This is a good cautionary tale for where we are today, and what a lot of "idea labs" and "thought leaders" amount to: moral vacuity, which means more here than simply lacking any ethical standards. It also means having no truly substantial goals in life, apart from chasing the currently visible bright shining object. It is not clear, by the way, that the author of this piece understands the lessons that the episode he is reporting has to teach us.
When I read pieces like this, my main feeling is not anger. I am mostly sad that so much of contemporary "research"--at tech firms and universities alike, and many other places--seems not to know about real learning, and the deeply fulfilling nature of real inquiry.
Over the past several years I've been trying to immerse myself in some older, and longer-term, modes of scholarship--reading ancient history, "global history," philology, historiography, anthropology, and the like. What I have sensed in them is the value of "going deep" and doing so for long periods of time, unrecognized by public acclaim, travelling silently, under the surface, all through the night, when everyone else, and all else, is asleep. The pleasure is in the learning, felt perhaps in the solitude and the darkness but realized nonetheless; and the payoff is in the contribution to our common stock of understanding, a payoff whose durability and substantiality may be inversely related to the volume of its self-promotion.
This more durable kind of learning still exists out there; most of us touch it a little bit, and some of us are fortunate enough to have a still more profound and enduring acquaintance with it. And I think this durable kind of learning can be communicated in classrooms and in office hours. After all, what teachers do in "teaching" is, in a way, I would argue, simply helping students become better learners, as their teachers putatively are. We teachers don't finally know things as the core mode of our being; rather, we are simply good at asking questions, launching investigations, seeing where they lead. I think I know a lot, to be sure (just ask my kids); but the core of what I do is not the inert, vegetative, and spectatorial semi-activity of knowing, but of asking. In the process of this inquiry, your picture of what you knew before gets rewired, perhaps in radical ways. And it is an ongoing process, so that the more you get into it, the more aware, I think, you are of how tentative the conclusions have to be.
For me, this is the best part of our jobs, and the best part of our vocation, and, for me at least, among the very best parts of being human. I always go back to Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture, and his observation there that scholia originally was the Greek word for "leisure," for quiet. I continue to think there's something deep to be discovered in that insight.
Were we to dedicate some larger portion of our lives to the self-conscious cultivation of this activity, perhaps we teachers, and our students, would both be happier, and more grateful.