“However you cut it, what we’re talking about when we say “science” just isn’t close to the thing it was seventy years ago.”
A priori, I think it’s completely plausible that many of the changes we’ve made have not been for the best. Most systems get worse in at least certain ways as they scale. The idea that science could have gotten worse in significant ways sometimes sounds strange to people — like, we’re doing so much more, how could that be bad? — but I think that misses the many examples of sensitivity of scientific processes to institutions and culture. Swiss nationals have won more than ten times more science Nobels per capita than Italians have. Ten times! And yet they’re neighbors, and Italy certainly isn’t lacking in scientific tradition — Fermi, Galileo, the oldest university in Europe, etc. The “how” of science just really matters. At the micro level, when you look at the careers of individual scientists, the same thing is often striking — if Born hadn’t recommended that Rockefeller give Delbrück a fellowship, he might well have dropped out of science… his track record up to that point wasn’t very impressive. But if he had, how far would that have set molecular biology back? So, given that science has changed a lot, we should push ourselves to really understand the effects of those changes, and we shouldn’t assume too casually that they’re all good.
