0. I think your perspective is really detached from the actual scientific enterprise. I think this kind of take exists when there are cultural clashes combined with a strong focus in the media and online with the mistakes and issues in science, not its successes.
Science is actually progressing at an amazing rate in recent years. We are curing diseases and understanding more about life and the universe faster than ever.
Like all of these are just from the past month or two and are pretty astounding advances. And they are just a subset of all of the scientific advances recently. All of them have contributors in academia (and science performed outside of academia would not exist without academia, as it depends upon it for most of the conceptual advances as well of course as for scientist training).
1. Stuff like paper mills and complete fraudsters exist, but for the most part, these things are the exception, not the rule. Your average scientist doesn't even hear or think about these things and the weirdos who cause them, to be honest. Nobody has ever heard of "International Review of Financial Analysis" outside of an extremely niche economics subfield.
2. "Public or perish" is not a cycle, really. While I believe it's not good for people to be constantly working under pressure, the fact that academia is so competitive currently is a healthy sign. It's because we have so many people with extremely impressive resumes and backgrounds, doing extremely impressive work, that makes funding so competitive. And when funding is competitive, it's no wonder that funders prefer to fund people who have produced something and told the world about it ("publish").
3. Fraudsters and hucksters have been in science forever. Go read an account of science in the early 19th century. There are tons and tons of stories of crazy scientists who believed ridiculous things, scientists who kept pushing wrong dogma, and so on. And yet nobody knows about them today, because the evolutionary process of science works: the truths that are empirically verifiable win out, and, given enough time, the failures are selected against.
Fantastic effort post and the necessary dose of fresh air to balance out hedonic skepticism.
The collapse in faith of institutions in various ways, for different reasons has created a vibe that gives any criticism of any institution has a whiff of plausibility, and these days that's all you need for some people to treat it as settled fact. That is basically what I think the poisoned and anti intellectual attitude of hedonic skepticism is all about.
The pace of technological advance over the past 5-10 years is staggering in so many ways. If our era weren't known for collapse of democracies and conflict, it could have been heralded as a major historical moment of technological advance on a number of levels.
Ha, or, perhaps for a 2025 variant: it would quickly be shared publicly by government scientists (who are not as secretive or good at keeping secrets as the public seems to think!), the evidence all shared publicly, subject to international peer review and consensus. And then 70% of people would believe it's made-up. The US-sphere would believe China made it up as a plot (or "globalists") and the developing world and BRICS would believe the US made it up as a plot. Western countries would repeatedly sign and then remove themselves from international treaties to prepare for contact.
Bit too on the nose, maybe, but a heck of a lot more likely than a coverup by government scientists.
Ummm... you know that Bluesky is the social network that permits anyone to say anything, right? Like, that's just how it works? That the open source decentralizable community moderation opt in website is the free speech website and the website run by a billionaire with an algorithm and AI designed to promote his political views isn't? Right?
Well, Bluesky is an open-source, algorithmless, decentralizable community platform with crowd sourced opt-in moderation, so it's the place to go for free speech, as opposed to the website run by the guy who bans people who disagree with him, has an AI he wants to rewrite history with, right, and has an algorithm preferentially promote his political views? This is common sense stuff to be honest
Bluesky is not the place to go for free speech. The admins ban users from the entire site for a variety of reasons, including disagreement over political viewpoints.
Full stack, and ability to opt out of purely ideological filters that are essentially trying to mandate Dorsey Twitter?
At least with Mastodon, you weren’t tied as tightly or centrally, such that the worst one can do is balkanize instance groups as opposed to efficient narrative security ops.
I find the reverse, that everyone has a bsky but few have an X. The people still posting there tend to be the type looking for clicks (like promoting their brand or whatever) instead of just wanting to share their thoughts and science
Circa 2018-2020, Twitter felt genuinely unique as a social media platform to find intelligent scientific and policy discussion. The quality of discussion in my feed felt much higher than reddit or HN. I could barely imagine leaving it. By 2024, that completely reversed, and it felt much so, so stupider than anywhere else. So many scientists have left. Eventually I left despite having 1000s of followers.
Bluesky has recapitulated or even surpassed peak sci twitter. The signal:noise is excellent. However, it requires some work because there is no algorithm. Aggressively unfollow people with low signal:noise, use the custom feeds that disable reposts and enable replies, use the Quiet Posters feed, and use sill.social. This has created a science feed that for me surpasses even the peak of Twitter, let alone X today which is unusable for scientific discussion.
Finally, the thing that drives me crazy is that Bluesky is literally a popular open-source, nonprofit, Ad-less, algorithm-less, truly free and partially decentralized social media network. It's what we all dreamed about in the 2010s! It's Mastodon but actually popular! But half the tech community have convinced themselves it's a "liberal bubble" (that anyone can join....) and that the website that apparently isn't a bubble is the, err, website run by a billionaire with an algorithm designed to promote certain political content that agrees with that billionaire. Absolutely bizarre situation.
