Buried by Our Own Knowledge: Donald Hebb and the Knowledge Crisis

Commentary

I recently came across a textbook from my undergraduate days: “A Textbook of Psychology” by the eminent Canadian scientist Donald O. Hebb.

As I browsed through its preface, I was more struck not by Hebb’s famous maxim (“neurons that fire together wire together”) but by something much more relevant to our current intellectual crisis: his respect for literature and his wariness of scientific excess.

Before helping to establish neuropsychology, Hebb had dreamed of being a novelist. That early ambition stayed with him. It enhanced his understanding that, despite its strength, science has limitations, and beyond those boundaries lies the domain where literature has long thrived.

Throughout his career, he maintained that for scientists, clarity and readability were not just stylistic choices but moral responsibilities. Ultimately, Hebb believed that obscurity, jargon, and evasive language were not only scientific faults but breaches of intellectual honesty, suggesting that a writer either did not understand their subject or sought to hide that fact.

He also feared that if psychology detached itself from the humanistic tradition that once grounded it, the discipline would drift into a superficial blend of popular therapy and fashionable opinion, still draped in scientific language but hollowed of genuine seriousness. It was in that spirit that Hebb offered this striking reminder of what psychology cannot do:

“It is to the literary world, not to psychological science, that you go to learn how to live with people, how to make love, how not to make enemies; to find out what grief does to people, or the stoicism that is possible in the endurance of pain. … For such knowledge and such understanding of the human species, don’t look in my Textbook of Psychology—try Lear, and Othello, and Hamlet. … These people are telling us things that are not on science’s program.”

Hebb’s concerns now seem prophetic. However, the crisis we face today is not just a shift in psychology toward self-help culture. It is something larger and more ruinous: a scientific publishing regime now so bloated, so mechanized, and so out of control that it threatens the very conditions under which genuine knowledge is attainable.

A recent RealClearInvestigations report highlights the extent of the issue. Scholarly publishing, once guided by academic judgment, has become a commercial production line. In one infamous case, a major publisher pressured the editors of one of its journals to produce 35 new articles within 60 days. Rather than dilute their standards, the entire editorial team resigned en masse. As the authors of the report made clear, this was not an anomaly but a symptom, evidence of a publishing system so distorted by commercial incentives that even the most respected journals are pushed toward industrial-scale production.

Universities now demand that scholars publish at a relentless pace; the old adage “publish or perish” has never been more literal. Young, untenured academics are often required to pay article-processing charges (APCs)—fees publishers impose to cover the “costs” of handling and making a paper publicly accessible. These APCs frequently run to $3,000 or more, and paying them offers no guarantee of publication.

For publishers, however, APCs are a goldmine. Because revenue rises with every accepted paper, they have a built-in incentive to expand output. The results are staggering: In 2023 alone, academic publishers collected $2.5 billion in APCs. More papers now simply mean more profit, regardless of their scholarly value.

The result is a scholarly landscape drowning in paper, most of it trivial, seldom read, and increasingly unreliable. A growing share is fraudulent or irreproducible. Paper mills now churn out AI-generated manuscripts complete with fabricated data, and some publishers have been forced to retract thousands of such articles. Meanwhile, peer review has been swamped by sheer volume and can no longer function as an effective gatekeeper.

This is not a golden age of discovery. It is epistemic inflation: As with currency, the more units we mint, the less each is worth.

What would Donald Hebb make of this tsunami of papers? Hebb warned against a psychology that mistook the mere accumulation of data for understanding. A discipline hypnotized by measurement, he cautioned, would eventually forget what was worth measuring in the first place.

Today, his fear has been realized. We inhabit a research culture that confuses the proliferation of papers with progress, as though insight could be quantified by the ton. Metrics have become the mission; production has displaced comprehension.

And this is not a parochial academic concern. Flawed studies shape public policy, influence medical practice, and direct billions of dollars in research spending. When volume overwhelms judgment, it is society—not the academy alone—that pays the price.

The problem is not just that many papers are mediocre, flawed, or worthless. It’s that the overwhelming, unmanageable volume makes it impossible to judge properly. No researcher can read more than a small part of the work published in their own field. Peer reviewers become overwhelmed. Literature reviews turn into triage. Citations increase faster than discernment can keep up.

Science has always depended on a collective judgment that is slow, careful, and selective. That judgment is now swamped. And when judgment collapses, error does not merely slip through; it metastasizes, spreading across disciplines that no longer possess the capacity to police their own standards. And when that happens, the damage does not remain in the academic journals; it reaches hospitals, legislatures, classrooms, and courtrooms, ultimately shaping decisions that affect millions. Which is why this crisis, far from being an abstract issue in the universities, ultimately affects us all.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.