> It appears this is true of academic and scientific disciplines as much as anywhere else.
Sure, of course!
That's why "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
And we can be happy with at least that!
In anything outside science there is no progress at all. Humans in general behave exactly the same since thousands of years.
You could read some thousands of years old drama and the story will be very familiar. Lust, greed and power struggles, and the other typical human traits.
We did not manage to solve even one none technical problem since we came down the trees. But that's nothing unexpected actually given we're a horde of apes. I'm old enough to know that nothing will ever change as we had already more than enough time to easily mange at least some "humanity scale" issues by now. But we as a species are seemingly bound to our ape nature.
The few statistical outliers here and there could not and can not change the course of events. They never had any realistic chance. Because they're outnumbered by the billions. That's just how it is.
Eugenics would be a small chance. Or we'll become some day the "wet bootloader" of some truly intelligent beings. But both is not very likely.
Or, of course, we just kill our species eventually by some stupid mistake, or just out of rage; which is frankly the most likely outcome in the long run given human nature and its current technological possibilities.
There are no other realistic outcomes one could come up. Apes will stay apes. Likely to their very end. Time already proved that we just can't do better.
Now, anybody who likes to argue that I'm too pessimistic needs to explain away why there wasn't any substantial progress up until now (besides tech, which is something almost exclusively driven by singular people). I say it's all about human nature, psychological phenomena and that. Which is something coded by our common gene pool. And that's something that just can't change on any time scale that is meaningful to humanity as it is. (Besides doing this through tech, which isn't a realistic option at all given said human nature. My guess here would be that it's more likely that we'll go "the Borg path" than that we would try to re-engineer our-selfs to become a more generally friendly and intelligent species). Like said, it's imho already proved by time that we don't want maximize joy for everybody. Quite the contrary actually! We seek ever since only more efficient ways to extinguish our enemies. That's the one constant in human history. Actually, even most of our technological breakthroughs are direct results of this pursuit. Go figure…
Hmm, now I have the opening scene of "2001: A Space Odyssey" on my head. Not sure why.