Philosophically incoherent and empirically bereft.

From Bret Weinstein and Steve Patterson on the Scientific Method by Arnold Kling.  An insight from Steve Patterson.

At about two hours forty-four minutes, Patterson says that originators understand the weak points in the foundations of their ideas, but followers lose site of these weak points, and the ideas become conventions that people treat as absolute truth. It reminds me that Robert Solow understood that a weakness of his growth theory was the possibility that aggregating capital, labor, and output might lose too much information. Nowadays, everyone takes aggregate capital, labor, and output measures as if they were accurate to at least three significant figures. I think the resulting analysis of “changes in the trend rate of productivity growth” is bunk.

I agree.  There are many interesting ideas floating around and pundits are always attempting to generate new energy around some of them.  Think about the University of Pennsylvania psychologist who tried to build momentum around the idea of Grit which was really just a reformulation of already established ideas.  It got a lot of uncritical mainstream media attention and then disappeared.

But there are also plenty of examples of what Patterson is discussing.  Thinkers who come with an idea which is tethered and constrained by many nuances.  If, however, it becomes popular and a hot idea, it almost always loses all nuance.  The simplification of the idea aids communication but loses sophistication.  Frequently to the point of becoming misleading.

Anthropogenic Global Warming, Social Justice Theory, Justice Reform, Critical Race Theory, etc.  They all are very specific and nuanced at the beginning but then morphed into a dramatically simplistic representations which were philosophically incoherent and empirically bereft.