And we complain that the public at large doesn't trust us "educated" folk, well I can't see why...
I left, co-founded a startup and never regretted it for a moment.
Edit: The point where I was sure I had to leave was when I was actually starting to play the "publications" game too well - when you find yourself negotiating with colleagues to get your name on their paper for a bit of help I'd decided things weren't really for me.
Edit2: I'd wanted to be an academic research scientist since I was about 5 or so when I actually got what I thought was my dream job I was delighted - took me a couple of years to work out why almost nothing in the environment seemed to work in the way I expected them to ("Why is everyone so conservative?") and became, as one outsider described me, "hyper cynical".
While the experience day to day was definitely fun, it destroyed any desire I had of entering the field. A lot of politics, a lot of statistically suspect stuff (even to me, in my third year of a bachelor), and a lot of busiwork.
After that experience I went into web development (full-stack). What I like about it is that even though there IS politics, even though there IS taking shortcuts, and god forgive me for some of the code I delivered, in the end whatever I work on has to actually do the thing it's supposed to do. It doesn't remove the aforementioned problems, but it grounds everything in a way that is mostly acceptable to me.
As frustrating as it can be to build some convoluted web app that feels like it's held together by scotch tape, it's nice to know that it eventually has to do whatever the client asks for, however flawed.
In either case pretty much all humans are profoundly small-c conservative, "big change projects" on society-scale do often end in war/death/etc. At least, it's probably 50/50 whether its a "National Health Service" or a "World War".
However the reason is deeper than that: evolution does not care if you're thriving, it cares that you are breeding. So you're optimized for "minimum safety" not "maximum flourishing".
So if things are stable then you will prefer to stay in them for as long as possible. It is why people need to "hit rock bottom" before they can be helped, often, ie., their local-minimum needs to become unstable so they will prefer the uncertainty of change.
Not only the public at large, but even University graduates start to an extent distrusting those who are "professionals" in academia. It is simply a whole other world, where you are only judged by the number of papers under your name, perhaps never having contributed to anything practical - seems so detached from real life.
Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach.
In my experience this is accurate in the overwhelming majority of cases.
It feels like a religion, with its own T-shirts and all. Appeals to authority, intellectual posturing… often from people with little understanding of the actual science. Honest insiders are way more careful with any absolute statements.
No wonder there's a (also scary) rise of conspiracy theories.
How do people not observe those as two sides of the same coin?
Interestingly, I have read that in the 1920s and 30s, there was actually an organized relativity denialist movement, that wrote articles and held public protests.
Tesla was famously against relativity, telling the New York Times, "Einstein’s relativity work is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king".
Chances are, most of the people marching against relativity had no clue about Newtonian mechanics, and were told stuff such as relativity leading to moral relativism.
Which actual scientists describe themselves that way? We're physicists, geologists, botanists, psychologists or whatever. When someone says they're a scientist, it suggests that they're not part of any actual scientific discipline, but making a false appeal to authority.
This is just incorrect. Meteorologists don't study Earth's climate, they study weather. Meteorologists don't use ice cores or tree rings for their research, they study much shorter-term fluid dynamics. Climate scientists do study climate, and not weather. The disciplines are related (specifically, they're under atmospheric sciences), but to dismiss either one as being less scientific is picking favorites despite all evidence to the contrary. I suppose you could use the synonym "climatology" if you want a word without "science" in it, but it seems like a pretty silly heuristic regardless.
Science bros, for all their faults, can trade blows on more even footing, and that's something. Perhaps even a vitally important something. Even if science bros aren't great at science proper, their contribution to societal consensus formation might be as important as the underlying science itself!
We agree that science bros have problems, but unless you have an alternative I see them as a net positive, and not by a small margin.
Consensus formation is always messy, but that's not solved by losing.
It seems much easier to find scientists who will tow your political viewpoint and then people can use them as a resource to prove that unless you take this person's "expertise" as gospel, then it proves you are a science "denier".
This is re-incarnation of what used to be religion. Religion is alive an well, just not in form that our predecessors were familiar with.