I agree with everything you said, I remember seeing this graph that shows how likely House Democrats and Republicans where likely to vote with their party between 1949 -2011, which already showed a pretty bleak outlook, here’s the full paper.
The second thing that I noticed about ten years ago maybe before that was the sudden increase in misinformation on Facebook and YouTube that people will believe as truth, and since they see it engages you they will constantly bombard them with more and of it. I remember as a kid adults saying don’t believe everything you read, and if so and so would jump off a bridge would you? A lot of them should have taken there own advice.
It’s not just older generations, younger ones are obviously affected by it but in different ways cyber bullying, that weird Andrew Tate following and other.
I heard someone explain like this, let’s say a person walks up to on the street and asks you to buy something, obviously it’s easy to say no and walk away. Now instead of a person imagine it’s a machine with 10 billion times more intelligent than all of humanity combined is constantly trying to get you to click a link.
I’ve always considered sciences like psychology to be more susceptible to the reproducibility crisis. It seems if someone decides to pursue a career in academia the criteria becomes publishing, and well publish or perish as is goes.
I think some researchers areocing towards things like prerigistering hypothesis and open data+publishing source code for calculations and using that as references in there paper so it can be updated afterwards.
They’re have definitely been a lot of papers where results were later determined to be wrong but is still referenced because well you can’t update a paper from the 1970s.
This is hearsay from friends I’ve never done any serious research or published in journals. As a side note I do enjoy reading taking a scroll through https://retractionwatch.com/