The core of academia is preserving a fairly specific culture for long periods of time - a culture of people who care more about logical argument than social pressure.

In an academic setting the person with the strongest argument generally has a long term advantage. That gets compared to the real world where entities like the churches, political parties & <insert any groups> just don't work that way. Many organisations can go for multiple generations with charisma being a superior strategy to argument. In academics they remember the people who went it alone with the most technically correct argument in the face of general opposition (names like Galileo and Socrates spring to mind, along with legions of unpopular and unlikable men who nevertheless earn places of high honour for their contributions to the world's knowledge).

The academics perpetuate that with a series of exclusionary, weird and crufty traditions that frequently date back centuries. It isn't perfect but it has proven an effective culture at grinding out slow productivity gains.

> In an academic setting the person with the strongest argument generally has a long term advantage.

This is a remarkably naive view of how contemporary (and likely, any) academic institution or academia as a whole operates. Do you actually believe this?

You don't have to look very far to discover that they aren't perfect. I do suspect that as the academic tradition will fail as the bar to getting a degree lowers. Something like half the population the population of the US is getting a degree? Some of those students must be pretty average. Pretty challenging to build an exceptional cultural pocket out of average people.

Nevertheless they are much closer to the ideal than pretty much any community you can name. Especially on the scale the academy operates at in both time, space and social influence.

Academia is at the vanguard of dismissing meritocracy for politicking. If it were so great at dispassionately pursuing the truth then you wouldn't get things like decades of Alzheimer's research being based on a fraudulent study. There's nothing magical about the academy. They don't hire people of above average moral integrity and they are incentivized to publish attention grabbing findings. The result is they form cliques to protect their meal ticket theories.

You may say that but there is much more of a backlash against a fraudulent study than, say, all the people who lied the US into various financially ruinous wars. Despite one of those being objectively much worse for more people than the other.

The academy condemns people who publish fraudulent studies. The US political class is mostly at peace with the legacy of a George W. Bush or equivalent. Mild admiration for his political technique. Relatively popular president compared to the last 2. This is a difference of culture.

> There's nothing magical about the academy.

There is nothing magic about anything. Magic isn't an influence over our daily lives. :)

Things are still different from each other in observable ways.

The core of academia is being a good sophist. Every successful professor I met in gradschool was a better salesman than they were scientist, my own advisor included.

By that I just mean to make sure that they don’t succumb to the pressures of modern academia (grant agencies and every committee judge your proposal based on your expertise in the exact same field only in the past). That they need to find the goal they want and have an absolute open mind to reach it. That they also need to be well versed with philosophy (Neil Bohrs philosophy background arguably gave us the atomic bomb). That they should not think small (most academics would swear their life that there can never be a single cure for all of cancer. I beg to differ). That they should steer clear of this George Costanza academia attitude of “it’s not a lie if you truly believe in it” you need to get your grants and papers published. I can keep going on lol.

He's trying to say he has no idea what he's talking about

I’m pretty sure I have a decent idea about this. I’ve been fascinated at the rot of modern academia and to identify what went right in the past in such successful scientific endeavors. Decades of reading and rumination. If you now want to come and say my PhD is not enough and I need to be a professor to comment on the status quo, then perhaps that’s the exact attitude I’m critiquing.