My dream died, and now I'm here

I love Sabine Hossenfelder's personal take on the social problems in science ( [VIDEO] ), which reminded me a lot of my own experience in academic science. She also has some critiques of particle physics that I find compelling - but outside my knowledge domain - where the sociological dynamics sound similar to things I've bumped into in biology.

On a tangent, this video[0] from Sabine Hossenfelder about academics in general is eye opening. In comments, veritasium[1] agrees: >After finishing my PhD I went to a university-led session on ‘What Comes Next.’ What I heard sounded a lot like “now, you beg for money.” It was so depressing to think about all the very clever people in that room who had worked so very hard only to find out they had no financial security and would be spending most of their days asking for money. I realised that even what I thought of as the ‘safe path’ was uncertain so I may as well go after what I truly want. That led me here. EDIT: Typos [0]. [VIDEO] [1]. [LINK]

> There are numerous of cases of financiers, academics, etc. who have been expelled because they have corrected their beliefs in contrary to the groups. The best thing to do is leave. Once you cross that Rubicon, never think "I can change this system/institution from within". You will die on that hill. I wish people had better psychological education and preparation to understand what institutions are. Realistic preparation before joining the police, army, government, or academia would help many people avoid so much suffering - and make those institutions "better" by making it easier for differently-thinking individuals to get out and start new movements or institutions. It's really hard, because sometimes ones whole identity gets wrapped up in that group. Cult leavers often talk about this. Rejecting the ideas is the comparatively easy part. Escaping the people is harder. But hardest of all is escaping the part of yourself that identifies. Sorry I don't have a better link to this video [0], but it matches my experience, of waking up one day in an in institution I had outgrown, surrounded by tiny-minded, compliant, insecure, mutually hostile, self-deluding people. It takes courage to move on. [0] [VIDEO]

“When you go into the medical field, the law field, every single field, everything is based on merit.” I'd probably reject her just for believing that. She'll learn, sadly too soon, that all the merit in the world doesn't overcome hate. [VIDEO]

Note how you have no trouble enumerating famous academics from pre-1960s. Shouldn’t we have much more such famous people, if your theory is true that institutional obstacles kept a lot of geniuses out? What are the „luminaries like e.g. Bertrand Russell or Tolkien or Wittgenstein or Gödel or Whitehead or Heidegger“ of today? There should be many more! The progress of science should speed up, the number of groundbreaking papers should grow. Yet the opposite is true [0]. Could it instead be that progress in science is driven by a few geniuses, and 95% of academia nowadays is just a mechanism of turning grants into (often fraudulent) papers [1], suffocating the institution of university as a byproduct? [0] [LINK] [1] [VIDEO]

as one female academic said it: scholarships specifically for women are reinforcing the idea that women are inferior because they would not be accepted without that scholarship. [VIDEO] [LINK]

[VIDEO] in this video here sabine hossenfelder explains the problem. the statement could be applied to any other marginalized group "I am against programs or positions that are exclusively for women.I think that treating women differently just reinforces the prejudice that women are less capable than men"

A perhaps relevant Sabine Hossenfelder video: [VIDEO] Although Sabine's video is more about today's academia money/paper mill incentives, she mentions the more eternal work/family-life balance for women that also seems to have been determinative for Rosemary Fowler (the subject of the article).