Are things "improving every decade" at a "vast rate"? What exactly is improving? Doesn't that depend on one's values as to what counts as "better"? Do you mean technological progress, economic progress, social progress?
Perceptions of progress seem to depend a lot on (a) where in the world you are, (b) what things you value, (c) whether you choose to optimistically focus on the positive developments (from the viewpoint of your own values) or pessimistically focus on the negative.
Even if we agree that certain forms of progress are occurring, do those various forms of progress necessarily entail scientific progress? I think, the only form of progress which necessarily entails scientific progress is technological progress – but even for that, some scientific fields have much greater technological relevance than others, continuing technological progress requires continuing scientific progress in technologically-relevant fields, yet is compatible with going backwards in areas of science which lack direct technological application.
You can be philosophical about "improving", but in the context of the thread and the post, I think we are talking about technological improvement over the last few years as an example of tangible scientific improvement, even if a lot of papers that are published suck.
Okay, but that comes back to the point that some scientific fields are more relevant to technological progress than others.
Getting physics and chemistry right is really essential to technological progress. How can technology advance if your physics and chemistry are wrong?
But, what about "softer" sciences, such as psychology or the social sciences? It seems you could be moving in the complete wrong direction with them, and yet still be advancing technologically – because technology largely doesn't depend on them.
And even for the "hard sciences", technology generally only depends on certain areas of them. How much of the Standard Model of physics is actually technologically relevant? Technological progress is strong evidence you've got the technologically-relevant parts of physics right, but is compatible with serious error in low technological-relevance areas. What is the technological relevance of electroweak unification, for example?
We also don't know what we are missing out on. Neuroscience is an area of biological research in which many promises of clinical translation have thus far failed to deliver. Is that because this the brain is very complicated, and we just have to wait longer and invest more before we see more results? Or could it be that we are doing the science wrong, and we'd clinically be in a much better situation now if we were doing it right? How can one tell which of those two possible situations we are actually in?
Perceptions of progress seem to depend a lot on (a) where in the world you are, (b) what things you value, (c) whether you choose to optimistically focus on the positive developments (from the viewpoint of your own values) or pessimistically focus on the negative.
Even if we agree that certain forms of progress are occurring, do those various forms of progress necessarily entail scientific progress? I think, the only form of progress which necessarily entails scientific progress is technological progress – but even for that, some scientific fields have much greater technological relevance than others, continuing technological progress requires continuing scientific progress in technologically-relevant fields, yet is compatible with going backwards in areas of science which lack direct technological application.