Scientists actually spending more of their time reading others' work, communicating encouragingly and giving constructive criticism (anyone in academia has read

Scientists actually spending more of their time reading others' work, communicating encouragingly and giving constructive criticism (anyone in academia has read more than a few hate filled reviews of their work), better pay (a postdoc at Oxford nets you a monthly salary after taxes of about 2.4k pounds), less focus on numbers and more on quality (a big reason why people don't read papers is because they're missing out on little by not doing so i.e., much of the work is incremental, unsurprising or just badly posed or ill motivated. instead focus must be given to quality and this must come from job hiring decisions which should reflect that science is not a numbers game, but the sad sad truth is it so very is). About the encouragement part, I felt let down many times by senior scientists by their uncaring and viciously competitive nature. All this does not need to be a part of academia. I think greater science can emerge after these structural problems are addressed. But currently the only people who rise to the top are the genuinely good ones and the ones who know how to game the numbers system. Idealists who come for the beauty of math often find themselves woefully unprepared to play all these other games in addition to doing good math.