Your comment makes it sound like there's an agenda in some entity consciously misrepresenting how acamedia works. But academia is really accessible to public nowadays.
The problem, in my opinion, is how external entities treat science. Some examples:
* Media reporting low grade papers as "Science" which constantly contradict each other. "Scientists found out $something causes cancer", then a year after that "Scientists found out $thatsamething cures cancer
* Pseudo scientific drugs being sold for a health-and-beauty-obsessed general public with little to no effect
* Political think tanks funding flawed research to push their own agenda and heavily echoing those researches in their echelons for political gain
It seems that academia has become a foundation for other entities to cling on for profit, and now the it's the acamedia's reputation that has been shattered.
>Your comment makes it sound like there's an agenda in some entity consciously misrepresenting how acamedia works.
There absolutely is.
Scientists and universities are constantly declaring themselves to be bastions of reason and enlightenment, and their research that they themselves know is shit to be of great significance and rigor.
I'm not even talking about the outright corruption that you mentioned - just the more mundane things like researchers publishing papers with completely useless/misleading information (e.g. testing a ML algorithm on a single dataset and declaring it as a breakthrough in neurosignal decoding) just to get those updoots from your mates.
Even when something in academia doesn't have an agenda, it will be interpreted by everyone else as if it does.
Despite all the brilliant minds and appearance of professionalism and pride and campus pageantry...
it's easily a much more insecure, drama-filled, immature, and petty social dynamic and environment than most high schools.
That seems imo to be due to a combination of academia itself and a govt (or govt style) administration apparatus, where everyone is constantly trying convince everyone else of the importance of what it is they do.
The problem, in my opinion, is how external entities treat science. Some examples:
* Media reporting low grade papers as "Science" which constantly contradict each other. "Scientists found out $something causes cancer", then a year after that "Scientists found out $thatsamething cures cancer
* Pseudo scientific drugs being sold for a health-and-beauty-obsessed general public with little to no effect
* Political think tanks funding flawed research to push their own agenda and heavily echoing those researches in their echelons for political gain
It seems that academia has become a foundation for other entities to cling on for profit, and now the it's the acamedia's reputation that has been shattered.