@misnohmer is on the right track. Many colleges have failed to provide effective training and some have been captured by activists pushing left wing political agendas. Be careful not to follow this to "colleges should be doing job training.' I recommend two paths forward. First, we need to strengthen accredited paths to mid/high social status careers that don't require college. You should be able to choose home construction/remodeling or transportation infrastructure or business careers after high school and have a job training path that isn't modeled after current college curricula. Germany has such a system and it usually works well. Second, we have to abandon the Ivy League as the model for a great college education. See Brooks 'How the Ivy League Broke America' in the Atlantic for details. Most of these institutions have been overtaken by left wing radicals or by research agendas that have strayed far from the common good of American society. This is already happening as employers realize that many Ivy league degree holders will bring toxic values to a company that is trying to be profitable. Instead a pluralism of top notch higher education is needed. Places like U of Chicago or Johns Hopkins are trying to buck the left wing trend. A few new initiatives like Univ. of Austin and Olin College of Engineering are trying new models. Many other schools, some with religious backgrounds, some state universities, and some liberal arts colleges are creating new versions of college curriculum that provide students with a well rounded understanding of how the universe works.

Torvalds is exactly right that most of what currently calls itself AI is hype that will vaporize soon. But there is an interesting twist here. Large language models are amazingly good at generating marketing materials. One the reasons for the insanity of hype bubbles at the moment is the way digital tools speed up the generation of hype. It is possible that the deluge of marketing from AI run amok will finally guide more careful thinkers to examine the differences between clear thinking and marketing. AI itself will likely soon become effective at distinguishing between rhetoric aimed at marketing and clear thinking aimed at understanding. Eventually the post-modern silliness in academia will have to recognize that a distinction exists between clear thinking about simple problems that we call science and marketing rhetoric.

Judging from the comments here, there is a lot of pent up hostility on this subject. Naomi Oreskes gets at some key issues in her essay, but clearly wasn't writing for the crowd that remains hostile to masks. There is no real question about whether masks work to decrease virus transmission. They clearly do. The mechanisms are clear (filtering out liquid droplets) and the evidence shows clear decreases in transmission rates. But transmission rates don't go to zero and the value judgement about whether the draw-backs of mask mandates outweigh the transmission rate benefit is a complex social and political value judgement.

The part I like best is the identification of 'methodological fetishes' that prevent people from using clear thinking to evaluate all available evidence. I think the current anti-expertise ideology from various angles of populism are running into shallow minded methodological ideas from scientists and experts to create a lot of confusion and ignorance. If you give people with experience and wisdom time to evaluate all the data, they usually have helpful guidance if you are willing to listen long enough to understand how they communicate their uncertainties. But usually we barely start that process and essentially no one waits to hear the error analysis.

But the 'poor physics education' problem is real. There is no fundamental benefit to doing this at the bottom of the ocean. Traditional RO systems have a high pressure side with energy consuming pumps and high pressure plumbing. Doing it at the bottom of the ocean simply reverses the situation so now you have pumps that consume the same energy pumping the permeate up to the surface and high pressure plumbing on the permeate side. Some marketing people who don't understand plumbing probably claim something like 'but the permeate flow rate is lower'. But it really is only the permeate that goes through the pressure drop and so that is the only fundamental energy consumption in a typical system. Of course what really matters is total cost of operation, and there is simply no way that running at depth in salt water is going to be cheaper. (See OceanGate's Titan for the trajectory of big hype when it tries the deep ocean.)

The science media strikes again. "Microsoft" will "solve some of the biggest headaches in quantum computing" with this newly discovered quasi-particle that they can barely detect whether it exists or not. This is cool science. The theorists have made a big deal about majorana particles because it is a fascinating possibility going back to the era of the 1930s when we first discovered how elementary particles have anti-particles. It turns out that we haven't detected any majorana elementary particles, but these quasi-particles are likely majorana. But they can barely be detected in idealized experiments because defects obscure them. The likelihood of them being used in quantum computers in the foreseeable future is essentially zero. But by combining cool science with a trendy application, some scientists got their work published in a high profile journal and some science journalist generated a lot of click-throughs. And the net result for science is a bit more skepticism about its actual usefulness.

