> They are pretty much by definition highly intelligent people who could earn a lot more by working for FAANG or hedge funds
Having interviewed many failed priests of higher education, this is not true. It might have been true 50 years ago, but if you are smart and intelligent you typically do not spend 5-7 of the most productive years of your life getting a PhD.
>but prefer to take lower paid work on the off chance they get to discover something interesting about the universe we live in. So not much like priests then.
This is exactly what priests do for religion right? Academics are ordained priests educated in the Seminary of Higher Education. You need to be granted a Doctor of Philosophy in order to join the Church of Higher Education, and then maybe a few decades of cloistered contemplation and publishing of prayers to the funding agencies will let you do something useful.
Everyone I've met with a PhD was intelligent. Maybe not genius, but yeah, pretty damn intelligent.
If you want to spend your life in the pursuit of knowledge rather than mere money or status, it's kind of a prerequisite to demonstrate you can perform original research.
I honestly don't get the analogy with priests. They still seem utterly different to me.
Organized religion ordains priests to read the sacred texts (papers, theses, books) and then anoints them to be the only ones allowed to do ministry and theology. Then they fight among themselves to be allowed to get resources and rise up the ranks of the church.
The analog is with forcing promising researchers to go through 5-10 years of thankless "training" to be granted a doctorate, so that they can be taken "seriously" by granting institutions, and have them fight among themselves so they can get resources and rise up the ranks of academia.
It's the same institutional structure, not anything to do with the content, and this is by design since academia and the Church were one and the same centuries ago!
Of course the idea that you don't need institutional approval to do something is alien to someone steeped in this worldview, but this is the news site for YC, most famous for telling people no, in fact you don't have to waste a decade working before doing something interesting.
Hmmm. You are describing pretty much any human organisation where people have to compete for limited resources.
I disagree strongly with describing learning what we currently know (or think we know) as reading sacred texts and being annointed as the only ones allowed to perform scientific research.
Scientific texts are very much not sacred. Yes, there are orthodoxies which most people believe, and if you are going to go against them, you better have damn good evidence. But you absolutely can challenge them, which is how science progresses and is the key difference between religion and science.
Since I just had a paper published in a computer science academic journal last year, (and I'm very much not an academic), I also challenge the idea that only people within the "priesthood" are allowed to practice the discipline. Obviously this will be rarer than people whose day job is doing this, but there is no license to practice science required from an anointed priesthood.
So forgive me if I really push back on that analogy, as it obscures the absolutely critical differences between them.
Having interviewed many failed priests of higher education, this is not true. It might have been true 50 years ago, but if you are smart and intelligent you typically do not spend 5-7 of the most productive years of your life getting a PhD.
>but prefer to take lower paid work on the off chance they get to discover something interesting about the universe we live in. So not much like priests then.
This is exactly what priests do for religion right? Academics are ordained priests educated in the Seminary of Higher Education. You need to be granted a Doctor of Philosophy in order to join the Church of Higher Education, and then maybe a few decades of cloistered contemplation and publishing of prayers to the funding agencies will let you do something useful.