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Or maybe social scientists are just way dumber? Physical Sciences Masters are vastly superior to Social Masters in math AND superior in verbal (study). No wonder: adding to my thesis, it's so painfully clear that our progress in social sciences is kneecapped by the political power of people motivated to use them to obscure rather than discover truth, which repels anyone with half a brain from those fields. Every bit of social science that holds the promise of conclusive, replicable and useful results is politically fraught (of course one could say that safer fruit has all been picked, but was there a lot of it?). We could have had a predictive HBD-based science of economic productivity, criminality, cooperation and social cohesion half a century ago, to say nothing of this polygenic score era, but instead we're still wading through the morass of implicit bias tier fraud and «is freedom of speech worth the consequences»/«shut up scum you have freedom you just have nothing to say» pablum, with grants going into scientific stamp collecting. What do you think comes first, stupidity of the scientists or malice of their effective managers? Does it matter after incentives are, time and again, so clearly spelled out to early career scientists?
On a separate note, @4bpp doesn't seem to give enough credit to Napoleon. It's a somewhat popular idea, that maybe the field is so packed and competitive, our mediocrities would have been brilliant by the standards of yesteryear. Maybe it's powered by the progress in performance of professional athletes, or perhaps by tool-aided improvement in stuff like music. Admittedly I may underestimate Blinken, whose distinguishing features seem to be reliability, stalwart Zionism running in the family, and a history of activism – rather than anything IQ-related (then again, how would I be able to tell if he's hiding his power level?). But, well… this is normal. Napoleon was abnormal.
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