That's survivorship bias. Of course the results that have survived a century of scrutiny look better than the average high-profile research published today. But there were also plenty of unremarkable and outright false results back in the "good old days", as well as ideologically motivated garbage such as scientific racism. Or Lysenkoism, which killed millions.
Much agreed with this. There is no area of science nor social science that we don’t understand better today than we did 70 years ago.
For one thing, we understand statistical methods much better. We have a much better sense of what theories only sound good and what theories actually have support in data. Even in psychology, we understand the problems with non-replicating results much better.
The callback to the good old days when only the elite had the privilege of contributing to science rings very off to me.
