> the academic side is largely the same thing except it's attained from years of schooling through certain pedagogues that tout the one true way and if you haven't been through that wringer, then your understanding doesn't count

Personally, every time I approach an unfamiliar domain I’m shocked by its depth and sophistication, seemingly only made possible by hundreds of thousands of hours given by passionate and intelligent people. Where there are parallels of concepts between domains, there’s often also highly specialized language formed around the exceptions that separate the two (e.g. applications of signal processing in different domains).

> true intellectualism, has humility and the everlasting honest pursuit for truth

True intellectualism recognizes the value of institutions and the models and frameworks of organized thought that they produce. For every Ramanujan, there are millions of Terrence Howards.

No, I don't think it's the same thing at all. For many intellectual fields, I'd say having an academic degree (or a degree's equivalent of knowledge) in the subject is more-or-less required to have an intelligent, novel opinion on the subject.

It depends on the field, but just to use one that I'm familiar with, philosophy: everyone seems to think they have novel insights on philosophical issues, but unfortunately these opinions tend to be really, obviously wrong and half-baked when analyzed by actual philosophers.

I've had experience in a couple academic insitutions and among hundreds of faculty I've met, only three were real elitist assholes. Known among the departments as such too. But hey, they bring in the grant money, so people let them continue to run toxic labs. At least their sub pis are usually decent people.

I've heard of stories of posters at conferences getting tossed out because a single "important" person on the conference committee had a problem with the author's advisor.

All that being said I don't think the rate of assholism is any different from the rate among the general population. Quite the opposite. Most of us look at those Nature moonshot labs in our depts as something of a cult lacking any semblance of work-life balance. We find most of our most compelling papers and examples of great science are not in CNS publications, but in journals niche to our field with single digit impact factors. A big part of that is reviewers for niche journals are able to actually understand the work and give a better review.

Am I understanding you correctly that you believe that all of academia has aligned behind "one true way?"