That's a novel direction to take it, but I think you can make arguments both ways. On the one hand academics need some slack to go off and come up with their own arcane lingo and practice at pace, because otherwise they'd never get anywhere. But on the other hand, detaching from the rest of the world feels unhealthy. Especially since much academic research is publicly funded, surely it behooves them to eventually show the public what they've done and how it improves the world? If you don't eventually make advances accessible to lay people there's no way to be sure you're in fact doing something of value.

You use the word constructive; can you elaborate on what you mean by it? I think people talking on forums is constructive even if they get things wrong -- as long as how confident people are that they're right isn't too far from reality. That's really where this study shows up a flaw; people exposed to nasty comments seem to turn dogmatic, which is far worse than being wrong.

I'm not very certain of any of these sentiments. I'm not sure how much slack we should give areas of academia. I'm not sure how much delta to tolerate between people's confidence and reality.