[NotAnEconomist]

> I don't think it's useful or wise to just throw our hands in the air and claim we should no longer give these institutions any respect or credence. Humanity has made real, amazing gains in knowledge, understanding, and culture, and these imperfect institutions have played an important role. It is easy to forget that sometimes.

This is a deep fallacy, and why the "halo effect" works.

The institutions which made those gains no longer exist, and over the last decade or two have had their name stolen by shallow ideologues. Their downfall was much longer, but it's clear that in many cases, adherence to "politically correct" dogma has replaced genuine inquiry and the standards to which these institutions used to adhere.

Some of which, while we're on the topic of Russian political interference (as a society), was originally sponsored disruption by the USSR now spawning child political movements in the US.

[dwaltrip]

I'm not advocating blind trust or the ignorance of any problems. In my first paragraph I made that quite clear by saying we should continually work to find where we can do better. For example, it is clear that new problems are arising as our scientific efforts scale up and become larger and more formalized.

> The institutions which made those gains no longer exist, and over the last decade or two have had their name stolen by shallow ideologues.

This is a dramatic claim -- literally all of academia is utterly ruined?

It seems to me that things are not so apocalyptic. Do you have anything to back this up?

[barry-cotter]

> The institutions which made those gains no longer exist, and over the last decade or two have had their name stolen by shallow ideologues. Their downfall was much longer, but it's clear that in many cases, adherence to "politically correct" dogma has replaced genuine inquiry and the standards to which these institutions used to adhere.

This is wildly overstated. Things were never “good” and the institutions of which you speak were never pure. Most of the world think Joseph McCarthy was a madman sniffing at ghosts when he was right, the US government was riddled with Soviet spies from top to bottom.

The US and the West more generally are still well ahead of any conceivable competition in scientific and technical fields. China is doing well and will improve even more but they’ve passed peak Chinese workforce and demographic momentum means that absent artificial wombs there will be fewer Chinese in 2060 than there are now.