When I went into academia, I thought there was a tradeoff between having a lucrative career, on the one hand, and an interest in truth and influence, on the other. I came to realize there is no tradeoff, academia is worse across the board. I encourage everyone to avoid it.
https://twitter.com/ekadamer/status/1375745456886648835
You have more intellectual freedom writing for think tanks and newspapers than for academic journals. Academics are told what authorities to cite and which methodology to use, and that's on top of the pressure to reach certain conclusions, which are found everywhere, and more PC.
During my PhD, I did work on public opinion and used stats to understand international relations. I came to the conclusion public opinion doesn’t matter in IR, and the statistical methods are mistakenly applied. Only way to keep publishing would have been to pretend otherwise.
In the real world, if I come to believe that a conclusion I reached was wrong or a method I was using was flawed, I can just say so and move on. It’s hard to think of a more intellectually constricting system. The PC that people focus on is a relatively small part of it.
Writing outside of the academy, you have to say things that are credible and interesting to a more general audience, not just a few people who have the same sunk costs as you. This can create pressures, but is also a check on bad methodology and doing work that doesn’t matter.
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