Is there a celebrity culture in academia and should we discourage it? I work in STEM, and in recent years I have been troubled by this trend in academia where certain individuals are elevated to the status of celebrities. Their appearances alone draw crowds in the hundreds and their "latest" interviews are almost taken as edicts directly from God and are debated endlessly. They are sometimes literally referred to as "Heroes" or "God (fathers)". 

Sure, there has always been certain academicians (especially authors or professors) who are popular, and I think we should acknowledge them. But I don't understand the point of celebrating certain individual just because of what he or she is doing, or what this person has done or achieved in the past. The whole point of academia is cross-examination, and no person has absolute say in anything. I think people have lost sight of that. Plus, I don't believe in the "self-made" researcher. 

What really prompted me to write this is when I discovered a serious error in a widely cited paper by a very prominent scientist (who has published books, been on TED talks, etc.). How can the paper be so widely cited given such a glaring and serious error? I am also troubled by some recent "non-sense" work from the same author. But this is just one example out of many (countless). I have seen people citing the work of a famous person despite the content or quality of the work, and then doubling it down by defending the indefensible. This also connects to the well-known debate over the meaningfulness of citation count. 

But am I just imagining all of this? Perhaps the power in academia is more diffused as compared to what I have been exposed to and these so-called "Gods" of academia are more frequently challenged than what I know of. And ultimately, if this celebrity culture exists, then should we discourage it?
Academia is an extremely primitive and immature system in many ways, driven disproportionately by emotion and status over merit or egalitarianism. You will be reminded of a lot of academic social behavior if you read about the social behavior of the other primates. 

However it is a unfair to suggest that people are simply acting as smitten teenagers swooning over big-shots because they have their own academic reality show. It is a social system which is behaving rationally in rewarding those who move it forward (or some new direction which at the time seems to be forward). Papers are almost a sideshow (written by underpaid postdocs), and citation count is merely a proxy metric for this. But impact, that which citation count tries to measure, is a very real and valuable thing; how well you can attract lots of funding to a research direction, as well as attract lots of other researchers into that direction, determines how important your career is to the system. And, in the absence of other sources of information, makes for a decent predictor for how important your work is currently and will be in the future.