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Notes -
Longtime readers will know what my take on this is.
The institutions in question have not be held accountable for outcomes in decades, don't hold their internal staff accountable, and oftentimes don't measure outcomes at all. The Institutions generally in charge of holding people accountable and punishing the misdeeds are, themselves, usually compromised as well. I suspect everyone prefers an arrangement where the institutions shamble along based on their prior reputation, everyone getting paid to maintain a facade, than risk collapsing it by exposing the extent of the rot. To the extent there are punishments and consequences they're rarely sufficient and proportional enough to truly dissuade the behavior in question.
And finally the institutions that manage to maintain integrity eventually get outnumbered and even if they are able to hold some people to account, can't possibly keep up with the volume of the problem. If that becomes widely known, even average people will be inclined to cheat/defect since not doing so makes you a bit of a sucker and there's rarely true consequences for doing so.
Re-insert skin in the game.
The good news is that in such hard fields, nature itself tends to have a correction mechanism for this, where the feedback loop for doing something wrong is tight and the punishments can be harsh.
Synthesize the wrong chemical, the reaction won't work, and you possibly kill yourself. Design the plane wrong it crashes, eventually. Reducing your safety margins too much will eventually come back to bite you, and possibly remove you from the system, and provide a warning to the next guy.
I'm sure there's stupidity to be found there, but when the real world REQUIRES you get things right in order to actually succeed, the accountability is to some extent baked into the cake, even if various institutions will try to put a few layers of obsfuscation between themselves and the outcomes.
That's exactly why if all that turned out to be a facade, it would be absolutely wild and crazy and turn my world upside down. I'd guess that the odds are low, but also, I'm quite sure that the true believers in those already-discredited fields would also judge the odds as being low for whatever field they're a true believer to.
Yeah solid point.
If it turned out that foundational papers in Engineering and studies in chemistry were false and everyone else had just been winging it and lucking out (or maintaining a massive coverup) then I would have to re-examine a lot of my core assumptions.
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