TFW, YOU'RE WAITING FOR THE PARADIGM TO SHIFT:

In recent years, I've noticed a lot of think pieces in which people talk about their academic fields hitting an impasse. A recent example is this Liam Kofi Bright post on analytic philosophy:

Analytic philosophy is a degenerating research programme. It's been quite a long time since there was anything like a shared project ... People are not confident it can solve its own problems, not confident that it can be modified so as to do better on that first score, and not confident its problems are worth solving in the first place ... The architectonic programmes of latter-20th-century analytic philosophy seem to have failed without any clear ideas for replacing them coming forward ... What I think is gone, and is not coming back, is any hope that from all this will emerge a well-validated and rational-consensus-generating theory of grand topics of interest.

Another example is Sabine Hossenfelder's 2018 book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, which is about how high-energy particle physics has made itself irrelevant by pursuing theories that look nice instead of those that try to explain reality. The book followed on the heels of a number of pieces noting how the Large Hadron Collider has failed to find evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model (though we still have to wait and see if the Muon g-2 anomaly turns out to be something new). And of course there are many books and articles about the apparent dead end in string theory. [...]

There are seemingly endless warnings of disciplinary dead ends. In 2013, Keith Devlin, director of the Stanford Mathematics Outreach Project, fretted that "mathematics as we know it may die within a generation." Some worry that the field of psychology will be rendered irrelevant by neuroscience. In general, if you pick an academic field X and Google "the end of X," you'll find an essay from the last decade wondering if it's over -- or declaring outright that it is.

Is this normal? Maybe academics just always tend to think their fields are in crisis until the next big discovery comes along. 

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