> But, so far he has made the point that most of science in this country
> is financed by business or by govt -- for profit or war -- and that this
> distorts what this science is, what it can be, it's benefit to society,
> and the sorts of people that it attracts.
I'd agree with all of that, but I don't think you need a theory of indoctrination specific to scientists to account for it -- you just throw money at research with military applications, and that's where the funding is to support grad students.
> He has also accounted for my experience of grad school which is that
> most of the truly great people who go there are crushed or winnowed out.
I forget -- what was your field? I wonder how much of that might be variation between fields and departments. He seemed to work in solid-state physics, which has a lot of fairly direct technological/military applications, and probably a lot of funding dependent on them. I imagine that would skew his outlook vs. something more benign, like meteorology. I've heard of some right bastard professors, but my admittedly limited experience has been with people who weren't jerks so much as social 'tards (cue speculation about the autism spectrum). I've also seen complaints about the system favoring people with not much sense of work/life balance, I don't see that so much where I am now. And that doesn't seem terribly ideological anyway.
> But the most interesting thing he has said so far is that due to the
> training that makes one "professional," the professional class is much
> less likely to be creative or to think independently than those who have
> not benefitted from this training.
The problem I see here with his analysis is that he focuses on PhD students in the natural sciences, and that has to be a small percentage of the professional class. For the latter you probably don't need more than a master's degree, and you can get that just by taking classes, a very different experience from a PhD. So you have to account for the indoctrination of a lot of professionals and managers without the PhD process.
-- Andy