For the most part you have the financial incentives of pharma backwards... it is very easy to make a killing and because very famous being the kind of doctor or scientist willing to go to bat for pseudoscientific ideas. They get invited to podcasts, make their own podcasts, accrue thousands of followers, get paid to write articles for right-wing think tanks, get easy ghost-written book deals.... and after Trump's election, high-profile positions in the government. This is especially true for people who fail at the normal scientist / doctor career path.
I also don't really think there is any money per se in "shilling" for pharma, at least for like, 99% of doctors and scientists. Pretty much all doctors and scientists I know who dedicated a lot of time to communicating on covid-19, including studying ivermectin, running the trials on it that failed, didn't really get any extra money for doing so. Just a lot of hate mail.
I agree that the balance here is not entirely clear. But I think it's important to not let our perceptions of that balance be influenced by our personal social circles. If you encounter a lot of "online atheist" skeptics in your life, then I think it's important to just note that like, statistically, you're in a bubble. This kind of intense scientific skepticism isn't very common in a world where all sorts of clearly scientifically illiterate ideas poll at very high numbers.
I think there's a third way between "hear them out" and "online atheist", and that's basically a kind and gentle dialogue questioning pseudoscientific ideas while still focusing on trying to make clear the cognitive errors they are likely making.
LLMs are actually pretty good at this [1], which is remarkable, because LLMs are pretty stupid, and rarely knowledgeable about the details or nuances of any particular debate, especially on niche scientific topics. Like Ken Ham would "win" a debate about creationism with chatGPT because he's familiar with all of the tricky creationist arguments about radioisotype dating that ChatGPT isn't. But if we look at why AI typically succeeds in debunking conspiracy theorists when "online atheists" fail, I think it is because AI has infinite patience and respect for the user, where-as any online human debater eventually loses their patience, whether with an individual or over time. Being able to share new information with people while also being patient and respectful is basically this secret but it's just incredibly difficult to a person to do it.
Figuring out how to teach a generation of skeptics that aren't burnt out, jaded, and angry, is probably the secret sauce here to fighting misinformation.
> If you encounter a lot of "online atheist" skeptics in your life, then I think it's important to just note that like, statistically, you're in a bubble. This kind of intense scientific skepticism isn't very common in a world where all sorts of clearly scientifically illiterate ideas poll at very high numbers.
My point (and I believe a large part of the author’s) is that “online atheist” style skepticism isn’t actually any sort of “intense scientific skepticism”. It’s largely schoolyard bullying that (in many cases) happens to be right, but isn’t right because they’re doing any actual scientific rigor, but because they happen to have aligned themselves with the “correct” side.
But that same self assured smugness, and absolute conviction in their side being correct and therefore having no need to consider alternative view points and at least examine the arguments and evidence is all around us. Trump style politics is this writ large, but modern day politics is awash in this sort of behavior. Any item that happens to get sucked into the culture war vortex becomes an instant “everyone knows $X and only an idiot would believe otherwise so the only appropriate response is mockery”. Are you a conservative? Mock the foolish girly-men and “fee-fees” havers for daring the question the obvious fact of men and women being different and immutable traits. Are you liberal? Mock the bigots and the TERFs for daring to question the obvious fact that gender is a complete social construct and distinguishing them has no value in modern society. Are you a dyed in the wool capitalist? Mock the socialists and the heavy handed regulators for ignoring the decades of evidence that communism and socialism destroyed societies and people. Are you a communist? Mock the free market worshiping fools who can’t see the obvious destruction capitalism is reigning down on their societies every day. Bumper sticker politics and “science” is to my mind the norm, not the exception. Between tweets, hashtags, news media soundbites and clickbait headlines who has time for nuanced or even minimally genuine consideration of alternative perspectives? It’s much more fun and easy to just fire off the latest hot take and get some internet updoots. And yes I recognize the irony in the width of the brush I’m painting with here, but my point is this isn’t just tiny bubbles of online spaces, this behavior is (in my opinion) everywhere and permeates the entire public discourse. In fact I would wager that one would be pretty hard pressed to pick any major media outlet that could be honestly accused of “too much hearing out of the other side” and certainly even harder pressed to find one that applies any sort of rigorous evaluation of the evidence.
> I think there's a third way between "hear them out" and "online atheist", and that's basically a kind and gentle dialogue questioning pseudoscientific ideas while still focusing on trying to make clear the cognitive errors they are likely making
Perhaps we are not meaning the same things with our words, because to me what you just described is exactly what I would describe as “hearing someone out”. Allowing them to say their piece and then applying the same fair and rigorous standards to all the evidence and arguments presented for all sides.
Ah - I see. I totally agree that tone and manner of rhetoric and speech should be drastically improved among most "online atheists".
I do distinguish between being nice and reasonably and truly "hearing someone out" though. To me, the difference is that when truly hearing someone out, you will be interrogating the exact data and logic behind the validity of their individual claims to their fullest extent. This is how I would respond to e.g., a scientific work that I view as potentially valid, serious, and important.
