While I am skeptical of psi, I'm not 100% sure the drop off of that interest is progress. You can count me among those who believe that fundamental ground-break

While I am skeptical of psi, I'm not 100% sure the drop off of that interest is progress. You can count me among those who believe that fundamental ground-breaking innovation has declined considerably since the late 70s. One potential cause that I see is a narrowing of acceptable interests and lines of inquiry, especially in academia, and the rise of a kind of hidebound dogmatic skepticism. If we don't already know it, it doesn't exist. If it hasn't already been done, it can't be done. That's gonna cut out a certain amount of possibly-silly stuff like psi, but it's also going to eliminate a lot of potentially very fruitful "out there" lines of inquiry. I am not sure you can have one without the other. How do you a priori determine what's "silly" without actually investigating things? I feel like that's analogous to solving the halting problem -- you are claiming to know whether an avenue of research will be fruitful without actually pursuing it. As far as I can see the same establishment skeptical science that no longer takes psi seriously also no longer takes any hopeful, visionary vision of the future seriously. Space colonization? Life extension? Really solving our socioeconomic problems? Meh. Hell, a huge chunk of this crowd thinks that industrial civilization itself is doomed to collapse because we've already discovered all potential sources of energy and none of them are sustainable. To these guys even suggesting visionary futures that are wholly within known physics and even known technology is too "woo woo" for them if it involves steps that have not already been taken. This isn't scientific. It's rebranded medieval scholasticism with already-known scientific theory taking the place of Vatican dogma. I'll take my psi-researching acid-dropping 50s-70s woo-woo nuts over today's boring hidebound curmudgeons any day.