Some but not all academics also seek truth in terms of their own beliefs about the world, and their own processes (including hidden ones) for selecting the best model for any given decision. From a Hansonian perspective, that's at least what scientists and philosophers are telling themselves. Yet from a Hansonian perspective, that's what everyone is telling themselves about their ability to seek truth, especially if a lot of their ego is bound up in 'truth-seeking', including rationalists. So the Hansonian argument here would appear to be a perfectly symmetrical one. I don't have a survey on hand for what proportion of academia seek truth both in a theoretical sense, and a more pragmatic sense like rationalists aspire to do. Yet "academia", considered as a population, it much larger than the rationality community, or a lot of other intellectual communities. So, even if the relative proportion of academics who could be considered a "truth-seeking community" in the eyes of rationalists is small, the absolute/total amount of academics who would be considered part of a "genuine truth-seeking community" in those same eyes would be large enough to take seriously. To be fair, the friends I have in mind who are more academically minded, and are critical of the rationality community and LessWrong, are also critical of much of academia as well. For them it's about aspiring to a greater and evermore critical intellectualism than it is sticking to academic norms. Philosophy tends to be a field in academia that tends to be more like this than most other academic fields, because philosophy has a tradition of being the most willing to criticize the epistemic practices of other academic fields. Again, this is a primary application of philosophy. There are different branches and specializations in philosophy, like the philosophies of: physics; biology; economics; art (i.e., aesthetics); psychology; politics; morality (i.e., ethics); and more. The practice of philosophy at it's mo