a danger of unconventional ideas on academia

Date: 2020-11-08

One of the dangers of having unconventional views on academia is that you can end up in a situation where you don’t produce a track record of thinking / ideas / research efforts. Academia and the associated journal-article norms is the primary method ppl use to establish a track record of serious research and having/presenting pioneering ideas.

I think rejecting uni culture is one reason I have ended up writing so little up till now; I had issues with some aspects from the start but I got more critical over a few years until I dropped out. (Tho I’ve been tempted twice by offers of a shortcut to postgrad stuff: first a masters of geoscience and second a PhD in compsci focusing on blockchain stuff. There are circumstances where you can do postgrad stuff without an undergrad degree – basically if someone will vouch for and supervising you. Skipping the BS was one reason I considered it more fully.)

I tried to do some writing after dropping out but never found it easy and I wanted talk about topics beyond my writing skill. I don’t think doing the normal undergrad-to-phd-to-research thing would have fixed all those issues (I’m still critical of academia), but I would have ended up with a track record at least.

I think my lack of a track record has been significantly detrimental to me more than once.

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