The topic itself is important, but I thought a few statements were subtle attacks on the scientific community. Perhaps I'm too suspicious. But here are the statements, with my italics emphasizing the key parts:
"In a time when expertise and science are supposedly under attack, some convincing way to make this distinction would seem to be of value."
It seems to me that science and rationality are under heavy attack in this country, and the author is attempting to undermine that view.
"According to the New York Times, the Higgs discovery confirms “a grand view of a universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws—but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry.” Whatever that means—but I’ll come back to the question of meaning later."
I take whatever that means as a dig at those highfalutin egghead scientists and their mouthpiece, the New York Times, who are trying to put something over on us. It's unbecoming of an author who is himself a research scientist.
"But if all this activity is just self-correction in action, then why not call alchemy, astrology, phrenology, eugenics, and scientific socialism science as well, because in their time, each was pursued with sincere conviction by scientists who believed they were advancing reliable knowledge about the world? On what basis should we say that the findings of science at any given time really do bear a useful correspondence to reality? When is it okay to trust what scientists say?"
I see this as more undermining of science.
"What we nonexperts choose to believe about such matters will depend much more on whom we trust and what we find to be helpful than on what can be known to be true."
Don't trust liberal scientists.
As I say, maybe I'm too suspicious, and this author has no agenda.
It's from the Weekly Standard (a conservative opinion magazine). It certainly has an agenda, but that doesn't mean it can't make valid points. And I think it does.
> "According to the New York Times, the Higgs discovery confirms “a grand view of a universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws—but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry.” Whatever that means—but I’ll come back to the question of meaning later."
is mostly quoting the NYT's piece (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/science/cern-physicists-m...). 'Whatever that means', as I read it, is a dig to the second part of the quote, which comes after the 'but'. Now, if you understand what that sentence means, I would like you to help me with it. Or, more precisely, I would like to know how that sentence can be true. If physical laws describe the universe, they should also describe those things which are described as 'interesting', and if these laws are elegant and symmetrical, there should be, in some sense, elegance and symmetry in the description of those 'interesting' phenomena (I'm skipping over the issue of reductionism, but that only makes things more complicated). The suggestion that things like ourselves require 'flaws or breaks' in the symmetry comes from nowhere in the NYT piece. The idea only tangentially comes back at the end, when (without context) a professor is quoted as saying: 'I personally do not want it to be standard model anything — I don’t want it to be simple or symmetric or as predicted. I want us all to have been dealt a complex hand that will send me (and all of us) in a (good) loop for a long time'. I guess this is an expression of the reasonable opinion that the fact that the standard model was vindicated would be the 'boring' case. However, the original claim is a faux pas, if not a non sequitur.
OK, maybe that was a bit longer than I anticipated, so perhaps I should jump into the discussion of the larger picture here.
I think the piece illustrates something interesting about the whole science/anti-science debate. Personally, I think one can read the piece as having no anti-science bias whatsoever, although that requires one to pass over the context of the debate. One can take the writer to be saying: 'OK, so there's this discussion about an attack on expertise, and science, and it seems to matter a great deal. What is science, though? What is, actually, being attacked?' And the point they make is: well, there is no solid (unshakeably true) answer to that question. Perhaps their analysis is too simple (the stuff on ad hoc hypotheses, or about alchemy and the rest, is sloppy), but at the level of the layman that is as far as the discussion ever goes. I think the article captures this quite well. So, for example, that quote
> What we nonexperts choose to believe about such matters will depend much more on whom we trust and what we find to be helpful than on what can be known to be true.
is actually a description of the situation, not a prescriptive judgment about what the nonexperts are entitled to do or believe. It goes both ways for both conservative or liberal nonexperts when evaluating knowledge claims (either scientific or of other kinds). That question, about what should be believed, is philosophical. I'm not sure people appreciate the scope it has, how it is that hasn't yet been fully answered, and why it matters, so I appreciate that pieces like this bring it to the foreground. The point is not to doubt science and jettison it, but to get a better grasp of it. The task of knowledge is like repairing a boat while on it (Neurath). To give up is death.
On the other hand, I see how something like this could be brought to the fore by people who, seeing these questions, jump to the conclusion that science is not to be trusted, and using the veil of the reasonableness of the questions, push forth that as a goal. One often sees the critics of reason to deploy the language of reason to undermine it. There's no easy solution for that. Again, I don't think that is the goal of this article.
"In a time when expertise and science are supposedly under attack, some convincing way to make this distinction would seem to be of value."
It seems to me that science and rationality are under heavy attack in this country, and the author is attempting to undermine that view.
"According to the New York Times, the Higgs discovery confirms “a grand view of a universe described by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws—but one in which everything interesting, like ourselves, results from flaws or breaks in that symmetry.” Whatever that means—but I’ll come back to the question of meaning later."
I take whatever that means as a dig at those highfalutin egghead scientists and their mouthpiece, the New York Times, who are trying to put something over on us. It's unbecoming of an author who is himself a research scientist.
"But if all this activity is just self-correction in action, then why not call alchemy, astrology, phrenology, eugenics, and scientific socialism science as well, because in their time, each was pursued with sincere conviction by scientists who believed they were advancing reliable knowledge about the world? On what basis should we say that the findings of science at any given time really do bear a useful correspondence to reality? When is it okay to trust what scientists say?"
I see this as more undermining of science.
"What we nonexperts choose to believe about such matters will depend much more on whom we trust and what we find to be helpful than on what can be known to be true."
Don't trust liberal scientists.
As I say, maybe I'm too suspicious, and this author has no agenda.