>In short, there is a paranoid mentality in academia that if people let their ideas go before formal publication, they'll be "scooped."
That is because academia is mainly about status seeking (see Robin Hanson's many posts on Overcoming Bias, http://www.overcomingbias.com/), which is inherently a zero-sum game.
ADDED: That is about academia as a social institution, it is not intended to be an attack on all academics all the time, though any successful academic does have to accommodate to it.
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>In short, there is a paranoid mentality in academia that if people let their ideas go before formal publication, they'll be "scooped."
That is because academia is mainly about status seeking (see Robin Hanson's many posts on Overcoming Bias, http://www.overcomingbias.com/), which is inherently a zero-sum game.
ADDED: That is about academia as a social institution, it is not intended to be an attack on all academics all the time, though any successful academic does have to accommodate to it.