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“The emphasis on reason, without which science is impossible, is closely linked to a prominent value without which science cannot progress: the challenge to authority.”—Edward Grant

As scientific fields grow, they become more conformist, and advances in knowledge occur more lethargically. This is a problem, both because academia is now bloated with more researchers than ever before, and their ranks are constantly growing; and also, because anything seen as new, exciting or promising, is immediately flooded with money and countless new researchers, whose presence will only slow progress and ensure greater conformity. The pandemic era has been a perfect object lesson in how this happens.  A paper in Nature, finding that papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time, confirms and expands upon this basic picture. 

The authors look at citation networks among 25 million papers published between 1945 and 2010 indexed at the Web of Science. Basically, papers cite other papers which cite other papers, and by studying these patterns of citation over time, you can work out roughly what is happening in a discipline. If a field is utterly changed by new, foundational discoveries, a lot of older work will never be cited again. Papers in fields experiencing stagnation or steady, cumulative advancement, on the other hand, will continue to cite increasingly old research, as work from many generations ago remains relevant. 

Postwar expansions to science (and academia more broadly) have happened via increases to the number of less prestigious schools, less talented professors and less intelligent students. The whole enterprise has been inflated at the bottom, in other words, and not at the top, such that we’re wasting huge amounts of money for very little added advantage. The authors say what’s actually happening is scientists are becoming overspecialized, leading them to publish narrower, less interesting stuff. A narrow research focus is above all a careerist tactic(1). Self-citation, a lack of currency with new publications, and the tendency to cite the same stuff over and over again, are all just symptoms of dimmer people publishing too much. 

Science has entered a new, careerist era, one in which it will grow ever more conformist, erratic and unreliable. All of which encourages a tendency to turn science into pseudoscience(2).  We desperately need to increase our skepticism of and our pessimism about The Science. If we can’t, mass house arrests, mandated facial coverings, and criminal vaccination campaigns will pale in comparison to the evils yet to come.

“Only when the currently low scientific literacy of the American population rises to the level of accurate and sympathetic understanding of science will the appeal of pseudoscience (and bad or even non-science) diminish sufficiently to disable the quackeries that today prey upon people.”—Barbara Forrest & Paul R. Gross

1. A profession is, ultimately, a declaration of faith, a faith that means the acceptance of certain ethical norms, including pursuit of the truth. The ethical imperative of a career, in contrast, is survival, advancement, and the pursuit of material rewards.

2. Pseudoscience:
-Lacks independently testable theory capable of explaining and connecting claims.

-Lacks progress.
-Evaluates the quality of evidence not on its merits but, on its consistency with a predetermined conclusion.
-Constructs its ideas to resist any possible counter-evidence.

Further reading:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/50_ways_for_experts_to_lose_their_expertise.html

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/physical_science_is_in_a_crisis.html