As a professor, I probably agree that a lot of academia probably isn't that valuable, and probably could be reorganized. However: 1. I think the same argument

As a professor, I probably agree that a lot of academia probably isn't that valuable, and probably could be reorganized. However: 1. I think the same arguments could be made about just about anything anywhere. People forget that. 2. I think there's a collision of reality with assumptions about how progress works. We tend to think that supergeniuses come in and revolutionize everything, and I think things are instead very piecemeal and incremental. As a result, we fret about worthless academics when the real problem is our expectations about how things work. I realize that sounds a bit like "we should downgrade our expectations" but what I really mean is that great work requires a lot of small contributions that don't look important at any given point in time, but we expect great work to be lots of big contributions all the time. It's sort of like expecting building construction to happen by waiting for one mutant superhuman to come in and put the pieces together, and then blaming the workers for not building quickly enough. 3. Relatedly, it's impossible to know what's important and what not at any given time. I'm struck by the number of times obscure results from decades ago are dragged out and used as the basis of some new finding. 4. About psychology and neuroscience: there's the bootstrapping problem. Let's say you want to explain something like attention. At some point you have to invoke neurons. But to get there you have to have a way of measuring attention, a definition of what attention even means. To do that you have to have a model of the thing you're explaining. We're nowhere near a clear framework for that sort of thing. Similar sorts of arguments could be made about philosophy. Sure, philosophy's great when it intersects with other fields. But there are some problems that wouldn't have any sort of outlet anywhere else other than philosophy publications. Emergence is a good example of this.