This is subtly one of my favorite comments in the history of Hacker News, and I've read a lot of good ones. We're at this weird historical moment where we are enjoying the many rewards of Enlightenment philosophy, but we've forgotten almost all of the stuff they wrote about the weaknesses of human nature. Everyone and their brother is throwing mud at the notions of reason and logic thanks to postmodernism, pointing out their hypocrisies and failures, ignoring the fact that that's the default. Of course human beings are contradictory and full of self-interested behavior and reasoning. They knew that in ancient Greece better than we do! The point is that we have demonstrated we can improve on the baseline condition, not that men have suddenly become angels. It's a false standard and enormously damaging.

I'm not sure I would consider the implementation of the methods in today's fields of science to be "without tipping into anarchy", but credit is certainly due to the platonic ideal of the scientific methods themselves.

Science is a very carefully defined field that includes little or no controls on the behavior of its members, as long as the behaviors that are controlled appear to be adhered to. We've ended up with Retraction Watch, collusion between journal editors and paper publishers, and endemic #metoo issues throughout the field. I would never voluntarily enter a science field that depends on publishing papers for advancement today, because by definition these concerns are excluded from our current answers to 'what is required to science?'.

As to the scientific methods they often practice in service of those fields, yes, and it's admirable how well those have persisted. We also have a massive reproducibility crisis across all human psych and social fields, so while the theoretical methods do earn credit for not being "anarchy", their implementations clearly aren't being held to the standards that we're praising here today.

You're describing 'science the method'. GP is describing 'science the community'.

Scientific method (mostly) works and bears fruit at longer timescales (40, 60, 100 years, or longer). In the meantime, over short to medium term, a handful of outcast scientists have to face ridicule, be sidelined, be shunned, be mocked, by pretty much the whole scientific community, a massive circle-jerk that exists for the purpose of citing each-other, giving each other awards, sucking up to, networking, and clinking champagne glasses with the handful of agencies doling out the pitiful amount of funding, most of which goes to waste. More often than not those outcasts can't go any longer and their work either disappears, or is usurped in the form of "You did this? ... I did this."

What makes science great is the scientific method. Far too many people seem to forget it.

Coming up with a hypothesis and then finding some evidence isn’t science any more than alchemy is a form of science. Neither is cherry picking data and then retroactively creating a hypothesis (There was a big scandal surrounding this a few years ago). Even if you are right you need strong evidence of reproducibility for scientific claims to have any credibility. You need extremely strong reproducibility if you expect to make claims that may have implications for the health and safety of others.

Perfectly put.