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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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In short, one of the few really good insights coming out of history & philosophy of science in the last fifty years has been the demise of Essentialism about science, in favour of a view of science as disunified and pluralistic. If you start looking at the history of activities we label as "science", you'll find radically different methods, norms, and distribution of labour being adopted at different times, different disciplines, and different theorists.

Eh. You might have anticipated this objection when you said that "some of you might be tempted to scoff at this", but it is really quite easy to scoff and say that this account of the state of "science" is a postmodernist exercise in pulling wool over the reader's eyes, where I want "postmodernist" to be interpreted somewhat idiosyncratically as encompassing all uses of language that are aimed at extracting value from one's fellow humans rather than from nature. All these fields you list that now engage in "different ways of knowing" appear to me to just become increasingly barren as they deviate from the essentials of the scientific method (or, perhaps, the modernist toolbox of science, which queries our instance of nature for its parameters, mathematics, which derives truths that hold in all instances of nature, and engineering, which gives best practices for leveraging understanding of parameters to achieve a desired outcome). Pharmacology produces a procession of p-hacked drugs that don't work, with the exception of some narrow domains of heavily automated industrial drug discovery that are basically Bayesian in nature; geology has the same cliquish turf wars that you see in history and any other discipline which will never have to contend with a ground truth (pun acknowledged but initially unintended); and my understanding of the state of particle physics or cosmology is that at this point it's basically just a way of burning outrageous amounts of money to generate IFLScience content and the track record of projects such as the LHC shows that nobody is capable of predicting anything better than random guess.

In my eyes, what is happening there is not that science has transcended dogma and reached new heights under the aegis of Philosophers of Science enlightening its practicioners about the validity of radically different methods and norms, but instead that structural incentives and plain incompetence have resulted in a proliferation of bad science practiced by people who are much better at producing eloquent defenses of their wrong methods and norms, with enthusiastic fire support from the "wordcels" studying history and philosophy of science, than at correcting said methods and norms and actually generating new knowledge of reality.