Sorry, there, but "objectivity" is not up for debate. Unless you subscribe to the woo-woo "different ways of knowing" crap.
The scientific method is not up for debate.
> To do ideological science is simply to run an experiment on the scientific method itself, it's what Feyerabend called 'epistemic anarchism' which he identified as the only thing that avoids limiting the potential of science.
"the potential of science": Berkeley nonsense. It's too bad he didn't just stick with Popper, who'll be around long after he's forgotten.
It really obviously is up for debate, all the way from the fundamental question of whether objective knowledge is accessible at all, to things like the measurement problem in quantum mechanics
"obviously" to you, I guess. Not to anyone else who realizes that life expectancy beyond 30 and absence of periodic famines with mass starvation is the result of objectivity.
> whether objective knowledge is accessible at all
How to make steel, plumb our houses, cure our bacterial infections, and bring A/C power to them is not knowledge that's "accessible to all." Most of us are happy that someone somewhere knows how to do those things. That's called "division of labor."
> whether objective knowledge is accessible at all
Kind of like the missing link in the fossil record which causes creationists to say "Look! Darwin was wrong!": quantum mechanics is the difficult-to-understand problem giving an easy out to people who don't believe in science anyway. Give it a rest.
"At all" is equally fatuous, though. The philosophical problem of whether objective knowledge is attainable was settled centuries ago. "How do you really know that Einstein's Relativity is valid?" is something that was settled when its predictions were borne out. If there are still questions about it, those will be settled by more science.
Not chaining the scientific process to objectivity might improve the evolution of scientific processes, but it won’t really bring the world any good as of now. Objectivity, as nebulous as it can be sometimes, is reliable enough at aligning what we think the world is and what it actually is. Plus, having competitive methodologies would just create silos of scientists all working on their own “science is X” methods, with nothing binding them all together. And how would you get someone who believes ‘science should be X’ to listen to someone who believes ‘science should be Y’?
Maybe if we’re on a new planet, an ‘epistemic anarchy’ is worth trying, but not on Earth, where the objectivity train is full speed ahead on an Ouroboros track.
I'd rather take up the second point, namely that the author almost takes it as a given that politicized science is bad. He puts forward this idea that science ought to be bureaucratic, ideally all scientists ought to be disinterested, universalist, apolitical monks who try to improve reproducibility, and so on.
To chain science to objectivity or to any kind of formulaic process may help everyone to agree on results, but it impedes the evolution of the scientific process (or better, processes) itself. There's nothing wrong with methods that in different places drift into different directions, because overall this makes for a more competitive field of methodologies. in fact something even as stupid as Lysenkoism serves a purpose, it's in itself part of the scientific map of ideas that need to be discovered before they could be disregarded.
So if you want to do insular corporate science, and someone wants to do militaristic science, and someone else wants to do cooperative 'objective science', all of this is valid and in fact useful, not despite, but because it creates conflict. To do ideological science is simply to run an experiment on the scientific method itself, it's what Feyerabend called 'epistemic anarchism' which he identified as the only thing that avoids limiting the potential of science.