0. I think your perspective is really detached from the actual scientific enterprise. I think this kind of take exists when there are cultural clashes combined with a strong focus in the media and online with the mistakes and issues in science, not its successes.

Science is actually progressing at an amazing rate in recent years. We are curing diseases and understanding more about life and the universe faster than ever.

Just briefly skim some top journals right now:

Here's an amazing 'universal vaccine' for respiratory viruses in mice https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1260

here are brand new genome editors in human cells https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz1884

Here's amazing evidence of an ancient lake on Mars https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu8264

Here's a meta-analysis of 62 (!) different studies on GLP1 receptor agonists to figure out whether they can contribute to pancreatitis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/edm2.70113

(covered here https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00552-6)

Here's identification of a new mechanism of resistance in Malaria https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10110-9

Here's curing a genetic disorder using gene editing in mice https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10113-6

Here's a study that has figured out that as CO2 levels rise, there's less nitrogen in forests https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10039-5

and here's personalized mRNA vaccines curing people of breast cancer https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10004-2

Like all of these are just from the past month or two and are pretty astounding advances. And they are just a subset of all of the scientific advances recently. All of them have contributors in academia (and science performed outside of academia would not exist without academia, as it depends upon it for most of the conceptual advances as well of course as for scientist training).

1. Stuff like paper mills and complete fraudsters exist, but for the most part, these things are the exception, not the rule. Your average scientist doesn't even hear or think about these things and the weirdos who cause them, to be honest. Nobody has ever heard of "International Review of Financial Analysis" outside of an extremely niche economics subfield.

2. "Public or perish" is not a cycle, really. While I believe it's not good for people to be constantly working under pressure, the fact that academia is so competitive currently is a healthy sign. It's because we have so many people with extremely impressive resumes and backgrounds, doing extremely impressive work, that makes funding so competitive. And when funding is competitive, it's no wonder that funders prefer to fund people who have produced something and told the world about it ("publish").

3. Fraudsters and hucksters have been in science forever. Go read an account of science in the early 19th century. There are tons and tons of stories of crazy scientists who believed ridiculous things, scientists who kept pushing wrong dogma, and so on. And yet nobody knows about them today, because the evolutionary process of science works: the truths that are empirically verifiable win out, and, given enough time, the failures are selected against.

Ha, or, perhaps for a 2025 variant: it would quickly be shared publicly by government scientists (who are not as secretive or good at keeping secrets as the public seems to think!), the evidence all shared publicly, subject to international peer review and consensus. And then 70% of people would believe it's made-up. The US-sphere would believe China made it up as a plot (or "globalists") and the developing world and BRICS would believe the US made it up as a plot. Western countries would repeatedly sign and then remove themselves from international treaties to prepare for contact.

Bit too on the nose, maybe, but a heck of a lot more likely than a coverup by government scientists.

This is AI generated gibberish unrelated to the article. A brief look at this account's history shows that is all it posts. Is this allowed here?

No, you can host your own server, subscribe to your own moderation services. It's a protocol like email.

Ummm... you know that Bluesky is the social network that permits anyone to say anything, right? Like, that's just how it works? That the open source decentralizable community moderation opt in website is the free speech website and the website run by a billionaire with an algorithm and AI designed to promote his political views isn't? Right?