I don't want to generalize because I do not know how widespread this pattern is, but my job has me hopping between a few HPC centers around Germany, and a pattern I notice is that, a lot of these places are chuck full of reject physicists, and a lot of the AI funding that gets distributed gets gobbled up by these people and the consequence of which is a lot of these ML4Science projects. I personally think it is a bit of a shame, because HPC centers are not there to only serve physicists, and especially with AI funding we in Germany should be doing more AI-core research.

HPCs are usually in Collab with universities for specific science research. Using up their resources is hopping on the bandwagon to damage another industry.an industry (AI) which is neither new nor anywhere close to being anything more than an personal assistant at the moment. Not even a great one at that.

> a pattern I notice is that, a lot of these places are chuck full of reject physicists

Utter nonsense, these are some of the smartest people in the world who do incredibly valuable science.

Exactly. Passing academia is the opposite of being a reject.

To be fair, the problems of careerism is really a side-effect of academia becoming more enthralled with the private sector, and therefore inheriting it's problems.

If there's one thing working as a software dev has taught me, it's that all decisions are made from a careerist, selfish perspective. Nobody cares what's best, they care what's most impressive and what will personally get them ahead. After it's done, it's not their problem. And nobody can blame them either. This mindset is so pervasive that if you don't subscribe to it, you're a sucker. Because other people will, and they'll just out-lap you. So the result is the same except now you're worse off.

Well, the good news - and I think from the sound of your post you will take it as good news, because you care - is that you are not correct.

Some careers are vocations, and in vocations people work less for egoist reasons and more from the desire to help people. Fortunately in the UK, we still have a very strong example of a vocation - nursing. I know many nurses, none of them can be described as careerist or selfish. So to begin, we know that your statement doesn’t hold true. Nurses’ pay is appalling and career paths are limited, so I’m confident that these many datapoints generalise.

The obvious next question is why academia is not a vocation. You say it’s because it has become too like the private sector. Well, I can tell you that is also wrong, as I have spent many years in both sectors, and the private sector is much less selfish and careerist. This is surprising at first, but I think it’s about incentives.

In the private sector very few people are in direct competition with each other, and it is rarely a zero sum game. The extreme of this is startups, where founders will go to great lengths to help each other. Probably the only area their interests are not aligned is in recruitment, but it is so rare for them to be recruiting the same type of person at exactly the same time that this isn’t really an issue. There are direct competitors of course, but that situation is so exceptional as to be easily ignored.

In academia, however, the incentives encourage selfishness, competition, obstruction, and most of all vicious politics. Academics are not paid well, and mostly compete for egoist rewards such as professorships. I believe in the past this was always somewhat a problem, but it has been exacerbated by multiple factors: (a) very intelligent people mostly left, because more money could be made in finance and tech, and thus little progress can be made and there is no status resulting from genuine science, (b) governments have used research assessment exercises, nonsense bureaucracy invented by fools that encourages silly gaming of stats rather than doing real work, (c) a system of reinforcement where selfish egotists rise at the expense of real scientists, and then - consciously or not - reinforce the system they gamed, thinking it helped them up the ladder and thus must be a good system. The bad drive out the good.

Ultimately the problem is academia is now filled with politicians pretending to be scientists, and such institutional failure is I think a one way street. The only way to fix it is to create new institutions and protect them from infiltration by today’s “scientists”.

This is of course a generalisation, and there are some good eggs left, just not many. Most of them eventually realise they’re surrounded by egoist politicians and eventually leave.

The follow on from this is that any structure one wants to persist through time had better rest maximally on people acting in their own self interest.

This doesn't seem possible, because self interest will always lead to hacking the structure for better returns, and technology accelerates the ability to do that. It seems to me that whatever is put in place to direct selfish behavior toward good will eventually be rerouted or broken for one exceptionally selfish asshole or group.

It's not a binary classification.

Some structures are more resistant, some less.

Some are self-correcting, some not.

The biggest design feature is usually requiring energy to be burnt to hack the desired outcome. At some point it's more effort than benefit.

In what sense could you interpret this story as "no longer truth seeking"? Isn't this in fact the opposite, a very clear story of where truth was sought and found?

Seriously don't understand what "no longer" does here.