For over the past few of decades, the crisis within academia has been defined by its lack of ability to replicate its results. It therefore calls into question its ability to determine truth from falsehood, and therefore its ability to sustain itself...

At the present time, the social sciences and the humanities have borne the brunt of this skepticism. Nonetheless, this is starting to affect the hard sciences as well (known to occur within some fields of medicine and biology. And there is also the infamous NDLH superconductor which was faked for years within physics).

There are three broad outcomes that can occur:

1) Dissolution - It is eventually decided that academia cannot be reformed and/or competing institutions take its place which can more reliably conduct science. Additionally, many fields are eventually discredited, and either end up having to start all over again, or absorbed into other domains where applicable. The period of time in which the Corpernican Revolution and the Scientific Revolution emerged come to mind here, whereby thousands of years of previous inquiry, as well as entire methodologies for accumulating knowledge, was just simply overturned or abandoned. New institutions of knowledge accumulation were founded, with the legitimacy of previous institutions which served that function permanently damaged.

2) Reform - The academy stays intact, but the incentive structures and institutional environment are changed, leading to an outcome where it can much more effectively clamp down on faulty science. There are only modest changes to the way science is conducted, if any changes are deemed necessary, and the replication crisis is resolved before the worst affected domains suffer a catastropic collapse in trust and are thus discredited wholesale. Progress towards reform could be fast or slow. There may or may not be any fundamental changes to the academic profession itself, whether that be new job categories, changes to the PhD or post-doc programs, and so on.

3) Revolution - The academy stays intact, but is irrevocably changed in ways that would make it unrecognizable today. On one end, there is a paradigm shift within the worst affected domains of the kind that was experienced in the first half of the 20th century as described by Thomas Kuhn; epistemic credibility is otherwise is fully retained. On the other end, drastic changes are made to the institutional and incentive structures within the academy, as well as the academic profession itself. This could cover things like changing the way tenure is granted, changing the methodology of scientific practice itself within certain domains, etc.

Either way, let's hear what you all think! The poll does not attempt to predict when any of these things might happen, and so will open until the middle of 2024.