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I think this was one of the best posts to come from Scott since his switch to ACX. I think he lays out the situation clearly and fairly, and makes a good case for why priesthoods have unique pitfalls, but are still better than not having them. I think his hypothesis about why wokeness infiltrated every priesthood is interesting, but only one of many many potential angles to be considered. I want to hear what the Motte has to say about all of this.
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Notes -
To bad nobody else has answered; I don't really have the time to write anything about it, but some things have to be said, so I will.
Scott is right that a) Priesthoods are a naturally arising organising principle among humans and b) Science has been a priesthood for a while before wokeness became a large issue. And it's somewhat reasonable to conclude that therefore, maybe nothing was wrong with science being a priesthood before wokeness, which means maybe there also is nothing wrong with science being a priesthood nowadays in itself.
There is, however, some objections that should automatically come to mind here (and which imo old Scott would have noted):
First, his definition of priesthood makes little sense considering real priesthoods that have existed. Those mostly fulfilled criteria like the following: a) credentialism separating the priests from the masses b) a strong preoccupation with (personal) purity according to some internal set of moral norms. And given the central importance of religion to past societies, these moral norms were usually religious in nature. Hence, priests. But sovjet-style political commissars are fundamentally the same. It has little to do with "smart people only"; Many priesthoods didn't optimize for smartness much and had no problem with having clearly stupid people between their ranks, as long as the moral criteria were fulfilled. Instead, it is about being a coordinated group that can give benefits to insiders, control the public and punish competition. Priesthoods are clearly optimized for wielding and extending political power for a certain class of elite people. Finding truth has nothing to do with it. At the most charitable, they are about keeping peace and order in society.
Then further, we can ask:
Are there contemporary examples of sciences that don't work like priesthoods?
Are there past times during which science overall wasn't like a priesthood?
So for the first question, (theoretical) math immediately comes to mind for me. When reading up on theoretical math news , I regularly encounter solutions to problems that have stumped mathematicians, sometimes for centuries, which only were solved with the help of laymen. How does math do this? Pretty simple, actually; It uses its own specific language that generally has high requirements on your intelligence to learn, and which intrinsically serves as a barrier against low-effort swipes. Even just shortly talking with someone makes it quite obvious whether they know what they are talking about. Credentialised science obviously is the fastest way to acquire this understanding, but certainly not the only. There is often little interest in who you are, whether in terms of credentials or moral considerations, as long as you can contribute.
I'll certainly not be able to give a comprehensive overview, but just a few examples of science as practiced in the past; Let's start with the greeks, since they are the oldest with quality records (it's correct that the ancient near east scientific tradition probably predated the greeks, but the records are terrible, like a single tablet with some pythagorean triplets which may indicate knowledge of the pythagorean theorem, but also may just have been derived by brute force, we just don't know).
Greek science was mostly disorganized, some doing it as an extension to their actual craft with which they earned money, some priests, some just considering themselves "natural philosophers" with no clear occupation (first NEETs?). There were specific schools which sometimes could veer of into cultish, priesthood-like behaviour patterns internally, but science as a whole was always a mix of multiple competing schools with different interpretations of basic reality as well as many unaffiliated yet respected philosophers. Arguably the most influential philosopher, Socrates, was forced to to kill himself for his perceived clash with prevailing religious/moral sentiments. Yet, as a philosopher this did not diminish his standing in the slightest. And the greek scientific tradition is still considered one of the greatest, often explicitly labeled as the origin.
Islamic science in the middle ages explicitly saw themselves as inheritors of the greek tradition of science, and the way scientist were generally judged primarily by their results as opposed to their person and character is often considered one of the primary reasons why they advanced faster than the west at the same time; Mind you, I'm not claiming that they had no moral/religious requirements - Islam can be quite strict-, just that having less than the western monastery-dominated scientific tradition of the middle ages gave them a distinct advantage.
Which leads us to science in the late european middle age and the resulting renaissance. As mentioned, european science in the earlier middle ages was almost entirely done by monks in monasteries with all the resulting moral/religious blocks. Starting around the beginning of last millenia, partially caused by more excess resources, partially influenced by the success (and threat!) of islamic science, there was a clear progression from the very priesthood-like early monastery tradition, to the religious universities with obvious carve outs such as protections from certain wordly punishments and "ex cathedra/hypothesis" opinions allowing inquiry into moderate taboo topics. Together with the religious upheavals of the 16th century this progressed further into the Renaissance, which outright identified itself by its allowance to question everything.
Incidentally, this is usually considered the time of greatest scientific progress. Similar to contemporary math, while credentialed university-educated scholars certainly dominated science, laymen, whether self- or otherwise privately educated, were tolerated as long as they were capable of speaking a certain language and bringing results. The early british royal society included multiple members who had little meaningful credentials despite universities having existed for quite a long time at that time. It was more-or-less founded by Robert Boyle, who had the equivalent of a modern high school education in terms of credentials but who was privately taught and ran his own laboratory with his families' money. Only after having established an informal "invisible college", he later simply rented space near Oxford University to run a better lab, profiting from Oxford's University but AFAIK never officially being affiliated with it directly, yet his contemporary and later academics respected him; Make a guess, how would current universities, journals and the general educated class talk about & treat a rich kid with a high school education running his own lab?
So to summarize everything and give my own thoughts on the matter: Priesthoods are an okay institution to generate some scientific output. It has happened multiple times in the past, especially during difficult times when people are unwilling to spend money on long-term endeavours such as science intrinsically is (but they still might be willing to spend for "a good cause"). Early middle ages are a good example here. Knowledge is power, therefore priests want to extend some of it as long as it does not call into question their grip on power.
But science as its own optimized institution, capital-S Science, doesn't really mesh all that well with it. Scientific output is reliably highest when scientists are individualistic and willing to question everything, when there is no single, easily captured institution, when they are judged by output, not character (and the output itself is also not judged by how well it fits in with prevailing sentiments) and especially when it gets regularly checked against a hard reality that is difficult to socially engineer. Scott cites his Bauhaus review on the norms of scientists, but the people involved in these discussions clearly had no scientific objections whatsoever, just read it again, they didn't even claim to; it was all strictly moral considerations. At best, they aped, in the cargo-cult fashion Feynman described, some superficial properties of science.
So imo he misidentifies multiple negative priesthood-like tendencies as sensible "bulwarks". The best scientist, from whatever age, era or field were almost always occupied to degree of obsession with answering some question or attaining some knowledge. They didn't care much for giving the impression of separation from the public. They didn't care for separation from capital, often they worked with it for their own advantage. They have no tendency towards intra-social-class political games and purity spirals, often even having a distinctly amoral streak (or strong personal moral convictions that don't fit well into any particular class of people). They often have a surprising overlap with the stereotype of the eccentric, obsessed, overworked but extraordinarily smart start-up founder.
These bulwarks are instead very good markers of a priesthood that successfully managed to subjugate the institution of Science again after it has temporarily managed to wrestle itself free, while doing what it always has done. Since this process was continuous & slow, and since even priesthoods want knowledge being generated, universities have still been working somewhat well for a long time even after being taken over, just like they have worked somewhat well every time priesthoods ran science. But good science is something else.
Of course, one sneaky objection here is that, if priesthoods are optimized for power, they will always win any conflict against a non-priesthood eventually. Therefore, Scott is engaging in the long-term correct course of actions: Molding a new priesthood that is maximally optimized for science while still retaining the critical traits necessary to stay in power. I don't really disagree with this view, but it's not really a objection on content, rather on pragmatism.
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