Ive read yhe whole article but I can't make heads or tails of what it is arguing (for lack of a better word). The article connects a lot of disparate facts abou

Ive read yhe whole article but I can't make heads or tails of what it is arguing (for lack of a better word). The article connects a lot of disparate facts about science as an industry (academia/grants, journals, etc) to how specific theories evolved to speculation about the nature of the scientific method without ever connecting how those are related or even placing them in the right chronological frame of reference. Renaissance "science" != 18th-19th century "science" != first half of 20th century "science" != post WWII modern "science" and I say "science" in scare quotes because the article entirely fails to separate the scientific mindset, which has arguably been in play from the beginning of human civilization as a logical extension of the natural selection of ideas, from the infrastructure meant to support science as a field, from funding to publication. The latter has changed drastically at least once a century since the Renaissance and you can't understand the former without knowing what that change looked like. 》One way or another, science really happens. The claim that basic research is valuable because it leads to applied technology may be true but perhaps is not at the heart of the social use of the enterprise. The way scientists do think makes us aware of how we can think. Samuel Johnson said that a performer riding on three horses may not accomplish anything, but he increases our respect for the faculties of man. The scientists who show that nature rides three horses at once—or even two horses, on opposite sides of the universe—also widen our respect for what we are capable of imagining, and it is this action, at its own spooky distance, that really entangles our minds. What in the world does this even mean? Science is revered as much as it is today simply because it has proven over and over again that it is the only field and/or industry and/or intellectual pursuit that is capable of producing truth that is independent of race, religion, or socioeconomic status. THAT is the true utility of science: demonstrating that there is a frame of reference that the vast majority of human beings can participate in and get the exact same results as anyone else. Riding three horses at once is pointless but providing a common language for the epistemology of human civilization isnt just for the warm fuzzies. I think I have very much misunderstood the author and am butchering his argument for the sake of a straw man, but I can't help but feel that every other paragraph has yet another assertion that is too vague to be wrong but too specific to be right, all without a central premise other than "science works" and "fallible humans do science so science is fallible."