And what pray tell do you think modern academia is about? I have trouble understanding why so many Hacker Newsies have such disdain for a class of people whose main objective in life is to discover and share knowledge, and have sacrificed tremendous amounts of their time, and potential money, to do so.
There are whole disciplines whose telos is now activism rather than knowledge production.
https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites...
By revealed preference, modern academia is about churning incremental papers in order to obtain tenure and research grants.