This is probably particularly salient for academics who also serve in other roles, and can (and do) leverage their academic reputations and credentials to create a halo effect or legitimize views that are entirely outside of their realm of expertise (or are within it, but where their interest is more than detached). Two examples come to mind.
One is the alliance between Bay Area universities and the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. In its purest form, academics lend their technical expertise to fledgling upstarts. But in plenty of cases, academics lend the shine of their credentials to pure frauds (like Theranos) or use their academic post to privatize gains from discoveries made at their university posts.
Another is public intellectuals who use their academic posts to push politics. The foremost example is Milton Friedman, whose contributions to economics were very real but very technical, but who made his name as a public intellectual publishing highly ideological political bromides, which ranged from unsupported and intentionally misleading ("the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression") to delusional ("doctors shouldn't be licensed, and we can use tort law to weed out quacks"). This one is somewhat asymmetrical, but not entirely so. I find Paul Krugman's economic analysis to be mostly rooted in sound economics, but in his public intellectual role, he'll occasionally couch political opinions as economic analyses (for instance, as he later acknowledged, his prediction that the economy would plunge into recession if Trump were elected was not based on any rigorous economic rationale).
Which is to say, I think perhaps these rules are more applicable to academics solely in their roles as good faith academics.
I think this is spot-on--when academics tap into systems of amplification, they're especially prone to just completely jettison "civility" as they previously constituted it, and sometimes even to disparage it entirely--sometimes even while they complain of the loss of civility etc.!
This is probably particularly salient for academics who also serve in other roles, and can (and do) leverage their academic reputations and credentials to create a halo effect or legitimize views that are entirely outside of their realm of expertise (or are within it, but where their interest is more than detached). Two examples come to mind.
One is the alliance between Bay Area universities and the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. In its purest form, academics lend their technical expertise to fledgling upstarts. But in plenty of cases, academics lend the shine of their credentials to pure frauds (like Theranos) or use their academic post to privatize gains from discoveries made at their university posts.
Another is public intellectuals who use their academic posts to push politics. The foremost example is Milton Friedman, whose contributions to economics were very real but very technical, but who made his name as a public intellectual publishing highly ideological political bromides, which ranged from unsupported and intentionally misleading ("the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression") to delusional ("doctors shouldn't be licensed, and we can use tort law to weed out quacks"). This one is somewhat asymmetrical, but not entirely so. I find Paul Krugman's economic analysis to be mostly rooted in sound economics, but in his public intellectual role, he'll occasionally couch political opinions as economic analyses (for instance, as he later acknowledged, his prediction that the economy would plunge into recession if Trump were elected was not based on any rigorous economic rationale).
Which is to say, I think perhaps these rules are more applicable to academics solely in their roles as good faith academics.
I think this is spot-on--when academics tap into systems of amplification, they're especially prone to just completely jettison "civility" as they previously constituted it, and sometimes even to disparage it entirely--sometimes even while they complain of the loss of civility etc.!