I'd like to push back on this sort of gently but in a few ways. 1. Scientists are entirely human. Sometimes I think people expect more from both science and sc

I'd like to push back on this sort of gently but in a few ways. 1. Scientists are entirely human. Sometimes I think people expect more from both science and scientists. In the end, getting knowledge is hard. I have a copy of the Oxford Handbook of Epistemology which I keep on my night stand and every once and awhile it amuses me to read the first few chapters the upshot of which is "Fuck, we don't know how we know anything, really." Science works by having lots of unfruitfrul research programs. I won't say that research programs don't get "pathological" from time to time, in the sense that more energy is invested in them than it should be, but this is often only really discernible in retrospect. Even if a naysayer turns out to be right after a program has been explored, it doesn't mean that the naysayer was justified before the cards were all on the table. 2. Whether we like it or not, the search for truth is a practical matter, involving courting reputation, earning research money, winning war of ideas. This isn't so much new as it is profoundly more democratic than it used to be. Newton was famous for aggressively defending his reputation, to the point of arguably claiming to have invented things that he did not. Now we just have many, many, many more humans involved in science.