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Comment by hallway_monitor

16 hours ago

As an outside observer, it does seem that the whole process is tedious, capricious, and corrupt. No wonder academia is crumbling - it deserves to, and it needs to be replaced with a new, better system.

> the whole process is tedious, capricious, and corrupt

Is there any human institution under the sun that doesn't labor under a litany of such criticisms?

  • To paraphrase the science/funerals quip, one might say "Society advances one failed institution at a time".

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  • We must live in different worlds, I’ve been literally blown away by the advances I’ve seen and the new research coming out in the past 40 years. In some ways it feels like we are just getting started, especially in bio. We finally have the tools to discover the wonderful nano machines that make up life and people are using them in wonderful ways.

    • It's only between 1920 and 1960 that you would have been literally blown away by scientific progress, first as we split the atom then fused it.

      That you're impressed by the stamp collecting that science has become since then says a lot more about you than the state of scientific progress.

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  • > Anyone pointing out the obvious - that peer review is broken and science hasn't worked in 40 years - is at best a flat Earther.

    Yes, if someone claims that science hasn't worked (what does it even mean?) for 40 years then he's not that far from being flat Eather. It's hard to expect other side to be reasonable while making such absurd claims.

  • What does this mean “it’s the left that’s the problem”? The right’s solution to academic reform is literal pseudoscience. And I don’t mean this as whataboutism—I’m responding to the implication that some political faction other than the left has the right answer, and I don’t know who that would be.