I’ve met some incredibly unlikeable fraudsters. The bottom line is pursuing them would mean giving up months of my life in a tedious process. In many cases, the fraud seems stupid enough that it’s not okay, but just not worth sacrificing life time over.
I have fled a renowned institute for this reason. You are probably going to sacrifice your career over it either way, because if you're not hopping on their gravy train...
The review process is completely broken because it gives the reviewers no actual ability to change anything so 99% of the time it's just a rubber stamp.
What’s the solution? I actually don’t have a great grasp of how it all works right now. Is there a field-specific board that determines how reviews are done? Is there a feedback loop?
Yep, ready to alienate 30-50% of your friends, even though you were 'right'.
Do this enough times and you only have a few percentage left. "These are your true friends". There is no correlation. I watched someone rage over chapstick usage, they were right, but it looked like a silly debate.
I like the Stoics and those of virtue that sacrifice themselves for everyone else. Its genuinely appreciated if I can take a 30,000 ft high view. Best of luck doing it when humans live on the ground.
A lot of people, I'd say most, desperately want friends and will take quantity over quality anytime. Beggars can't be choosers? It works till it doesn't, and life brings SHTF situations from time to time. You can do serious compromises just to keep them, but I wouldn't call that a proper friendship. Freedom of mind and action that certainly isn't.
I'd take 1-2 good friends with similar life views over an army of acquaintances anytime. But that's me. Its extremely hard to find them, most of childhood friends don't qualify since we end up very different and sometimes incompatible people. And nobody is perfect, neither me nor you, so its good to keep it just a bit humble within all that.
If your friend is a fraud, that's a separate problem.
I'm not concerned with alienating fraudsters, though the people on their gravy train aren't as easily dismissed. The cost is in collecting the evidence, putting it in the right places, following up, and then continuing to be helpful as someone in a position of authority connects the dots and prepares their response.
Or put in another way: the first person in a group to get agitated about something has to spend a lot of effort justifying their agitation to the group, because by default, the group won't support or even stay neutral - they'll get weirded out, and/or even shun the agitated person.
That is not nonsense — you are doing yourself a huge disservice here by ignoring ideas categorically on ideological grounds.
IMO the witch hunt is a feature.
If you are dealing with sociopaths of this degree, and institutional tolerance of them, you should have VERY ACTIVE plans to divorce yourself from the situation.
Witch hunts frequently only bring the malfeasance to light and accentuate the magnitude of the problem to the social network associated with the sociopath.
Sociopaths and sociopathic organizations function either on outright control and fear, or lies and misplaced trust. Paranoia is the weapon against both of those, and especially places extensive stress on the sociopath who is working mightily to maintain the web of lies.