To be eccentric, you need to be crazy and rich. Otherwise you're just crazy.

The type still exists, they're embittered lonely conspiracy theorists now. The ones we hear from.

The ones we dont hear from are probably happily making interesting advances in their chosen field with perhaps slight regrets that they can't meaningfully share their results but otherwise content to breed pumpkin sized glowing tomatoes that eat rats, or whatever.

FYI: the author works for a right wing think tank whose stated goal is “to apply the riches of the Judeo-Christian tradition to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics.” So no surprise that he wants to blame the supposed disappearance of absent-minded professors on… society not valorizing the women who devote their lives to supporting these men. How dare those women have their own ambitions!

Anyone who’s recently taken a STEM class at a university can verify that absent-minded eccentric professors absolutely still exist in reality. Go to any math department and look for a professor that doesn’t fit the bill (male or female by the way!).

My favorite part of this rant is when he claims that Galois would not last in grad school today because of his temper. The dude was killed in a duel at the age of 20. Apparently he wouldn’t have lasted long in his time either.

> Anyone who’s recently taken a STEM class at a university can verify that absent-minded eccentric professors absolutely still exist in reality.

And don’t worry: they also exist in the humanities. Probably in the social sciences too but I have no experience there.

yes, in any system where you are sampling from a population as you increase the bias the variance decreases.

Increase competition, i.e. apply bias to the filter that selected samples(people) for continuation in an academic or professional environment, and the variance of the people who make it past that filter will go down.

There is no way to avoid this.

Well what I found interesting is that while the phenomenon of increased conformity in upper academia is not new to me (e.g. Eric Weinstein's discussions on the matter), the cultural change surrounding this phenomenon is not something I had yet recognized (i.e. scientists in movies are like lawyers).

This disturbed me as well. The nuts and neurodivergent (there's a difference!) still exist but maybe it's not a filtering phenomenon but just the author not recognizing code switching?

Why have a bias for that particular attribute?

What that's still almost all professors , this is some vaguely conspiratorial idea to discredit scientists

Nutty professor/inventor is still alive and you can find them in:

Henry Deacon in Eureka

Dr. Ezra "Doc" Greene in Transformers: Rescue Bots

To a lesser extent: Lucius Fox - Batman