Fake Physics

This sounds like the reaction against "Fake News", "Fake History", etc.

What that really tells me is this is an area of study that the Establishment does not want you to follow so it will label it to apply social pressure to mitigate the effects & discourage people from following it.

The thing is, nature has a way of not caring what the Establishment thinks. It does care on a surface level, but it also conspires to cause the collapse of the socio-information paradigms that the Establishment creates.

Given we have a soup of information & no grounding central authority to give us "objective reality", we ought to utilize other techniques. I don't happen to know what these techniques are, but I suspect that it has to do with network models, cognition models, perspectives (physical & information), attention schemas, faith, complexity, patterns, language, etc.

Knowledge is seen as dangerous by people holding power over others. It always has been (e.g. the apple thing). Therefore, in an age where knowledge is more readily accessible to a much larger number of people, it behoves the groups in power to somehow thwart its development. A good way of accomplishing this is to use mass media to make the signal to noise ratio as small as possible. Which is itself accomplished nicely by paid, conscious, agents and amplified by the growing hordes of individuals humiliated, rather than motivated, by their lack of knowledge. The true becomes a moment of the false, the real a moment of the fake. I believe that "spaces", real or virtual, rather than techniques will develop for knowledge to flow and grow.

I think this assessment is magnificently incorrect. Over the past 30 years there have been very important experiments, many of which have reached the mainstream. This includes anything from the Higgs experiments to the LIGO experiments. What about things closer to the HN crowd, like communications infrastructure like the Internet?

The discovery of the transistor didn't bring an iPhone overnight. Same with many other scientific discoveries that had to go through a long engineering phase. I see a similar trend happening now with quantum computation, which has seen great leaps over the past 20 years and continues to accelerate in both academia and industry.

It's my opinion that, at least in America, we live in a less intellectually disciplined and intellectually favored society. Anti-intellectualism, even in nominally educated portions of society, seems to be on the rise. This unfortunately has the effect of making science look stagnant to the larger population, and unless there are gadgets of instant gratification that science explicitly produces, it'll remain somewhat obscure to folks uninterested in advancement for the sake of advancement.

As for the multiverse stuff, I'm not sure why you think that it has to do with the arbitrary selection of constants. The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn't say "anything happens and it all happens in separate multiverses", but rather that—in simple terms—non-deterministic events like measurements bifurcate into separate universes. But QM still posits that the results of these non-deterministic events are each probable, and each obey the same laws of physics equally. In other words, it has a more "butterfly effect" on us, keeping physical constants as truly constants, not a "splitting of universal laws effect".

I agree about the lack of substantial progress, but for the record the standard many worlds theories still predict that most "constants" actually are constants; they're the same in every branch.