I truly don&#x27;t understand this article, or the comments on it:<p><i>Jerks step on, belittle or otherwise sabotage their academic colleagues. The most common method is by criticising their opinions in public, at a conference or in a seminar and by trash talking them in private.</i><p>Criticizing their opinions in public? How is this being a &quot;jerk&quot;? This is what academia is supposed to be all about - you publish, others criticize, you repair or you accept that you were wrong. That&#x27;s how we approach truth. Trash talking in private <i>might</i> be jerky behavior, though given the prior statement the author might just mean &quot;I think XXX&#x27;s theory is incorrect because of [reason]&quot; rather than &quot;XXX has sex with goats, plagiarizes his students and forges all his data&quot;.<p>Most theories are just wrong. The point of academia is not to be a polite mutual admiration society providing easy and stable work for people who loved college, it&#x27;s to get closer to truth.<p>The comments provide better examples of jerky behavior. For example, a female professor called the &quot;IR Hulk&quot; was privately supportive of someone&#x27;s work, but then she publicly ambushed them with criticisms she presumably did not share in private.<p>I also don&#x27;t even know what to make of comments like this: <i>Academia in general is very hostile to forms of communalization and cooperation and champions the rational individual (read: male)...</i> The issue of favoring those who provide valid rational criticism is &quot;indeed feminist one&quot;? Can someone steelman this for me?