[2] Moldbug’s "What’s wrong with CS research" is a witty and essentially accurate overview of this situation. He mostly limits himself to the discussion of programming language research, but a similar scenario can be seen in some other related fields too.

With the slight problem that Moldbug appears to be writing as a Systems Weenie, and being someone with cursory training on multiple sides of this issue (PL/Formal Verification and systems), I don't think his assessment there is accurate.

When assessing an academic field, you should include a kind of null hypothesis: "Academia is investigating interesting problems, but I'm a weenie who doesn't take a complete or unbiased look at the state of academia." This is often true.

Further example: a couple weeks ago I emailed Daniel Dewey about his Value Learners paper. I also read the ensuing LessWrong discussion. It turned out that the fundamental idea behind value learners was published in academia as a PhD thesis in ~2003, and someone linked it.

So why didn't we all know about this? Because we were weenies who didn't look at the academic consensus before diving in ourselves.