I think "scientific progress is waning" is maybe not the correct phrase. I think it's more like "scientific establishment is waning" or "scientific efficiency"

I think "scientific progress is waning" is maybe not the correct phrase. I think it's more like "scientific establishment is waning" or "scientific efficiency" or something like that. The issue isn't so much "is progress being made?" I think that's clearly the case. The question is "are resources being wasted?" or "what are the opportunity costs?" The blog post at the end kind of focuses on turnover of ideas and progress, which I'm not sure is quite the right focus. I think the original question, about how papers are being cited, are good papers being cited enough, are bad papers being cited too much, are papers being cited appropriately, is probably more on-point. I think people have this schema that academic science is a bunch of brilliant people just looking around, and when one of them comes up with a brilliant idea, others recognize it because they're brilliant, and then it floats to the top. What happens in reality is really different: you have a bunch of people who are pretty smart, but not always as brilliant as they are made out to be, and they have their own misunderstandings, blind spots, and biases. Ideas explode in popularity because the field as a whole is ready to understand or accept them, not because of the ideas per se. Re: "political attacks" I think this that's self-inflicted in that the worst part of all of this is the denial of how broken academics is at the moment among the scientific establishment. In any event, the focus of the article isn't really even about typical conservative anti-climate, anti-vaccine research, it's about citation patterns, written by academics, about academics.