Systematic thinking went out of fashion as a badge of membership in the cognitive elite, back in the 1980s, partly because it’s rigid and brittle.
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A few of my pals have this year been trying to stigmatise being a "non model based thinker" whose assumptions can't be easily checked + who is slippery + inconsistent + who doesn't apply relevant insights broadly
Pomo replaced systematic cognition as the badge of high academic achievement, because—done well—it’s more difficult, and it evades the foundational crisis in rationality.
Disastrously, though, it’s useless for problem-solving; its only value is personal advertisement.
Let’s make fluid, meta-systematic thinking the new fashionable IQ signaling device! It's even more difficult than pomo, AND it accurately addresses practical problems!
We can do this. Intellectual fashions are not ordained by God, or random catastrophes.
Perverse institutional incentives, and broad social changes, do play a role...
But so does individual choice, and collective resistance to idiocy. We have agency to make change.
I can't tell whether you think this is good or bad: these traits are what fluid mode looks like to a structural/rationalist person.