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”.