I enjoyed this article, and broadly agree with thesis. I'd also like to highlight the interactive reasoning bit, which has been vital to my development as a scientist and has really emphasised the sociological aspects of science. I've never done better work than when my colleagues were also friends who I could bug with discussion topics and vice versa.

Just a small aside about this para:

>In 2015 the physics journal Physical Review Letters published, for the first time ever in the history of science, a paper with more than 5,000 authors. The findings reported in the article resulted from the combined efforts of two teams working with the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Their goal was to obtain a better estimate of the mass of the Higgs boson that was only discovered a couple of years before.

Authorship in large collaborations means different things depending on the collaboration in question. It certainly doesn't mean that 5000 people wrote the paper, or even that most of them actually read the paper before it was released*. It means that they have contributed to the collaboration(s) and so are acknowledged. It also means that they trust the methods and judgement of their fellow scientists in the collaboration to put out good results, which comes back to building a local morality.

* Extensive documentation, often hundreds of pages of technical material, is accessible for members of the collaboration. The papers are also circulated to the collaboration(s) weeks before release and anyone has the right to ask questions or make suggestions.