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I think suggesting that the right doesn’t attract thinkers is wrong. As I said below, I think it does. The difference between liberal and conservative thinking types is where they gravitate to. Conservative thinkers tend to end up in the business world where the ideas are built in various forms. I don’t think anyone would say someone like Elon Musk doesn’t have a Big Crazy Radical idea for the future. The reason he’s not an academic is that he’s too busy building rockets, self-driving cars, and Starlink. Hollywood left has long been criticized for reusing characters and turning famous and popular characters diverse. What they aren’t generally doing is creating new franchises they aren’t making the kind of entertainment that can stand on its own.
Which is more attractive to thinkers? Go to work in academia, make peanuts for decades write reams of journal articles that might maybe be read once or twice, write books that nobody cares about, and teach classes. Go to work for Elon Musk and build a platform that will put a man on Mars within ten years. Build AI that can solve problems, build cars that drive themselves. Build that big bright beautiful future. I just don’t see how a starry eyed thinker who wants a better future for humanity would be content simply dreaming about that future when building it is within reach. I think academia is likely to be more attractive to people who lack self confidence and confidence in their ideas simply because it’s the place where ideas go to die in a sense. It’s perfectly safe to put your dreams in a journal nobody will ever see. It’s perfectly safe to advocate for changes to society or criticize art from the safety of a job you can’t be fired from.
I think the difference is that conservatives tend to attract the doers rather than the idealistic.
As someone who is smarter than the average academic and chose to go into industry, this is how I've always thought of it. A lot of leftists have an ideological hatred of industry, or at least think of it as vulgar. So they just stay in academia forever, if they can, even if they have to accept adjunct wages.
I had the grades and test scores to get into a high-ranked PhD program, but I wanted to go into industry, partly for the money, but partly because industry is awesome. In the years since, I've gained more respect for what academia could have been, while simultaneously losing respect for what it actually is. Sometimes I wish I'd stuck around for a PhD so I could do research, but if I had, I'd be doing research in industry.
This creates a vicious cycle, where the overrepresentation of leftists in academia allows them to make it less attractive to non-leftists, which further increases their overrepresentation, and now it's become so extreme that they've been allowed to enforce ideological tests for hiring.
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