Congrats! Also, I initially read this as “Excited about our 6th Mass Extinction!” 😅

yeah, that example is one of those cases upon which debates hinge

Every week should be instrumentalist week!!!

Yeah, I do think that pressure is real.

Interesting hypothesis. My read is that there has been a marked drop-off in FWers, but less so in MR. But it is true that the MR lit has moved away from systematic work to more topic-focused questions, and that might also play to some of these things even if numbers were steady.

That’s true for all of us, I suspect. Even so, although maybe it is career stage, it feels like there has been a noticeable uptick of both the frequency and degree of the problem over the past few years. Doesn’t help that fw is also a topic where people seem to want to ”solve” it w/o reading lit.

Hard to get deep expertise about a lit, though, without decades of work, or having spent an enormous time following up on the footnote trail. And, there are few incentives to do that, especially if there is a good chance the only available referees won’t know it either. #philsky