> They never sent emails, everything was always oral

I work with a guy like that. Send him an email, and if he replies at all it will be with a phone call.

Maybe he is just fond of instant organic feedback

Even in a work setting it prevents accountability. That's why I send a follow up email immediately after the discussion with the points and commitments. "Please let me know if any of these action items are incorrect..."

Worked at a fully-remote company that was like that. Anything barely controversial was moved to Zoom for fear of recording incriminating data (which could used by authorities but also by CEO in regular witch hunt). We weren't discussing anything illegal but it had the side effect of discouraging any disagreements in writing.

Once worked with someone like that too. And he was terrible at keeping to things agreed on such calls, and would in fact later claim that we'd agreed things which we had not.

I started following every call with a short email listing, for the avoidance of doubt, everything agreed in the call, with a note that if I've missed anything he should let me know ASAP, and explicitly mentioning anything that didn't have a satisfactory conclusion during the call. Never felt the need to CC in others, unless they were specifically relevant, though that would have been a further step if needed (if he claimed to have never seen an mail etc.).

This is why we need single party consent recording laws.

My graduate advisor was like that. Refused to ever put anything in writing. Would verbally order you to do something, entire room would jump in and say "that doesn't make sense, literally doesn't add up", when they would bring it up again I would send them an email stating exactly what was wrong with their idea and why I didn't like it, if they insisted I would send them another email stating "although you have not responded to my previous written correspondence, you have verbally commanded me to do this multiple times so I will go ahead with your idea although here is a list of my objections", and then when the crap idea failed exactly the way everyone in the lab said it would professor would rant that it was your idea and they were always against it and you've wasted everyone's time and resources. Not surprisingly, I left with a MS instead of finishing my PhD. What an asshole. Professor recently got tenure, after multiple students and staff (including me) reported them for fraud, embezzlement, and slander.

Although I'm very positive about my graduate advisor, I do see similarities in my PhD field in general. I'm still trying to figure out what is the goal of academia. It's not about finding the truth.

Money, as always. Instead of selling a product to willing customers at a profit, you try to sell your research ideas to funding organizations in the hopes that they will give you a grant.

Yes that makes sense, but what is then the goal of government funding in all of this? Is it just politics? Like we want to find out that Facebook corrupts our youth, so we fund research in that direction? Government seems to not care about whether the actual findings are true because both citations and peer review do not measure truth but popularity.

One could counter this by saying that truth is valued in the sense that publishing false papers costs you your reputation. However, there is a simple solution for this and that is to make your theories more intricate. If your theories are intricate, you can just say that it was all part of the scientific process and walk away without blame.

Those Tesla's can’t keep their mouth shut (“whose Tesla said it accelerated…”)