer believes many academics are naive.
Where is this contracts you allude to?
It is absurd claim. Academia is part of real world. It is not an isolated island cut off from everything else.
It is no more divorced from real world then any other group of people. No more divorced then rural farmer are divorced from it, businessmen are divorced from it, sports fans are divorced from it. They are all having limits of understanding other groups.
Tech workers as likely more divorced from average person even.
The problem is not in that they are divorced from the real world. The problem is in the model that science get financial support, which leads to the existence of filtering that eliminates from the science anyone who is not far-left loyal dog and supporter of the "current thing".
Is this how a 60-day old account has negative karma?
Maybe the problem is that your ideas don't withstand any academic scrutiny, since they aren't based on sound research or well-reasoned arguments.
My ideas do withstand the reality. Unlike their so called "sound researches" or "well-reasoned arguments".
So negative karma? I was banned on several platforms simply for saying that all available to me evidences point out that covid was developed in the lab, while ALL the scientist licked the communist China's boots and said that it is SCIENTIFICALLY impossible. So what does the karma means in front of the truth?
Yet you seem to be convinced that you have been proven correct that it was developed, so show it.
You can have any political opinion on HN so long as it’s a Liberal Progressive opinion.
In my “lived experience” <eye roll> this wasn’t so obvious here 15 years ago.
Everything you don’t agree with is just right wing nut jobs. Diversity of opinion, so long as it’s mine.
Between 1969 and 1998, the share of faculty identifying as “liberal” or “far-left” shifted only a tenth of a percentage point, from 44.7 percent to 44.8 percent.
Beginning with the next survey, in 2001, however, faculty opinion took a hard left turn such that professors on the political left are now approaching a supermajority in the academy (see figure 1)
https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-23-winter/the-hyperpoli...
I don't know that I'd characterize the military industrial complex, especially the private parts, as being made of up far-left types.
It seems that funding has become much more political lately, the problem getting worse.
Obviously being a truck driver is different than being a physics professor. But I'm not sure there is much of a coherent argument supporting the idea that the former exists in the real world while the latter does not.
Beginning with the next survey, in 2001, however, faculty opinion took a hard left turn such that professors on the political left are now approaching a supermajority in the academy (see figure 1)
https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-23-winter/the-hyperpoli...
Not the wet lettuce straw man usage posited by the other comment.