The Church of Scientism
How religious beliefs have taken over the science institutions.
Neither a young Einstein, Bohr nor Feynman would have gotten grants if they had been around today. None of them would have passed a modern grant review or passed any of the requirements set up for getting them.
Modern science institutions are favoring knowledge preservation, ideological, political mandate, and submission over knowledge creation and are more interested in preserving what they know, than learning what they don’t.
We’ve commoditized the entire field of science to better fit it into spreadsheets and are treating science as a factory and scientists as factory workers with timesheets, reporting cards and allegiance to the at any given time politically acceptable views — Everything to be able to say: “See how much science we are doing”
But actual scientific knowledge creation is messy, slow, mostly futile, counterintuitive, and often need to break down strongly held beliefs and facts to get any progress. More importantly actual scientific discovery like all other creative endeavors require an alumni of individuals who’s primary goal is to find new talent.
This is how music labels, baseball, basketball, soccer scouts and even VCs look for talent. Not by forcing them to fill out completely sensless forms made by some bureaucratic committee asking them to predict how their research will affect society, minorities, and the disenfranchised but instead by taking a chance because the individual have shown some promise either in their research or their approach to research without knowing what the consequence of it might be.
Yet today we are so eager to show progress that we just change the definitions of science so they fit our narrative. We pretend that peer-reviews and citations are part of the scientific method. We write about some random non-reproducible experiment/finding as if it’s actual science by disguising it with words like “could”, “might”, “potentially”.
We promote the democratisation of science and science education as long as it’s following the consensus view of the politicians instead of the contrarian and curious view required for scientific discovery. And when someone finally comes up with something novel, something new, something that could benefit the very society who pay for it, it gets patented.
Not to be used but to be added to the balance sheet of the university or instititution. Modern institutions understanding of science have become “scientism” as David Deutsch calls it. It’s become like churches;
The very dogmatic and self-preserving error-sustaining institutions it originally fought against.The search for truth have become the protection of consensus. Instrumentalism, predictability and impericism have become it’s holy trinity, and the leaders of institutions it’s cardinals. Without the ability to critique “the settled science”, society have no way to correct it’s errors and without error correction there can be no progress.