Increasing cognitive pollution combined with decreasing dissemination of accurate knowledge.

A suggestive coincidence of articles. The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time by Pontus Plavén-Sigray et al indicates that

Clarity and accuracy of reporting are fundamental to the scientific process. Readability formulas can estimate how difficult a text is to read. Here, in a corpus consisting of 709,577 abstracts published between 1881 and 2015 from 123 scientific journals, we show that the readability of science is steadily decreasing. Our analyses show that this trend is indicative of a growing use of general scientific jargon. These results are concerning for scientists and for the wider public, as they impact both the reproducibility and accessibility of research findings.

More specifically, their findings indicate that there is a rise in the use of scientific jargon. Jargon is useful within a field for conveying a complex concept or body of knowledge through a shorthand term. The challenge, however, is that jargon arises within a field for efficient intra-field communication but then becomes a barrier of communication between fields.

On the other hand, in terms of motivated reasoning and ideological needs, rhetoric is very capable of propogating junk science beyond the originating science domain as illustrated in The Bad Science Behind Campus Response to Sexual Assault by Emily Yoffe.

Justin Dillon, a Washington, D.C., attorney who defends students across the country accused of Title IX violations, told me that a couple of years ago he had barely heard of this condition, but that its terminology has swiftly made its way into campus adjudications: “I don’t think I’ve seen a complaint in the past year that didn’t use the word frozen somewhere.” Trauma, he says, is used to explain away all iconsistencies in some complainants’ accounts that would otherwise seem to contradict their having been assaulted. Schools do not make public the training materials of those who investigate and adjudicate sexual assault. But through lawsuits, Dillon has obtained some examples, and he says the assertions of the “neurobiology of trauma” that infuse these materials make it almost impossible for the accused to mount a defense. When such assumptions are held by those sitting in judgment, he says, “How do you prove your innocence?”

[snip]

Campbell’s claim that a sexual-assault victim’s memory consists of completely accurate but disorganized fragments contradicts fundamental scientific knowledge of the nature of memory, McNally told me. “The brain is not a videotape machine,” he said. “All of our memories are re-constructed. All of our memories are incomplete in that sense.” Each time we recall an event, it is being reassembled, and sometimes changed by the very process of recall.

All the experts I spoke with expressed concern about the malleability of memory, especially when people are being encouraged to clarify murky experiences. A 2015 study by the education insurance group United Educators, examining 305 claims of sexual assault at 104 schools, found that about 40 percent of students delayed reporting an assault (there are many valid reasons why they might do so, including fear of stigma). The average delay was 11 months, and “in most cases, the victim labeled the incident a sexual assault only after talking with friends or attending prevention training.” Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and social behavior at UC Irvine, has done pathbreaking work on memory manipulation. When I described to her what’s now being taught to administrators and students, she said it sounded disturbingly like a return of “recovered memory” theory, with some neurobiology thrown in “to give luster” to the argument.

During the recovered-memory scare of the 1980s and ’90s, thousands of people were convinced by their therapist—and by best-selling books on the subject—that their problems were caused by repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, often at the hands of their father. The theory was that the mind buried what had happened because it was so awful, but that the “forgotten” events nonetheless caused a lifetime of pain. Guided by therapists, victims were able to recover the memory and begin healing.

As it turned out, though, many therapists were implanting false memories in vulnerable people, resulting in baseless accusations that tore families apart. The frenzy eventually burned out when researchers, including McNally, discredited the underlying assumptions. “The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma,” he writes in Remembering Trauma, “is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support.”

In our modern, fast-paced society, it appears that we are becoming very good at broadly disseminating junk science when it serves the ideological purposes of rhetorical advocates but at the same time are becoming increasingly bad at communication complex and accurate information between and among knowledge domains.

That sounds like a recipe for cognitive disaster.