Overall a very interesting article. Still this line made me chuckle:
"And it would disastrous if erroneous results were to have a major impact on public policy."
This is probably one of the most routine occurrences in creating public policy. Maybe only superseded by misunderstanding scientific results (erroneous or not).
I was thinking of things like the Y2K debacle (not really scientists who made the call there, of course). Or imagine the global cooling scare in the 1970s had had a major impact on public policy.
Interesting idea, but I don't think the problem he posits is new. Everything is done along a chain of trust. Even current researchers don't reproduce every experiment that led up to their current body of knowledge. No one has ever understood the entire chain of reasoning.
More to the point, mistaken ideas have always infected lots of people, this was the impetus for science in the first place. This will resolve itself in the usual way- people rely on the results, the results turn out to be wrong, and we search for more answers.
I wonder how long until the trust chain is automated? As long as the results proceed along the lines of logical deduction and statistics, it can be machine understandable.
"And it would disastrous if erroneous results were to have a major impact on public policy."
This is probably one of the most routine occurrences in creating public policy. Maybe only superseded by misunderstanding scientific results (erroneous or not).