Mark 2022-2023 as the years this happened. A large section of human activities that has used generation of effective marketing materials as metrics for excellence and allocation of resources has been destabilized. A rational path forward is to recognize that comparing marketing materials was always a bad way to allocate resources. But we are so deeply caught up in the supremacy of marketing rhetoric and images and video that it is very hard to rebuild systems that evaluate excellence on the basis of actual production of quality goods and services.

Yes, this is just the easiest thing to spot of many ways the research industry produces papers without real benefit. I have seen relatively little fraud myself, although clearly it exists. But I see a tremendous amount of carefully crafted research to be publishable with minimal effort and risk. When PIs are using these agendas, many graduate students and post-docs realize that it is just the papers that matter and not actual new understanding. This dawns on them about the time it is becoming clear that permanent research jobs are available only to a small set of highly talented or lucky young researchers. An obvious conclusion drawn by some is that it is better to cut corners on the research since their real future is somewhere else. Others think they can game the system to make it as a researcher. It is a hard problem to fix. Ultimately the research community is going to shrink as society realizes that the every increasing number of journal articles and abstractions isn't helping. New metrics of actual new ideas, separate from publications and citations, need to be developed.

When you read a phrase like "40% more pollution", you have to ask how they are defining pollution, and you should strongly suspect it is so oversimplified as to be "not even wrong". The relevant comparison is not about ethanol refineries vs oil refineries on specific kinds emissions. It is the full system of agriculture, ethanol production, and use vs the full system of oil extraction, refining, and use on the full range or greenhouse gas and toxic material effects on the environment. Any ideas about how we can convince journalists not to produce confusing reductionist stories that are simply used by special interests to keep people confused. With sufficient confusion, they can simply do what they want.

First, someone please un-mod the 'troll' label on Nomad63's comment. I disagree with his opinion, but he has stated it clearly and this is a place for conversation including different viewpoints. We face many levels of dysfunction in our society, and one of the easier to fix is to convince rationally oriented people that we have to stop the viewpoint discrimination and cancel culture that has become far too normal.

Second, Nomad63 needs to study a little bit of economics and quantify the size of the subsidies given to fossil fuels and to electric vehicles. The actual cost of those free chargers is miniscule. Since most are only level 2 chargers, the actual cost of the energy they dispense is tiny compared with the cost of installing and maintaining the charging infrastructure which is tiny compared with the subsidies given to the fossil fuel industry. Chargers are basically marketing symbols, and it is a political issue whether a town wants to market itself as moving toward the renewable energy future. So reactionary politicians are indeed likely to argue against them. But the question isn't 'who pays for it'. This is small change marketing money.

The question is which future the town or state is planning for itself. The dominance of the northeast in the US is a sore subject, going back to well before the civil war and now the west coast is 'blue' also. And there is going to be cultural resistance to the conversion to electric transportation, particularly in the current time when it isn't yet lower cost than fossil fuel transport when you don't factor in the costs of emissions and environmental damage. The future will actually be very different than the progressives in the blue states think. But the opponents of renewable energy and electric transport are even farther from a workable future than the progressives. Go learn the physics of energy generation and transportation (here is a good source: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.withouthotair.com%2F) Then go establish your independence from the broken socialist energy system in our country with a good solar PV system on your house, a powerwall backup, and a electric car with a charger at home. There is nothing better than homemade electricity.

If you plan a garden on the moon, you quickly realize that soil is among the smaller of your problems. There are many kinds of rocks and regolith on the moon. But you have to provide earth atmosphere (so a sealed pressure chamber) and light to power photosynthesis (so either a transparent sealed chamber or solar panels to power LEDs) plus temperature control, and you quickly realize soil isn't the main issue. Growing crops at the scale necessary to support a colony is a huge operation,and we are very far from being able to make it work. The real question is whether you can manufacture reliable large pressure chambers out of materials already on the moon. Once someone builds a system to do this, then all kinds of possibilities open up.

Yes, this is mostly clickbait. To see clearly why this isn't a path to technology, realize that diurnal (night/day) temperature differences are usually more than 10C. So if you want to harvest the tiny bits of energy available from small temperature differences, you are much better off using a day/night thermal storage system with 10C temperature differences than 2C from space radiating panels. Or better, use existing solar and geothermal sources to store heat with much bigger temperature differences.

