Agreed. However, the method has ritualistic elements that can reproduced without following the method itself all that closely. When we use “accepted by a top journal” as a proxy for value, we are substituting social proof for actual value.

I think what you’re referring to is that a lot of traditional ‘hard’ science we are familiar with came out of a period of time when the most important thing was being provably correct (or not) - and it mattered in concrete ways - and so was enforced pretty heavily. Aka ~ early 1900’s to mid cold-war. When hard science and industrialization was a front and center, existential thing for society.

A lot of science (both back then, but especially now) is less hard and is more optimized towards being accepted. Psychology, Anthropology, Geology, Paleontology, many fields of Biology, and many others are all about social proof, since really what else can you use? There are too many lines of judgement that have to be drawn for any of it to make sense in a hard ‘verifiable’ way.

And hard science still requires reproducibility, but a lot of that is getting more niche and harder to verify, rather than more directly verifiable, so it is also falling prey to ‘acceptability’ vs ‘verifiable correctness’.

Going back even further Historically, it was very hard to afford verifiable correctness, so very few people could actually do it. Pretty much either very rich people, or people with rich rich sponsors - which also often required or provided social proof/acceptance.

Religion helps wrap the whole thing up in a way that is marketable, and secrecy protects the ‘trade secrets’ so any sort of professionalism can be supported for further work or development. And because people need to eat.

I’m not so sure it was secrecy or just some not that curious about the complicated subject matter. Much of the group study happend in specific ___location travel and publishing being what they were I expect knowledge scarcity without trying to control the information.

The Guilds were definitely about secrecy.

When were the guilds? How do you know it was secrecy and not some other tiered system of information sharing based on achievements.

[https://www.socialstudies.org/system/files/publications/arti...]

Which are closely related to secret societies like the Freemasons [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry], and the common pattern of secrecy among Alchemists [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1179/amb.1992.39.2.63].

I’m not clear about what you mean with ‘tiered system of information based on achievements’ separate from ‘secrecy’. That pattern was, and still is very common in religious and military institutions that I think anyone would call high on ‘secrecy’.

In broad strokes, how is that different from modern day security classification systems, and/or things like information access based on rank?

One very obvious difference between now and then, IMO, is the massive difference in wealth and population between now and then. That allows specialization and optimization to much greater degrees than possible before.

I meant that the “secrets” were doled out in achievements or the ability to comprehend.

I think the English language is great but complicated cultures are ill served by translation.

Biblical Hebrew commonly has 3 verbs in a sentence to semantically express a thought. The cultural ideas and concepts are hard to express in English.

Any translator needs to understand that aspect. Without that understanding important subtleties could be lost.

All of that is to say the word secret in English has connotations that may not exist in the original idea.

I’m not saying there weren’t societies that held information closely, I’m saying the motivations and details are likely lost.

> Reproduction of papers is an academic issue but your claim is at the very least hyperbolic

What % of population today can actually understand let alone reproduce the papers being published today. And this is not just about practicality of it. Is there a motivation to even reproduce it ?

I am not saying "science is bad". I am saying science has the same fate as religion.

No it doesn't. The fact that most are unable to reproduce it doesn't mean they can't reproduce it. Many do in fact are interested in these sort of experiments and methodologies and do them outside of their profession. All of this is different from the practice of religion. I have no idea how you compare a methodology to a ritual. The methodology comes from easily provable axiomatic facts about statistics and logic. The same cannot be said for rituals.

What does Science do to those in its ranks who challenge Global Warming Dogma? Flat Earth? Alternative medicine?

Tell them to present some evidence or go pound sand? (“You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine.” -Tim Minchin)

Or, you know, destroy and deny existence of evidence that was previously abundant and considered obvious. Or move goalposts on what's considered "evidence" at all. Or manufacture mountains of data and statistics to simply drown out anything else.

It’s easy for me to believe that art and religion have formed into science and engineering.

Why? They're built on completely different principles and methodologies.

We probably disagree that they are built differently. I’m willing to let you believe they are seperate and ask that you let Me hold my ideals. If you want to discuss you would have to state what the differences are. Declaring they are different and expecting me to know why you think that is a real hindrance.

It is not obvious to me.

You're free to hold onto your ideals, but if you're not willing to defend them, maybe don't go out of your way to share them.

I’m happy to defend them. I just don’t know what you think is correct. I understand you believe I’m wrong. I see the linkage as crystal clear evolution of human thought.

You have some other ideal I assume.

I see you as unwilling to defend your ideas.

More importantly, Jupyter Notebooks are becoming a de facto standard which makes repeating calculations using newly gathered data far easier, allowing for a straight-forward reproduction.