I had the 'luck' of being a research assistant at a prestigious academic collaboration involving multiple equally prestigious universities. This was in my bachelor years, and I still hadn't decided whether to pursue a career in academia or elsewhere.

While the experience day to day was definitely fun, it destroyed any desire I had of entering the field. A lot of politics, a lot of statistically suspect stuff (even to me, in my third year of a bachelor), and a lot of busiwork.

After that experience I went into web development (full-stack). What I like about it is that even though there IS politics, even though there IS taking shortcuts, and god forgive me for some of the code I delivered, in the end whatever I work on has to actually do the thing it's supposed to do. It doesn't remove the aforementioned problems, but it grounds everything in a way that is mostly acceptable to me.

As frustrating as it can be to build some convoluted web app that feels like it's held together by scotch tape, it's nice to know that it eventually has to do whatever the client asks for, however flawed.

What does conservative mean in this context? Could you explain it a bit? Thanks!

Apologies, I meant conservative in the sense of resistance to contemplate new ideas rather than the political sense. Somewhat naively I had assumed that academic research was where people would be most welcoming of at least discussing new ideas, whereas I found the opposite to be true.

Actually in some sciences they are. But anything touching medicine... forget it.

Thanks! Could you give a few examples? About what were folks so conservative? Were they stubborn proving/supporting their own paradigm/hypothesis or ... they were just simply not open to any ideas? About methods or about theory? Both?

It was quite a long time ago (~30 years) but I suspect a lot of it was simply because senior academics didn't realise they were actually managers, had no interest in managing or even understand that there were problems.

If I had to guess, in the academic context it would mean no actual novel thinking, just churning out more papers on the same `winning` theories in the field, things where before even starting you have a clear idea of what the result would look like.

The problem with going to a startup is it is kind of like going from the frying pan into the fire. As someone who has worked in both academia and industry, while academia and its pursuit of publications leads to bad behavior, industry and its pursuit of money is even more unprincipled. While it might not be that hard to fool peer reviewers with nonsense, it is way easier to fool venture capitalists, who often know no science and and are just listening for the hot buzzwords.

Is that small-c conservative? Or do you mean rightwing? (curious, I assume the former...)

In either case pretty much all humans are profoundly small-c conservative, "big change projects" on society-scale do often end in war/death/etc. At least, it's probably 50/50 whether its a "National Health Service" or a "World War".

However the reason is deeper than that: evolution does not care if you're thriving, it cares that you are breeding. So you're optimized for "minimum safety" not "maximum flourishing".

So if things are stable then you will prefer to stay in them for as long as possible. It is why people need to "hit rock bottom" before they can be helped, often, ie., their local-minimum needs to become unstable so they will prefer the uncertainty of change.