Comment by ajross

It certainly wasn't in "silos", it's all on arxiv!

But yes: the world is complicated and it's easy to make mistakes outside your core field. The point of the scientific process is to get things in front of eyeballs who can spot the mistakes, c.f. the linked blog post. Then everyone fights about it or points and laughs or whatever, and the world moves on. The system worked.

What the process is not good at is filtering new ideas before people turn them into news headlines. And sure, that sucks. But it's not a problem with "academia failing", at all. The eyeballs worked!