There is a potential use in educating people about how solar energy harvesting actually works: a solar panel is ultimately a thermodynamic energy system, like a heat engine. It can work with quite high theoretical efficiency because it is coupling photons thermalized at the extremely high temperature at the surface of the sun with a cold side at temperatures of the surface of the earth. So you can also use it in reverse between earth surface temperature and cold space. But this temperature difference is much smaller and with the infrared radiation dominant at these temperatures, the atmosphere is less transparent and it is not a practical energy generating system.

One thing many don't notice is that often in cases of huge hype, the main players are not in it for technological development. The business types want stock prices to become speculative. The career scientists want funding for their research and to make a name for themselves. The news media want something exciting that sells. None of these need the hyped topic of the moment to work in the near future. In fact, they will mostly do just fine if it never works. They will simply switch to the next case of big hype. I wonder whether the hype game will ever stop working by people realizing that the need to create hype is much much bigger than the rate of actual new and revolutionary ideas.

Yes, that is right. The system is stabilized by the selection process. Some are trying to dismantle it, but students and families are learning that schools that are "test optional" mean that you will be learning alongside students who didn't learn algebra in high school, and the talented students will choose schools that maintain admission standards. Same thing with employers. They will soon learn that universities that don't have highly selective admission processes based on concrete skills are not producing graduates who can get the job done.

There are several obvious signs higher education is broken. My main three are: cost gone out of control, confusion about whether universities are for research or undergraduate education, and incoherent anti-elitist rhetoric by elite universities.

Many universities are still doing something amazing...providing a meritocratic framework in which ambitious and talented young people can spend a few years learning and and working with outstanding faculty and other talented students in institutions with large endowments that propel them to major contributions to society. Getting the opportunity to study at Stanford or U Chicago or Princeton is an amazing way to spend 4 years and there are good substantial reasons (in addition to some bad branding based reasons) why so many leaders and innovators come through the top schools. But the system is running on inertia built up in a time when meritocratic institutions were truly valued. The most left leaning institutions (most of them lean left a little since the right wing in the US has so much anti-intellectualism, but these lean to the leftward extreme) are increasingly trying to dismantle the meritocracy that allows them to function. Optional standardized tests is a key sign of this as Altman notes. And this is guaranteed to end badly if it continues. However, I don't see signs of collapse. Instead, I see signs of ideological fragmentation. Some institutions see the writing on the wall about the implosion of extreme identity politics (the anti-asian bias in admissions is a good hint at the problems here) and the need to reign in out-of-control undergraduate costs. Other institutions are full steam ahead with the anti-elitist identity politics. These will remain popular with the left fringe, but ultimately they will become economically non-viable, in the way most left wing ideologies implode or fade away. But there will be many other institutions that avoid the wacky ideas and continue to provide outstanding opportunities to outstanding talented students. Students and families are slowly learning that schools that are "test optional" mean that you will be learning alongside students who didn't learn algebra in high school, and the talented students will choose schools that maintain admission standards.

We do need to move past the the simple minded extremes on the balances between laissez-faire innovation (driven by free choices by businesses and individuals) and centrally regulated innovation (driven by central government laws and bureaucracy). As you say, there is a brainwashed right that celebrates no regulation. Hopefully you also can see the brainwashed left that imagines they are smart enough to regulate innovation in ignorance of the sordid history of centrally controlled economies degenerating into either totalitarian regimes or economic stagnation. Maybe the recent intensity of the extremists will subside and more historically knowledgable voices will gain power. But I fear these authors are still too enamored by the power they have wielded in the halls of Google, Stanford, and Government for them to hammer out realistic paths forward that work for the masses. Their solutions sound like "just trust us (and keep our types in power in industry, academia, and government) and we'll add ethics and talk about the underprivileged to our rhetoric. We need those skeptical of capitalism to see their common cause with those skeptical of government regulation. Together they share a common problem which is letting powerful individuals in government, industry, media, and the academy control the economy and culture and siphon off a lot of wealth in the process. Solutions to this problem are hard, but we need to start by identifying our common problem.