MindMatters is belatedly grasping the tenure problem.

People who work inside academia have known and recognized this for many decades. My father saw it when he started work as a prof in 1957, and warned me about it. Everyone knows it, but outsiders, even outsiders who attend college for four years, don’t hear about it. Most insiders LIKE the situation and don’t want to kill the golden Federal goose by publicizing the corrupt reality.

Watching outsiders “discover” the problem is frustrating. A farmer who hears city people “discover” that milk comes from cows must feel the same frustration.

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Here’s the frustrating passage:

Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances. Yet contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields. Here, we analyse these claims at scale across six decades, using data on 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents from six large-scale datasets, together with a new quantitative metric—the CD index12—that characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology. We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. This pattern holds universally across fields and is robust across multiple different citation- and text-based metrics.

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1. 95% of the “knowledge” is not knowledge at all. It’s just fiddling with decimal points to achieve a Least Publishable Unit.

2. Breaking with the past is NOT how knowledge advances. Most of the theories and assumptions made before the era of tenure were correct. Most of the Breakings achieved in recent decades are wrong, climaxing with the total DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION of the entire field of medicine in 2020. Every piece of real knowledge was turned upside down and “pushed medicine in a new direction” of NAZI TORTURE.

If we want to improve knowledge we should RECOVER the past, not OBLITERATE the past.

There were a few genuinely innovative places and times. England around 1840 created pretty much all technologies at once. America around 1905 was equally creative.

The age of tenure is more like Europe in 900 AD. We’re ruled by insane infantile inbred psychopaths who make war at the drop of a whisker, and kill their own peasants for sexual pleasure. Knowledge is being DESTROYED at a remarkable pace.

Dark Ages 1.0 ended around 1500 when Euros started listening to the Arabs and Persians who had carried and advanced old Greek knowledge during Europe’s long lunacy.

The latter part of the MindMatters article quotes physicist Rob Sheldon, who DOES get it and tells the full truth about tenure and publication, though I’d still argue with his praise of disruption. Sheldon says Elon is a successful innovator because Elon wasn’t inside the tenure machine. In reality Elon is NOT innovating. He’s successful because he reuses old tech (electric cars, rockets, subways, electrotherapy) invented during America’s brief creative period around 1905.

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Sidebar: Speaking of milk and destruction of old good science….]