Oh indeed. It's easy to play the game too. The business world is
full of this as well, so it's a good skill to learn, especially
if you need to do a presentation to a venture capitalist to fund
your latest whoziwhatsit. Not my kind of thing though.
Honestly though, I think a lot of academia is just to keep
people there. Warm bodies with checking accounts = funding for
the college. I've heard it said that it's not long before there
will be a glut of PhD's and no jobs for them.
That's why they write books. Give talks. Gotta do something with
that Dr. on the name.
Nothing wrong with it as a lifestyle but spinning yarns with big
words can easily lead to a lot of people bumping their heads
into each other and not getting anywhere.
It happens within mathematics as well. Not so much in the math
itself, but in some of the things that mathematics is being used
to justify and draw conclusions for. We tend to agree with
things that are mathematically or statistically based and
agreement = funding. Not that everything is related to money,
but if I see something in a book or given in a talk...
_somebody_ usually is getting paid somewhere.. and when there's
money on the table, things don't have to be true, they just have
to sell.
That's not to say that there's "Truth in Poverty". But I always
keep a skeptical eye open when something sounds "too good".
