Not brilliant to ensure a good fraction of your smartest citizens are effectively unable to reproduce.
My professors pushed me so hard to get on the grad school track.
I was too smart to do something so stupid.
Professors are no longer the smartest people in society because only idiots go into academia. Grad students are often not the best or brighest but people with some kind of mental illness that prevents them from making rational long-term decisions.
There is no way that an intelligent person would ever try to get into academia in this climate. The people who try are on par with the pothead guitar player starting a garage band to get rich--they're not smart.
Oh, my, yes. One of the biggest problems with being smart is that it makes one especially prone to listening to and trusting in words, because one is so used to doing so due to the fact that it was the rewarded and reinforced behavior throughout their entire life, which remember, has consisted of little but schooling for such people up to that point. It takes additional training or practice to break out of that. After a lifetime of words about how wonderful this career path is, how suited to it they are, and how it's their natural goal, it cuts down to their personal identity to realize that the words were not true, and that's a hard thing to go through. (I am not being even slightly sarcastic. That can literally drive people to suicidal levels of emotional pain.)
But I do get your point and have lived it and seen it first hand.
Having said that.. I truly believe that academia is now SELECTING for these types of people: naive, foolish, simple-minded, trusting, innocent, gullible.
Only people with those traits are dumb enough to get into it.
The smartest people, who have not just intelligence but foresight, self-control, cunning, and guile, are found at Wall Street, in med school, or as high-level executives in major corporations.
They aren't doing science because they are too smart for science. Science is for dunces.
If you can't spot a dishonest salespitch from an academic, doesn't that make you gullible?
Smart people make decisions based on evidence. Gullible people trust their elders.
I can't see any better solution to human gullibility than to herd all the gullible people into a reproductive dead end. This means gullible men should be put into a situation of poverty so they can't find mates, and gullible women should be made to work in careers until they turn 38 and their likelihood of reproduction drops into the single digits.
If we can't make gullible people smart, we can at least make sure their genes leave the gene pool.
I am of the opinion that having a building full of head-in-the-cloud brainiacs chipping away at hard problems in medicine, nanotech, industrial chemistry, etc will do more good for society than having a building full of the meanest, savviest businessmen brainstorming new innovative ways to trick people into buying comparatively poorly priced insurance / advertising / savings plans. Due to the non-excludability of scientific progress, we have an economic system designed to incentivize the latter at the expense of the former. That's a bug, not a feature.
Markets are very good at sniffing out and rewarding some kinds of value creation. They're not so good at sniffing out and rewarding other kinds of value creation and sometimes they create perverse incentives that are downright terrible. There are enough instances of this happening that I don't think it should be controversial to demand that "markets know best" philosophies should only be taken seriously if they come with a string of conditions for (at the bare minimum) identifying dysfunctional markets and rejecting their conclusions in such cases (e.g. Enron's rolling blackouts, pay-for-service health care incentivizing longer wait times, the Chinese Businessman strategy, Ponzi schemes, etc). "Markets know best" should never be taken as an article of faith, especially if you identify as a libertarian.
Libertarians philosophers that have won respect from the academic community (self-test: name 3, excluding Ayn Rand, otherwise you have homework to do) know how to qualify their arguments. "Markets know best" is a conclusion to be made (or not) under specific circumstances for specific reasons. There is no branch of libertarianism I am familiar with that has both survived the competitive back-and-fourth of the philosophical community and managed to uphold "markets know best" as a tautology. If you're taking "markets know best" as an article of faith, I would recommend examining this foundation for cracks. The most popular one (and the one I "fell" for during my libertarian phase) has to do with using a transaction-centric model for value creation. There are others. Perpetual vigilance is the only defense.
Sorry if I've read too much into your opinion, but it seems very similar to one that I used to hold and I'd be remiss if I didn't point that out.
Do you know what else Galois did in his free time? He became a political radical, served a nine month jail sentence, and had an affair with the prison medic's daughter ultimately resulting in his death at the age of 20.