Remember when y'all thought Kareem was just being playful and silly with all that 2+2=5 and denying objectivity nonsense and I was just a huge meanie and a jerk?

Watch how he gets into it with a leading mathematician, who he originally seduced to his "playful" manipulations and got to play along with him about his 2+2=5 bullshit. Gowers' take was used widely to discredit my competing claim that 2+2=4.

By returning to animal analogies, Kareem confuses himself again, though in not quite as epic a fashion as chicken math. The reality of methodological rigor and mutual checking through falsification and hypothesis testing is lost in the nonsense.

In conclusion, Kareem falls for the same trick (or, more likely, promulgates it knowing somewhat better). As always, just like with the 2+2=5 debacle where it was always a semantic trick about 2, +, 4 or 5, and/or =, here it is a semantic trick on "social construction."

People who have taken a bit too much social constructivism on start to think, like Kareem, that it's "lucky" that the results of rigorous methods correspond to reality (and thus, yes, that science is rather arbitrary). This is not so. Watch and learn:

The semantic trick Kareem is playing here is an equivocation of degrees, pretending that the mere fact that knowledge is produced and transmitted by processes that involve social interaction means that it is a mere artifact of culture/society and thus encodes its biases.

One of the first and most important principles of science is universality, which indicates that for that which is true, it doesn't matter who or what does the experiment, the result should be the same. This fundamental premise completely undercuts the "social constructivist" view

Scientific knowledge is, by definition as a result of the reliance upon experiment, falsification, and universality, that which must transcend the limitations of culture. Christian, atheist, Muslim, Sikh, man, woman, robot, dog, doesn't matter. The true result is always the same.

Scientific knowledge wouldn't be scientific knowledge (maybe "proto-scientific," but not scientific) if it were culturally dependent. This is a common trick of the social constructivist crowd that likes to claim that "knowledge is socially constructed," including the scientific.

Kareem might try to defend this sophistry by saying that even if all entities agreed upon the methods and rules of science, that would still be the result of a social process, but the whole point of calling something socially constructed is then to put it up against others.

If scientific knowledge really is universal -- the result of the experiment, up to the limitation of needing to describe it within a model (see model-dependent realism), is independent of the identity of the experimenter -- then there would be no other to put it up against.

This would render the claim that scientific knowledge is socially constructed vacuous, which would mean there's no reason to bring it up. That Kareem brings it up, and that he argues that the politics of who gets to participate in what ways are key, means he thinks otherwise.

Kareem clearly thinks that the social constructed nature of knowledge in the vacuous sense implies that we should reconsider the social processes ("interrogate them") by which science is done. This is already constantly happening, though, and is only mentioned when radical.

In most sciences (replication crises in the social sciences kind of notwithstanding), greater methodological rigor and improvement of controls for errors and biases is already a core part of scientific inquiry. No fundamental rethinking is needed. Only radical activists push it.

In less mature sciences, a radical rethinking may be necessary, but not in the regard the social constructivists ever push for. In fact, it's the opposite. Any such change would be to demand more methodological rigor, higher standards of proof, and more checking of results.

Ofc, Gowers seems to detect that something is wrong here and tried to be sensible by saying that there are socially mediated corruptions within the pure scientific process, especially in the softer sciences and least in math, but the equivocation on science is quite sophisticated

Again, I urge everyone to watch this brilliant video about the differences between what social constructivists like Kareem Carr mean by "scientific knowledge is socially constructed" and the banal meaning that bears no relevance to the topic.