Yes, Sabine, Academia Sucks!

The story of thousands of other scientists (like me...)

Sabine Hossenfelder left academia.

This! You must see… Because it eloquently describes what modern academia is about. Not because Sabine Hossenfelder says so (I disagree with her on a lot of things), but because I can confirm from my own experience that she nicely describes the conditions in which science has fallen in the last decades. Something that I described in the first chapters of my book “Free Progress Education.”

So, finally, she got out of the matrix. She is only the last victim of a long list of scientists who realized that the days of free research, where they could follow their passions, inspirations, intuitions, and original ideas have come to an end. Nowadays science has nothing to do with knowledge and discovery. It is a managerial enterprise that is all about industrialized groupthink where only grants and the ‘publish or perish’ law dictate the rules, which is frequently corrupted by scandals, where plagiarism and various forms of academic misconduct have become endemic, and most of the research it produces is BS. This also explains, at least in part, the lack of progress in several fields, despite enormous investments and lots of hype (e.g., personalized medicine, or neuroscience.)

Most young (under-)graduates still live in the romantic delusion that, once they get their MD… ahem, no… their… PhD, ouch… still not… when they will make it to a professorship, then they will finally be able to free their soul and potentiality and dedicate their life to science. But life teaches them a very different lesson, and then, they will have to adapt or quit. Many adapt and are fine with this state of affairs. However, a minority can’t accept being caged for the rest of their life in doing something that does not at all align with their inspiration and aspiration and have no other choice than to leave a rotting system. This only underlines once more how low an ailing science has fallen. And then we wonder why conspiracy theories and various forms of denialism have become increasingly popular. Wherefrom should people learn critical thinking? From scientists??

My decision to leave academia was one of the best decisions of my life. While I have to make my living with financially much less rewarding activities (video courses, math & physics coaching, etc. and without having a 1.2 M subscribers YT channel… hey, but you can help!) I can express myself freely and without having to align to nonsensical standards. Even though, you will still get to feel it when you submit a paper that does not align with the mainstream ideology to a peer-reviewed journal.

One would hope that sooner or later she comes out of the materialist matrix as well. But, perhaps, it is better not to expect too much. Meanwhile, I shout out loud: Welcome on board, Sabine! 🙂