Science is Offensive (Should We Just 'Get Used to It'?)
It sometimes "offends" shareholders, who obviously know better (what's good for them); social control media is groupthink, where consensus gets shaped by the platform owner (e.g. Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or - now with Chinese entrants like Bytedance - Pooh the Bear)
(Ted S. Warren / AP Photo via this new and important article about investor-state dispute settlements, or ISDS.)
THE world changes rapidly and not for the better. More than 20 years ago I started my Ph.D. I was 21 (now 41) and eager to study what's true, what's important to oneself, not what will get "likes" in social control media (it hadn't yet come into being and Wikipedia was very new, not yet bribed by Microsoft and Bill Gates [1, 2]).
People who value science should go back to writing and not wasting time/money on so-called "apps" or 'groupthink machines'; they reinforce falsehoods both outwards and inwards, encouraging people to self-censor while absorbing lies (by supposed 'peers', fostering a false sense of trust/kinship). People become dishonest to themselves to appease some perceived "group" or so-called "friends"/"followers"/"connections". This is not how science or truth-seeking should be gone. The group is often wrong. That group might even be a fictional construct, manipulated or selectively assembled by some platform owner/s into forming a false consensus. Advertisers (sponsors) play a role in this. This is what they pay for. They want a greater stake in the outcome or the collective psyche.
Academic publishing is dead or dying. I still remember how it flourished online in 2003 (at libraries' expense). That's no longer the case. Even just landing on some paper abstract online, you often find not even 100 people saw/read it (the abstract alone) and it can take months to write it, based on years' daily work. Those papers need readers; without readers, what's the point composing them? Think of the "tree falls in the woods/forest" philosophy.
I used to work at MCC (home of the first GNU/Linux distro), where we let people access the online library remotely, i.e. from home. How many scholars still do this? There seems to be no future for them. I ought to know as I worked as a postdoc for a couple of years. I left that behind, seeing it was a dead-end job.
Why is that so?
Among the factors (there are more): the young generation does not read long texts, the young generation cannot properly read long texts, there are paywalls, access/usability issues, fewer scholars (drowning in admin work that's wrongly assigned to them) and remaining ones lack time to peer-review, edit, and write papers. Academia as 'research mill' (independent and solid, objective and courageous) will die, then turn into de facto marketing PR departments. We saw that during COVID-19. In some areas, corporate power and political correctness kill publications either proactively (research grants) or post hoc. Of course the attacks on free speech, including supposedly "offensive" (but perfectly legal) speech, ruin research in more social (as in society) domains. In pure science, data that does not support the buzzwords or cargo cult of the day will be defunded. The F in EFF will become "Facebook", owing to bribes, and decent staff lose the job. Because it's all about money, is it not? █