Science is hitting a wave of misinformation, ignorance, superstition, and undeserved mistrust.

These are being caused by religion, politics and those with other manipulative agendas.

It has probably always been there, but is now riding the massive wave that is the age of information - it's own doing (undoing?) of course.

The danger is that misinformation, ignorance, superstition and anti-science can overwhelm the good scientific information out there.

Most people are have little to no good science skills or education and they all now have a heightened ability to promulgate bad information, bad science, superstition, religion etc, worldwide.

The amount of misinformation seems to be greater and more readily available than the amount of good information...

I Love science and am a follower. No there is no wall , rather an incredibly intricate question regarding quantum physics. We may have gone far enough to realize we need to look else where and that alone is amazing. We now toy with multiple universes. It is the advent of computing that brought science into perhaps the most revolutionary past three decades. We are on the verge of explaining the god issue

I am no scientist but it seems to me there are always more questions than answers. And there are always young geniuses that have opened new doors, Avicenna, Jeremy Bentham, Carl Gauss, Blaise Pascal, Enrico Fermi, Karl Benz, Pablo Picasso, Bobby Fischer to name a few. If the way seems blocked, we just need a new set of eyes to reveal more mysteries; and ask the questions that we don't know yet exist.

I get the blog dude's angst, but it seems not all that hard to understand - we've discovered a good deal of the easy stuff, and much of what's left will take a bit more effort and brainpower. There may even be things we will never understand - what came before the Big Bang. BUT...there are a lot more exciting discoveries to be made in applied sciences, the art of making what we know work for us. Gloom and doom are unnecessary.

Thanks for sharing this!

The UK's Dr Bruce Charlton has some pessimistic thoughts on this subject.
[corruption-of-science.blogspot.com]

Be serious. Science is progressing exponentially. It's hard to keep us with all the new discoveries.

Ohferpetessake....science has Nothing to do with the mumbo-jumbo you mention!

I don't think it is progress that is harder to achieve, I think it is the communication of that progress this is the challenges. In my mind, we are now seeing better explanations of the evidence for dark matter and dark energy even though we don't understand what either are. But that uncertainty which is what scientists, researchers, and the intellectually curious thrive on, can be off putting to people who are more used to more definitive statements.

Another part of the problem is that the typical result of no result isn't news, so isn't published often. In a publish or perish climate, one tends to p-hack to get any result which distorts the overall foundation:

[imgs.xkcd.com]

Finally, the soft sciences (social sciences) are getting more rigour to their methods. The Undoing Project about Kahneman and Tversky explores quite a bit about how social sciences (in this case economics) are being better understood and studied.

But even with that, there is still a resistance to do basic research. For all the discussion (or lack thereof) about guns in the US, there are virtually no studies/research about the tropes used to support either side of the debate.