'Immune' might be too strong — we are all humans after all. But it's certainly plausible that the magnitude of the effect varies between disciplines.
As the commenter above observes, physics is (supposed to be) falsifiable, so it should be clear when you have a result and when you don't. In the some of the more 'wooly' disciplines, this is not the case. You can write BS and as long as you're able to argue sufficiently eloquently that your particular strain of BS is valid, you win — in some cases, you needn't even supply data or perform experiments. It is in those fields that I assume the forces of politics/fashion/social pressure are strongest.
I agree about the content of the material. But the process of promoting work, securing funding, and getting positions isn’t different.
There is a technical floor to participate, but to potential funders all the physics project proposals from Physics professors sound equally probable. They are going to choose projects based on internal initiatives (fad), name recognition, track record, etc.
Even if that is true, though, I don’t see how it’s that different to any other human activity. In business you have to persuade investors and customers too. Constantly. More so than in academia.
I feel like people are needlessly bitter about all of this stuff. Life isn’t fair; no one ever said it was. And why does anyone expect that you’d be able to get research funding without having to form relationships and make some effort to sway influential people in your direction? Yes, it’s not ‘pure research’, but it’s still part of life. I don’t see how it could be any other way… unless we get AGI as promised and then we’re free to sit on our backsides all day and become philosophers with infinite funding.
It is a part of all organisations, but usually spread across multiple people.
As I mentioned, my wife is a mechanical engineer. "All" she needs to do is do her work, and her manager will be happy. Going out and selling to customers and convincing them they want your product is not her job.
In academia, you can do the work, you can know it's excellent and groundbreaking, as I did for my own work, but unless you go out and sell it, no one cares. You can't just do science, you also have to do sales.
And, to pre-empt a response, yes, it is true that you still have to "sell" the idea that you've done the work properly to your boss in the industry, but it's totally different to in academia, where you will very often be in the situation where no one even knows that you've done any work at all, let alone is expecting something from you. Academia is just a very different working dynamic. Much more independent, much less collaborative, much more responsibility, much less praise
I’m in complete agreement. Sales and politics are even more an integral part of academia and which science becomes relevant is a direct outcome of those social processes.