However, in some cases, I have found (and suspect in general) doing so can be counter-productive. Here is one example: a recent report made by climate change deniers using AI: https://xcancel.com/RWMaloneMD/status/1903468473579340261
Regardless of the motivations of the original authors, thousands of well-meaning people have now boosted or referenced this work as part of their rejection of climate change. But I don't think this work should be "heard out" in the sense that every single claim in it should be addressed by a skeptic of the work, the way one would approach a serious scientific work. This takes a ton of time and effort and is simply infeasible - and often draws one into an endless back and forth where individual points get lost. Rather, in this case I'd focus on describing the general epistemic errors being made, and heuristics that can be used to avoid these errors.
Another case I guess is the OP article. This article is apparently written by someone who is a believer in parapsychology! I believe there is little to be gained for me to spend time evaluating the claims of parapsychologists: in that sense, I am a "bad skeptic" according to the author. But it is really just not an appropriate use of my time. Rather, I would argue from a position of general skepticism and logical positivism and remind others that these are extraordinarily claims that if true, would imply so much of what we know about the world is wrong.
I hope my distinction here makes sense now. My reading of the OP is he isn't just saying "be nice", but "take us seriously". I think we've got to try our best to be nice. But to take something seriously is a much bigger ask, and one that is not necessarily always beneficial in every circumstance.
This is a tiny portion of government spending though. You could completely eliminate the NASA budget entirely and it'd make absolutely no difference on the federal government's bottom line. The NASA budget, the NIH budget, the NSF budget, the USAID budget, the EPA budget, the NOAA budget - all of these unbelievably useful with high ROI agencies combined do not amount to more than the margin of error in the US government's annual yearly deficit.
So even completely eliminating these agencies wouldn't put a dent in the US government's deficit. But doing so would be sighted, because these agencies and programs also have a long-term return on investment. They are economic wealth generators, not money-spenders, and they are being cut.
So there are two reasons that this debate has clearly nothing to do with cutting spending. This is simply factual. Why do you and others keep claiming it does? Especially when the Trump administration is proposing a new budget that cuts all of these things and also greatly increases the US debt?
The federal budget is not hard to balance, and there are basically three paths: (a) raise taxes, especially on the rich, (b) cut defense spending, (c) cut Medicare and Social Security spending.
I just wish we could have the actual argument. If you do not like new medicines, clean water, space travel, saving millions of lives in Africa from HIV, then say so, and let's have that debate! But can we stop pretending it is about fiscal conservation?
"all of these unbelievably useful with high ROI agencies"
Unbelievably useful to whom? A lot of people seemed to have problems with what institutions like USAID were doing.
I can think of the CIA during Iran Contra as a very useful comparison. Funding the Contras and getting around Congressional obstruction was very useful to Ronald Reagan. The CIA facilitating Cocaine trafficking into the United States by groups supporting the Contras made the CIA offer a high ROI. Those black ops planes carrying cocaine into the United States had some valuable cargo.
And yet, after all this came to light I would have had no problem with Bill Clinton reducing the size and scope of the CIA, even if it was offering a high ROI and "was useful"
Science is actually progressing at an amazing rate in recent years. We are curing diseases and understanding more about life and the universe faster than ever.
Just briefly skim some top journals right now:
Here's an amazing 'universal vaccine' for respiratory viruses in mice https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1260
here are brand new genome editors in human cells https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz1884
Here's amazing evidence of an ancient lake on Mars https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu8264
Here's a meta-analysis of 62 (!) different studies on GLP1 receptor agonists to figure out whether they can contribute to pancreatitis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/edm2.70113
(covered here https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00552-6)
Here's identification of a new mechanism of resistance in Malaria https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10110-9
Here's curing a genetic disorder using gene editing in mice https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10113-6
Here's a study that has figured out that as CO2 levels rise, there's less nitrogen in forests https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10039-5
and here's personalized mRNA vaccines curing people of breast cancer https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10004-2
Like all of these are just from the past month or two and are pretty astounding advances. And they are just a subset of all of the scientific advances recently. All of them have contributors in academia (and science performed outside of academia would not exist without academia, as it depends upon it for most of the conceptual advances as well of course as for scientist training).
1. Stuff like paper mills and complete fraudsters exist, but for the most part, these things are the exception, not the rule. Your average scientist doesn't even hear or think about these things and the weirdos who cause them, to be honest. Nobody has ever heard of "International Review of Financial Analysis" outside of an extremely niche economics subfield.
2. "Public or perish" is not a cycle, really. While I believe it's not good for people to be constantly working under pressure, the fact that academia is so competitive currently is a healthy sign. It's because we have so many people with extremely impressive resumes and backgrounds, doing extremely impressive work, that makes funding so competitive. And when funding is competitive, it's no wonder that funders prefer to fund people who have produced something and told the world about it ("publish").
3. Fraudsters and hucksters have been in science forever. Go read an account of science in the early 19th century. There are tons and tons of stories of crazy scientists who believed ridiculous things, scientists who kept pushing wrong dogma, and so on. And yet nobody knows about them today, because the evolutionary process of science works: the truths that are empirically verifiable win out, and, given enough time, the failures are selected against.