Hacker News Reader

Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

At this point we are all just living in The Wire all the time.

So many of our institutions have been corrupted from the inside by the more ruthless nature of careerism that’s taken over the modern world. Bond rating agencies endorse junk debt, doctors say opiates aren’t addictive any more, epidemiologists say the politics of your protest determine if it’s safe during a pandemic, elite educational institutions tell you going into crippling debt will be good for you.

Literally every institution, including ones supposed to serve the public, is rotting from the inside out from people bullshitting to keep their job or get promoted.

https://youtu.be/_ogxZxu6cjM

View on HN

Implicit in your comment is that once upon a time things were different. That is not at all clear to me. Rather, science, government, public health, etc have always been largely a mess, and whatever you conjure up in your idealized view of "the good old days" in those human endeavours is just good old fashioned selection bias.

In academia, things were different. Science didn't really get like this until tenure became hyper-competitive. In the early days of the British tradition, science was a leisurely task by nobles. After WWII, academia was expanding rapidly, and there was a shortage of professors. Academic jobs were easy to come by.

The strong incentives to cheat is very new in academia. I've seen academia for about a quarter-century, and at least MIT went from a pretty honest place to a shark tank full of crooks.

That's not a general "the world was once better," but a very specific "academic fraud has grown out-of-control in the past 25 years."

The other big change happened when Clinton doubled the NIH budget in the 90s. This made a lot more room for shark tanks full of crooks (sadly).

Without necessarily endorsing the premise of the comment, I wonder what can be done to prevent this. Has humanity ever been successful at preventing institutions from regressing to exclusively serving their own needs? It's not clear if as a species we can actually pull that off, at least not in perpetuity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com