ok i went to my first proper academic conference. it was small, like ~40 people focusing on the effects of porn on behavior/intimacy. i think this was my first like high-volume encounter with academia. notes: *i LOVED some parts of it. the conversations i was overhearing were mentioning studies and confounders and well was that result replicable and asking good questions. curious people who understood clearly what I was doing and asked great questions and wanted to work with my data. In absolute heaven. It felt like I was truly around scientists who were curious about the world and good at finding stuff out about it. I was very rarely bored. they were great. *people said the structure of the conference was much better than most academic conferences, but i havent really been to conferences and it seemed kinda bad to me. not very efficient. people did not seem interested in efficiency. *all the conversations felt like they were being choked by the invisible hand of academia. id be like 'well just go research that' and htey'd be like 'no my career' or 'the irb would never'. their timelines for everything are SO LONG. i am used to just doing everything i want immediately. they talk about stuff like faraway future plans. all the juicy stuff is buried layers deep beneath proposals and committees and grants and all of it takes time. *nobody knows what vibecoding is. i had trouble explaining it; i was like 'you can do a fast exploration of your data with claude here-' and it was like i was talking alien noises. I was like 'no seriously, if you want to build a way to track user behavior you can just ask claude-' and it was like i was screaming into the mist. polite nods. 'yeah tech is crazy huh' type responses. *zero conception of methods of getting survey respondents outside of academic discipline. absolutely no concept of marketing or making things interesting/palatable to people they interact with. i blame this on school being boring. i was fantasizing about giving everybody a class on how to interface more vividly with the outside world. i think they'd be really good at it it's just outside their culture. *a world outside academia didn't really seem 'real' to them? people would be like 'i dont like my job' and i'd be like 'have you thought about other ways to do research and make money' and it didn't seem accessible whatsoever. they had a bunch of reasons why all the things i suggested wouldn't work. no fire or interest in it. i think they *could* be interested and a lot of them would be much happier with more novel approaches, but i think there's been so few examples of this actually happening that people just don't know how to conceive of it. like they're not sure what questions to even ask or the first step to try. it's hard to get motivated if you dont' know what to do! *I found myself fantasizing about making a like, halfway house for academics. There's enormous potential and talent and passion in the individual people, but the pulse in the beast is weak. I think the world is ripe for a good, well-funded institution to swoop in and give an alternative. i have ideas for how this would work, how it could make at least some money, but id need someone else to do the operations cause im too swamped with projects.