Science isn't declining: reanalysis says crisis claims are statistical artifacts
chris_j_paxton · x · 2026-09-09
Chris Paxton re-examined the popular "science is declining" claim by downloading the underlying data and analyzing it with Astra. He argues "genuine crisis" is a huge overstatement: the original plot doesn't hold countries constant (new countries were added over time), and naive averaging over-weights small European countries by population. After corrections, no real decline shows—suggesting changed reading habits instead. He plots Massachusetts alone to show how much variance one state can create.
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