Why is science slowing down?

Reports of the slowdown of scientific progress are wildly exaggerated.[a]

Scientific -- and mathematical -- progress continues in fits and starts, as always, thanks to individuals who labor in relative obscurity, year after year. Journalists tend to became aware of past progress only after it has gained wide recognition or become accepted dogma. By the time you read about it in vox.com, it's history.

Katalin Karikó labored on mRNA vaccines for decades with approximately zero mainstream media coverage. Jeff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun worked on deep neural nets for decades with approximately zero mainstream media coverage. Yitang Zhang labored for decades on prime numbers, making sandwiches for a living (!!!), with approximately zero media coverage. Their stories are typical. Scientific and mathematical progress is invisible to almost everyone until suddenly it isn't.

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[a] With apologies to Mark Twain.

It's not slowing down. It's getting more atomized. Plus, keep in mind that Western countries, just by the virtue of not being non-Western countries not because they are 'le evoolz colonialists!!', weigh publications from their neck of the wood with less transduction than publications from say, Iran or China, the former of which has had a very large boost in 'scientific output'. China, too, is where a lot of publications come from. Since a lot of these publications are not in par with Western codes, and again, that's because there are so many resources you can allocate to scientific publication and humans are extremely tribal (also does anyone appreciate the fact that 'West' is even a tribe these days? They were at each other's neck just 80 years ago --- better for all of us if these people don't claw at each other) so what we get is, PR bodies making it seem like science is 'slowing down' whilst truly, it is not.

What's happening is, text that laymen, e.g. me, understands, is slowing down. PR bodies at Western universities have a harder time 'selling' new publication to people. And the aforementioned countries don't even have PR bodies to begin with.

The key to improving the situation is standardize the fuck out of everything. Get rid of the nasty publication, ffs these days most people don't even give a shit if their paper is published as long as it gets traction on ArXiv. At least most people who don't live by academic scores don't.

Again I am a layman, I am not sure even if my posts show up so I am just venting and practicing my English. Be a sodomite and take this with a pillar of salt.

Thanks.