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Vladimir_M comments on LessWrong opinion of Nietzsche? - Less Wrong
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I don't think it has anything to do with cogsci education. My own theory is that there are two basic reasons. First, nihilism and akrasia, often fueled by strong feelings of purposelessness and the impostor syndrome, are rampant among knowledge workers nowadays, especially in the academia. LW simply gathers together lots of such people who are unusually willing to talk about their situation openly here. Second, there is the selection effect for people who like to argue on the internet. It seems clear that this propensity is strongly correlated with all kinds of traits that tend to cause low achievement for smart people.
As for the causes of the widespread nihilism and akrasia among knowledge workers, I think it's a consequence of the general social trends of increasing bureaucratization, organizational decay, and institutionalized mendacity. Many people whose work should in principle be intellectually stimulating and providing a rich sense of accomplishment are instead trapped in a hell of pointless makework, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, Dilbertian chaos, and staggering mendacity and hypocrisy that one must endure and even actively participate in. (One can read much speculation on why the impostor syndrome is so rampant, but to me it seems that it often represents nothing but a realistic assessment of one's own situation, possibly coupled with an unrealistically favorable opinion about the situation of others.)
A deeper inquiry into these phenomena and their causes would unfortunately quickly lead to thorny ideological issues.
To give one mild and uncontroversial example, here is Scott Aaronson's account about the amount of bureaucratic makework he is forced to do:
If this is the job of a top-class researcher who works in some of the academia's most sound and exciting areas, one can only imagine what it looks like in less healthy fields and at less elite levels.
I'm not convinced what you describe is actually useless make work. After all, having a better written paper means other researchers will waste less time struggling with it. Spending two months improving a paper so that each of 200 other researchers spends half a day less struggling with it is a net win.
Indeed, but notice that Aaronson himself says that the people who will actually end up reading the paper can be counted on one hand. And even that's unusually good -- except for the tiny percentage of blockbusters and citation classics, most published research papers and theses are never read by anyone except for the authors and reviewers/committee members (if even the latter). Unless you're in the ultra-elite in your field, and perhaps even then, there is no way that thousands of man-hours will be invested in reading your work.
Moreover, academic writing is usually not at all aimed at improving the paper, in the sense of optimizing it for easy conveyance of accurate information. It is optimized for jumping through the bureaucratic hoops of the review and editorial process (and perhaps also the subsequent citation impact). This process should theoretically be highly correlated with actual improvements, but in reality, this correlation is very low -- or even negative, since the "publish or perish" pressures often force one to employ every possible spin short of outright data falsification to make the work look better. This is further exacerbated by the ossified bureaucratic rules from the days when printed journals and proceedings were crucial for dissemination of results, which make no good sense in the age of the internet.
All this is even without getting into the issue of how much sense the work itself makes when evaluated in an honest, no-nonsense way, and how much it is fundamentally pointless, with zero or even negative contribution to human knowledge, and aimed only at padding one's resume, essentially a peculiar species of bureaucratic makework. (This is usually not a problem for people working in healthy fields and at sufficiently elite levels, but it certainly is a problem for a very considerable percentage of people doing academic research and scholarship.) All things considered, I am not at all surprised to see rampant akrasia, nihilism, and impostor syndrome.
I have made a stab at collecting some citations on citations in one of my footnotes: http://www.gwern.net/Culture%20is%20not%20about%20esthetics#fn48 If anyone wants to suggest more...