Boomers & Broken Governance

“There are only engineers. Researcher is a relic term from academia.”
— Elon Musk, July 29, 2025

As we wrote our forthcoming book, a theme kept cropping up — how those positioned to influence the future routinely either have avoided decisions or made decisions that reflected a set of values informed by Silicon Valley cyberlibertarian ideas and the bad mental habits and corrupted pursuits those have given us.

People overseeing the scientific claims space behaved as if the quote above were true — as if engineering information in certain ways was equivalent to conducting rigorous scientific discovery.

Since we turned the book in, the same themes keep cropping up — lackluster leadership and timorous spirits, while systems designed to govern science and society collapse, concede, or conspire in the shadow of big money, Big Tech, and bad ideas — a shadow that give us influencers like Musk, RFK Jr., Andreesen, Altman, and others.

These governance failures have consequences that hurt people.

Our inability or unwillingness to stop false anti-vax conspiracies led to a shooting last week at CDC headquarters, where one police officer was killed. The shooter believed Covid-19 vaccines made him suicidal — another part of the sprawling “vaccine injury” conspiracy we’ve also found some of our own spreading just this year under the banner of cyberlibertarian “free speech.”

One of the most surprising sources of bad ideas has become the old guard of science, which has in its midst a grousing group known as the New Atheists. A gaggle of these old geese have a new book out — The War on Science.

When I first heard about the book, I was immediately concerned, as it is positioned as an overt attack on “wokeism” and progressivism from the likes of Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Lawrence Krauss, and others. Operating under the guise of science, the book appeared to be a broadside on LGBTQ issues and related social movements. This, while an actual war on science from the right rages around them.

It turns out my instincts were shared and more justified than I imagined, as a recent review eviscerates the book, its authors, and the New Atheists, showing their own ties to libertarian “free speech” agendas, Silicon Valley-tinged eugenics, shameful arrogance and misbehavior, and a set of generally terrible ideas.

The best line of the review is, “it’s all here, boomer Facebook on every page.”

• What is so frustrating about the failures of governance by Boomers and their wannabes is that the generations following them are increasingly filled with people possessing enough talent, drive, compassion, and clear-headed views of the world to make it a better place — but for the Boomers, it’s all about them, so everyone else is blocked.
  • Best of all, this “wokeism” has taught younger people to be very tolerant and accepting of others, and to let people make free choices. Isn’t that America? Isn’t that freedom?
    • We are failing so many . . .

In scientific publishing, the governance function has been compromised to a significant degree by a few related factors:

• An acceptance of quantity-based publishing as an unalloyed benefit to society
• Timid, risk-averse decision-making
• A reflex to protect old gains instead of seeking new gains
  • A weird admixture of shame about profits, but pride in retained earnings (previous profits)
• Deference to perceived power and authority instead of asserting one’s own
• A light touch — if any — when it comes to conflicts of interest
• A belief that the public can safely and usefully interact with scientific claims
• A move away from expertise combined with a drift into “stakeholder” culture
• A failure to defend democratic norms, standards, and laws
• A lack of focus on the customer, on brands, and on the community at hand

When it comes to conflict of interest, one of the most insidious forms comes via grants — that is, scientists are especially susceptible to pressure from funders because they are reluctant to object to it. Their next grant may depend on how they are viewed by funders, and branding yourself anti-funder feels like a sure way to stop the money flow. This COI at the governance level of many societies needs to be addressed.

There are a lot of reasons governance of scientific societies, publishing organizations, and the field generally has failed over the past two decades. We’ll discuss this on a future episode of our podcast. It deserves attention, because nearly every malady in modern society can be traced reasonably back to a failure at the governance level.

OK, Boomer?