I can imagine a counter-argument that says “you’re noticing deep problems and then your wishful thinking is saying ‘but maybe they won’t bite’ but you should notice how deep and pernicious they are.” But this argument feels like it proves too much. Don’t plenty of fields have pernicious problems of a similar character, but manage to make progress anyway?
My answer to this is actually “no”, for the most part. There are fields which make lots of progress by avoiding this flavor of perniciousness in various ways—e.g. market feedback pressures are a big one which can work insofar as a nontrivial fraction of downstream consumers are capable of recognizing problems. Then there are fields which don’t have ways of avoiding this flavor of perniciousness, and they mostly either don’t make progress, or end up “faking it”.
My answer to this is actually “no”, for the most part. There are fields which make lots of progress by avoiding this flavor of perniciousness in various ways—e.g. market feedback pressures are a big one which can work insofar as a nontrivial fraction of downstream consumers are capable of recognizing problems. Then there are fields which don’t have ways of avoiding this flavor of perniciousness, and they mostly either don’t make progress, or end up “faking it”.