In the American system its hard to get tenure being a loser, so it selects against losers.
But once tenured, you can easily turn into a loser.
A lot depends on the institution. At high prestige institutions its hard to manage as a loser, and you are going to select for more sociopaths and clueless. Top ranking institutions are going to have more sociopaths.
But at low ranking institutions you are going to find a different distribution—relatively more losers than clueless.
Vao highlights Ryan’s journey as a prototype loser/sociopath-in-waiting to sociopath ascendency. In the academic world, both Ryan as loser and Ryan as sociopath don’t exist. So is one of many ways the corporate america > academic mapping doesn’t fit.
Partly because academic signals are hard to fake by pure posers or pure sociopaths.
Though going with your flow, I think the analysis is right in that academics are essentially clueless.
But, within academics you can have the subdivisions, clueless-loser, clueless-clueless, clueless-sociopath.
I disagree on sociopath faculty—my experience is that senior academics are much more likely to be sociopaths than non-senior academics, because they have figured out the rules and manipulate them and break them to their advantage. And so they are more likely to have dark-triad personality traits.
The way I would see it in academia, is that clueless play the game (and play by the rules) because they enjoy it. Sociopaths play the game in order to win (by any means necessary) and losers have given up the game—and often drop out of academia altogether when it gets really bad.
The clueless “game” in academia is one of traditional academic values—advancing knowledge for humankind. And all academics to become academics in the first place must have bought into that game to a fair degree (as they start out clueless). But then the trajectories for some can diverge in more of the directions of loserdom and sociopathy depending on career trajectory, environment and pre-dispositions.
In the American system its hard to get tenure being a loser, so it selects against losers.
But once tenured, you can easily turn into a loser.
A lot depends on the institution. At high prestige institutions its hard to manage as a loser, and you are going to select for more sociopaths and clueless. Top ranking institutions are going to have more sociopaths.
But at low ranking institutions you are going to find a different distribution—relatively more losers than clueless.
This makes a lot of sense, good comment. Honestly most of my experience is with top programs so it makes sense that I missed this.
Though honestly I think Sociopath faculty are rare, being tenured at a top institution is just not that great for how much work it is.
Vao highlights Ryan’s journey as a prototype loser/sociopath-in-waiting to sociopath ascendency. In the academic world, both Ryan as loser and Ryan as sociopath don’t exist. So is one of many ways the corporate america > academic mapping doesn’t fit.
Partly because academic signals are hard to fake by pure posers or pure sociopaths.
Though going with your flow, I think the analysis is right in that academics are essentially clueless. But, within academics you can have the subdivisions, clueless-loser, clueless-clueless, clueless-sociopath.
I disagree on sociopath faculty—my experience is that senior academics are much more likely to be sociopaths than non-senior academics, because they have figured out the rules and manipulate them and break them to their advantage. And so they are more likely to have dark-triad personality traits.
The way I would see it in academia, is that clueless play the game (and play by the rules) because they enjoy it. Sociopaths play the game in order to win (by any means necessary) and losers have given up the game—and often drop out of academia altogether when it gets really bad.
The clueless “game” in academia is one of traditional academic values—advancing knowledge for humankind. And all academics to become academics in the first place must have bought into that game to a fair degree (as they start out clueless). But then the trajectories for some can diverge in more of the directions of loserdom and sociopathy depending on career trajectory, environment and pre-dispositions.
In STEM but other fields make it easier.