>>81801090There are old farts that refuse to get with the times, but in my experience in a newer subfield of engineering, academics are still pretty down to earth. Your ego gets broken down fairly quickly as a PhD student when some bitchass jello kicks your ass for three months straight. It's alsp considered cringe as shit to expect people to address you as "Dr. ____" after you get your PhD. The egoistic dicks are still considered dicks by their peers for being hard to work with, and many of them don't have the knowledge to back it up. The biggest jerk I personally knew leeched off of someone else's thesis when he started his own lab.
Most people just don't want to do more stuff related to their work in their free time. Even if they did, the STEM crowd is hilariously awful at communication. Few would have the ability to take current work in the field and translate it into something interesting and captivating for a general audience instead of spewing technical autism. Also, this is more paranoid, but I'd personally be concerned about doxxing myself if I was in academia and went too in depth into my own area. These circles are small, and you see the same handful of labs pop up over and over again if you're diving into current literature on a certain topic.
