I went to grad school in English Lit and this resonated with me:
"By the time I started to draft journal articles and map out my dissertation, I became frustrated by having to write articles no one else would read that had to cite other articles no one else would read in order to satisfy peer reviewers and engage in a process that seemed internally self-justified to fill CVs and have an academic career but didn’t have much effect." He found more satisfaction writing his blog, which reached readers around the world.
Teaching, meanwhile, gets subordinated to the world of fake research, to the detriment of professors themselves and the students they're supposed to be teaching.
I legitimately don't understand America's obsession with sending so many people to jail.
It's not a widespread phenomenon—people don't think, "Let's send everyone to jail!" It's a set of incremental choices, somewhat similar to America's problems with regulatory thickets: http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_4_regulations.html .
The U.S. also seems to be weirdly bad at doing cost-benefit analyses regarding jails.
Is it pure egocentrism that keeps high-risk parents from adopting?
Interestingly enough, adopted children tend to resemble their birth parents much more than adopted parents in the "Big Five" personality traits, and twins raised apart from each other resemble one another to a shocking degree. Bryan Caplan's book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids discusses many of the studies that have examined these issues.
If you want a kid who is "like you," your optimal choice is probably to have biological children. The joys (and problems?) of being a parent, however, appear to be universal. Note that the first paragraph and Caplan's book are not an argument against adoption, but they are a reminder that genetics appear to have a much more powerful influence on people's personality than most Americans / Westerners wanted to believe for a very long time.
Part of the problem is that diagnoses and treatments are expanding faster than the ability of humans to memorize and learn about all of them. IIRC there are close to 14,000 diagnoses—just diagnoses!—that we know about. Combine that with the numerous drugs, treatments, and other changes, and it quickly becomes apparent why people with unusual conditions are better off making themselves experts than in relying solely on the expertise of doctors who aren't specialists in whatever they have.
Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combatted our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.
Note that this was published in 2010. By now those numbers have probably grown.
I've also had personal experience with the doctor-doesn't-know problem: I had an unusual disease seven years ago, and the first specialist I saw said that she Googled it a few hours prior. Her partner gave me completely wrong information; he didn't even know how to treat what I had. Fortunately my family found a research center where some of the major researchers in the field worked, and the treatment I ultimately got had been published a few months before I started (it had become standard two or so years prior). If you're curious about specifics, send me an e-mail—it's in my profile.