I voted the post down for, in a nutshell, flamebait.
The post starts off with observations about the CRU emails, but makes little use of these observations. The CRU-related reasoning appears to be the following: “Hanson dismisses the CRU leaked emails as not a big deal, supporting the hypothesis that economists are less interested in searching for reliable knowledge than in protecting their turf and signaling senority”. This is a) peripheral to the central claims of the post, b) using anecdotal evidence about anecdotal evidence in support of a strong overarching claim about science in general.
(Mark Twain once noted: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome return of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” This post gets a nice return of speculation out of a small investment of anecdote.)
The central claims are interesting, if caricatural, i.e. that “there hasn’t been any fundamental breakthroughs in the last fifty years” and this “has to do with the effective takeover of science by academics and government—that is by the signaling and control view”.
There would be value in a post that tried to build an actual argument in support of these theses, and such a post would require no reference to (commentary on commentary on) current events which are likely to be soon forgotten anyway.
What sociologists of science are actually saying about science is much more subtle and interesting than caricatures of “idealistic vs signaling”. The two “views” of science are not mutually exclusive, and it’s not a matter of one view being the Good Guys’ view and the other being the Bad Guys’ view.
I mentioned them because they are current, and because it was thinking about them that got me considering the problem again. Not “flamebait” just the most current application of the problem I am addressing. A decade ago I might have used Plasma Cosmology (http://www.plasmacosmology.net/), since I had then recently read Lerner’s “The Big Bang Never Happened” (http://bigbangneverhappened.org/ ).
I voted the post down for, in a nutshell, flamebait.
The post starts off with observations about the CRU emails, but makes little use of these observations. The CRU-related reasoning appears to be the following: “Hanson dismisses the CRU leaked emails as not a big deal, supporting the hypothesis that economists are less interested in searching for reliable knowledge than in protecting their turf and signaling senority”. This is a) peripheral to the central claims of the post, b) using anecdotal evidence about anecdotal evidence in support of a strong overarching claim about science in general.
(Mark Twain once noted: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome return of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” This post gets a nice return of speculation out of a small investment of anecdote.)
The central claims are interesting, if caricatural, i.e. that “there hasn’t been any fundamental breakthroughs in the last fifty years” and this “has to do with the effective takeover of science by academics and government—that is by the signaling and control view”.
There would be value in a post that tried to build an actual argument in support of these theses, and such a post would require no reference to (commentary on commentary on) current events which are likely to be soon forgotten anyway.
What sociologists of science are actually saying about science is much more subtle and interesting than caricatures of “idealistic vs signaling”. The two “views” of science are not mutually exclusive, and it’s not a matter of one view being the Good Guys’ view and the other being the Bad Guys’ view.
I mentioned them because they are current, and because it was thinking about them that got me considering the problem again. Not “flamebait” just the most current application of the problem I am addressing. A decade ago I might have used Plasma Cosmology (http://www.plasmacosmology.net/), since I had then recently read Lerner’s “The Big Bang Never Happened” (http://bigbangneverhappened.org/ ).