
Researcher Condemns Conformity Among His Peers - robg
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/researcher-condemns-conformity-among-his-peers/?ref=science
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timr
One of the cruel, unspoken ironies of academic life (particularly for grad
students, who usually have little power or autonomy) is that the biggest
rewards come from revolutionary change...but nobody wants to support you if
you set out to be revolutionary. So you have to be free-thinking, but only
incrementally so. Stay within the confines of _your_ pack; throw stones at the
_other_ guys.

Working in low-stakes fields like academia really helps you to highlight how
little our social structure has evolved from apes. So much of success in human
culture depends upon winning the favor of the alpha, while not alienating the
other members of the pack. And while we may have come up with much more
sophisticated mechanisms for doing it, fundamentally we're still just howling
at the trees and competing for a little bit of attention.

