Dear Academia, I loved you, but I’m leaving you (2014)

And it is hard to discuss some of those ideas, as they are often established within the specialization. The reasons why those wrong ideas have become established have more to do with tradition than actual science. And the reason why they were accepted, is because they matched some observations. Afterwards they were coincidence or cherry-picked, but often not recognized as such. And alternative theories were not needed nor supported, due to the internal culture.

It is easy to compare it with programming problems. You can claim that your program works when you tested it for certain problems. But if no-one else is allowed to test your code, your program probably still has a lot of bugs.

In some cases there is even a fundamental problem. They started with the wrong models in the first place, and/or misinterpreted certain observations. And from there they started growing new models on top of it. It is like programming code that started with the wrong abstractions.

Most problems occur from theories that are developed without much practical experience. Sometimes even without any practical experience. A friend of mine is a computer-scientist who has almost no computer experience. I have heard many wrong ideas from him.

If I want to talk about the problems, I will probably step on someone's toes. Causing anger and the belief that I am just misinformed or under educated.

We like to project these problems onto psychology and such, but I can also find them in hard sciences.

Let me pick one in hard physics. There are some theories in physics that model field-lines as real. While in reality, fields are always continuous. There are clearly some mistakes in one (or more) of the underlying theories.

> the truth is I understand why they have to do things that way, if they don't get published, they don't get money to continue work that should theoretically be beneficial down the road!

Scientists optimizing for what is likely to be published (read: what is likely to earn money), sacrificing elsewhere. Maybe if we payed them enough so that they don't have to do this to survive, then we wouldn't have this issue.

When I was in K-12, I got strong messages that education was generally good and, in particular, good preparation for a good career, e.g., financially secure, enough to be a good family provider and more, and a Ph.D. was the best degree.

Okay, around DC, with only a BS in math, I quickly had a good career going in applied math and computing. Often I could have done better if I'd known more about math and physics; so I did a lot of study on/off the job and learned a lot. Then I went for a Ph.D. in applied math and did well with it.

But, no way, not a chance, never, not even for a milli, micro, nano, pico second did I ever want to be a college prof. Instead I wanted to return to the career I had before grad school and, then, just do better at THAT career.

But my wife's Ph.D. program nearly killed her. So, to try to help her get well, I took a slot as a prof in an MBA program in a B-school near her family farm.

She didn't get well; that academic slot was as in the OP: The B-school wasn't much about business. The students were putting in time, money, and effort and learning next to nothing useful for career in business. For me, as in the OP, I was being financially irresponsible.

So, I left for business, an AI project at IBM's Watson lab.

Publishing? The OP claims that some of the publishing was unethical. Actually, in the papers I wrote as sole author, I didn't encounter that. My papers were fully honest, honorable, ethical, etc. Some co-authored papers were nearly all about hype and PR (public relations, getting known, pretending to have some good, leading edge research); the papers weren't actually wrong or unethical, and hype and PR are more common in business than in those co-authored papers!

Looking back, here's what's wrong generally with B-school: It has physics envy, wants to see itself as doing high end, pure research. E.g., too many B-schools are much more interested in the question P versus NP than anything having to do with being successful in business. B-schools are not clinical like medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy. Except for some courses in accounting and maybe business law, B-schools are not vocational training or much help for a business career.

More generally in US research university education, the big push is for research that can get research grants, and helping the students do well outside academics is a low priority. Really, at a good research university, the students will be able to learn from the best sources the best theoretical foundations of some field; that foundation might, maybe a long shot but might, help for some work in the field, even in business. Yes, one really good application might be a strong pillar for a whole career. Fine. But day by day those research university foundations are not very good information about how to be successful in business, might be like teaching about the details of photosynthesis and the chemistry and thermodynamics of internal combustion engines as a foundation for running a lawn mowing service!

Since the OP is about psychology, my brother tried that. He got his Masters. He concluded that psychology knew a lot about rats that was next to useless for people and otherwise next to nothing useful about people, was good at what was not of interest and not much good at what was of interest. He changed to political science and got his Ph.D. there. He has never used the degree for his career!

What happened? At the high end US research universities, ballpark 60% of the university budgets is from the university's 60% or so off the top of research grants to the profs. The research grants are heavily for (A) the STEM fields, e.g., from NSF, and (B) bio-medical science, e.g., from NIH. (A) is mostly for US national security and got started during the Cold War after The Bomb and more in the STEM fields were so important in WWII. As a secondary effect, the research funding AND the DoD funding for systems has helped US progress in information technology, e.g, the early days of Silicon Valley. For (B), that is, bluntly, because Congress has to vote the money and a lot of members of Congress are old enough to care about progress in medicine. As a secondary effect, the technology in US medicine is likely the best in the world. Still, as in the OP, commonly trying to be a college prof is financially irresponsible and possibly objectionable ethically, etc. But, again, there are some really big bucks involved, both to run a university and to get research grants.

Some good news, for the taxpayers, about the research grants, especially from NSF and NIH, (A) the grant applications commonly get expert reviews and (B) generally the grants are quite competitive.

For the students, learning is MUCH easier now than ever before: We are awash in books, often in PDF and for free, video lectures, e.g., quantum mechanics at MIT, etc. And, especially in practical computing, the US workforce does a LOT of independent study and self teaching, e.g., commonly knows MUCH more about practical computing than research university computer science profs.

So, in short, we can leave the research universities to do far out research and for the STEM fields, even for theoretical purposes (e.g., do research with a day job as reviewing patents in Switzerland!), i.e., there's no law going to sleep at night for an hour thinking about how to resolve P versus NP, and especially for practical purposes, be largely self-taught.

For how to run a successful lawn mowing service, bath and kitchen renovation service, auto repair and body repair shop, ..., building supply company, fast food restaurant, Web site, software house, etc., people get to learn from their parents, early jobs, what they can read, and especially what they can figure out for themselves. For using some algorithms for the traveling salesman problem to find a route over some ground to minimize mowing time, that might, but I doubt it, be okay for some farms but not for mowing suburban lawns!