@concavi @Gert My argument was economic, not material. The issue with the theory of the mountain of crap isn’t whether it can be refuted or not. The problem lies in comparing the costs of creating nonsense versus the costs of debunking it. While anyone can freely generate garbage across 25 disciplines, debunking it requires 25 highly specialized and expensive experts in each of those disciplines. The issue is economic. And the fact that the problem is economic also makes it systemic, insofar as economic evaluation dominates the social, media, and cultural landscape.