I think this is a kind of question where our intuitions are quite weak and we need empirical studies to know. It is very easy to get annoyed with poor epistemics and to conclude, in exasperation, that things must have got worse. But since people normally don’t remember or know well what things were like 30 years ago or so, we can’t really trust those conclusions.
One could also look at features that one may suspect are correlated with poor epistemics, like political polarisation. On that, a recent paper gives evidence that the US has indeed become more polarised, but five out of the other nine studied OECD countries rather had become less polarised.
I think this is a kind of question where our intuitions are quite weak and we need empirical studies to know. It is very easy to get annoyed with poor epistemics and to conclude, in exasperation, that things must have got worse. But since people normally don’t remember or know well what things were like 30 years ago or so, we can’t really trust those conclusions.
One way to test this would be to fact-check and argument-check (cf. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k54agm83CLt3Sb85t/clearerthinking-s-fact-checking-2-0 ) opinion pieces and election debates from different eras, and compare their relative quality. That doesn’t seem insurmountably difficult. But of course it doesn’t capture all aspects of our epistemic culture.
One could also look at features that one may suspect are correlated with poor epistemics, like political polarisation. On that, a recent paper gives evidence that the US has indeed become more polarised, but five out of the other nine studied OECD countries rather had become less polarised.
https://www.brown.edu/Research/Shapiro/pdfs/cross-polar.pdf