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.
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.
