academia needs far better standards for attention and intellectual labor than it currently has: right now norms tend to respond powerfully to prestige hierarchies - functionally, any argument made by people with rich and powerful enough friends becomes "serious"

and any position without such elite uptake is safe to ignore and/or caricature. this distribution seems indefensible in and of itself but also particularly difficult to square with philosophy's pretentions to free inquiry and reasons responsiveness

obviously inspired by recent Online events but a much more general thought I've had for some time now

I'm reminded as I often am of Toni Morrison's quote about racism as a waste of time, and @r_a_mckinney 's work on "extracted speech". How much effort should really be spent disabusing elites of either defensible mistakes or delusions (which our norms fail to treat differently!)?

At some point you might just start asking and answering your own questions, fail as you might to start the conversation where others would have you start it. Is this an offense against serious inquiry - or an enabling, perhaps even necessary condition of it?