etage3

It also appears to be similar to Jakobson phatic function (checking if the channel is working).

>Please, we can discuss art theory without political dimension.

Bourdieu discusses this very point in the Preface of The Rules of Art.

"(...) countless are those who forbid sociology any profaning contact with the work of art. (...) I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why they are so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational, understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the 'work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence."

A scientific understanding of art doesn't or negate or lower it. On the contrary : "(...) scientific analysis, when it is able to uncover what makes the work of art necessary, that is to say, its informing formula, its generative principle, its raison d'être, also furnishes artistic experience, and the pleasure which accompan­ies it with its best justification, its richest nourishment. Through it, sensible love of the work can fulfill itself in a sort of amor intellectualis rei the assimilation of the object to the subject and the immersion of the subject in the object, the active surrender to the singular necessity of the literary object (which, more often than not, is itself the product of a similar submission)."

It's a short but dense 5 page read.

The excessive detail is a necessity and a precaution. Researchers need that information (textual genetics or any art history for instance, maybe future archeology). A message can't be separated from the form it embodied; you need both to understand how an artwork has been received. Besides, you always want to preserve more information than what is needed today, just in case new ways to exploit data appear later. That's what archeology does when it refuses to exploit some sites and preserves them for later : maybe the current techniques destroy data, so we save some sites for later - just in case.

Speaking for France, but I suspect it is the same elsewhere: back in the day, the license exam was to build your own radio and operate it in front of an inspector, so it might be a remnant of that era. You also need to know this stuff to set up antennas.

Science is faith based for the non-scientific. As you put it yourself, it is about trusting studies and the institutions that produced it (including whatever in them creates the incentives for p-hacking).

Galileo being right or wrong is not really pertinent for PG's argument. See this piece of his text appearing as a html comment: "When you suppress heresy, you silence not just your opponents but also everyone who contradicts you unintentionally. And because ideas are so interconnected, you're almost certainly silencing more people than you realize. "