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Researcher Condemns Conformity Among His Peers
- timr 17y agoOne of the cruel, unspoken ironies of academic life (particularly for grad students, who usually have little power or autonomy) is that the biggest rewards come from revolutionary change...but nobody wants to support you if you set out to be revolutionary. So you have to be free-thinking, but only incrementally so. Stay within the confines of your pack; throw stones at the other guys. Working in low-stakes fields like academia really helps you to highlight how little our social structure has evolved from apes. So much of success in human culture depends upon winning the favor of the alpha, while not alienating the other members of the pack. And while we may have come up with much more sophisticated mechanisms for doing it, fundamentally we're still just howling at the trees and competing for a little bit of attention.