This is worse than religion because it’s pretending to be rational. And many many people will be fooled.
At least you can spot the acolytes with "I believe in Science" bumper stickers and yard signs. Science is not a belief system.
We are romans in the early 5th century. What’s coming won’t be pretty.
It's too powerful of a manipulation and control tool for the elites to just give up on. If we can just replace "god says" with "science says" and have the same result of getting the sheep in line, then of course it will happen.
By being a "believer" in science as you've laid it out, you aren't believing in science as a process, but science as an institution.
One problem with that. Some sciences, particularly soft or social sciences cross broadly into culture and "ways of life". There are certain things today that cannot be questioned without getting shouted down or deplatformed. So challenging the current widely held scientific facts can be career ending.
Actual science will accept when it's been proven wrong. Much of we have these days isn't that. And that includes many folks working in what would be considered the hard sciences.
In other senses, "beliefs" are an identity, and some people like to think theirs are more based on science than others. "Believing" in science amounts to adhering to a broad package of ethical and lifestyle choices that references science to various degrees, their followers believe this gives them more legitimacy than other lifesyles or ethics systems, but the actual degree to which they are justified by science varies enormously.
To take 2 extremes :
(1) Taking a stance against fossil fuel is "believing in science" because (good, credible) science says those increase carbon footprint which in turn disrupts the climate in a huge variety of ways, technically this doesn't necessarily imply to oppose fossil fuel as science doesn't have normative component (science doesn't care - in the strictest sense - if human civilization is destroyed or signficantly harmed), but with only an additional few, normally agreed-upon, assumptions you can get there.
(2) Taking a stance against biological-women-exclusive sports is "believing in science" according to the stance followers because a few studies of shaky foundations and questionable funding says there is no unfair advantage to those who had male puberty, although there are tons of other studies that disagree.
Those who say (loudly) they "believe in science" are usually using "believe" in the non-philosophical sense, and the viewpoints they love to push most are usually (2)-like rather than (1)-like.
When you evaluate the truth of the whole argument, you'll find that it's not a "Justified True Belief" because the truth does not flow through the justified prepositions.
In my opinion, the only rigorous way to improve our knowledge, is to employ Bayes Theorem, and Bayesian thinking in general.
You and I may have different prior on a topic. We may see the same evidence, but end up believing different things because of the prior. As long as we state the prior, that is good and fair. If the evidence contradicts my prior, I should lower the confidence I have in my belief, even if the prior was big enough that I still believe the same thing.
Unfortunately, what often happens, is that people lock themselves into believing things absolutely. If you lock some prior probability to 1, Bayes' Theorem has n way to let you update that belief.
This is especially common when it comes to beliefs related to religion and identity. In fact, this is one way to define religious belief. Anything you believe that you will NOT stop believing regardless of evidence, could be defined as religious.
If you believe in God, and we discover that Heaven is not on the other side of the starts, the believer just modifies non-core parts, and claims that "God is everywhere and nowhere".
If belief in racist oppression is what defines you, and you find that most individuals are not individually racist anymore, you can just introduce "Structural Racism" that claims that hard work, staying married and maths are racist.
The question is how do you define bad results if you include provisions for socially constructed feelings about whether results are socially and politically correct or not.
I hope hope hope hope hope underneath all the crummy filler language and what appears to be rationalization for a distinctly unscientific expansion of editorial discretion to suppress unsightly factual results, Nature is simply saying: don't study social constructs, it's not scientific, a phrase with which I think I loosely agree (without deeper thought as to whether there are valid situations to study socially constructed groups that can't be better expressed by studying the non-social-construct characteristic).
If that's all this is, I think we'll be fine. But I have a real hard time believing that Nature would allow a paper that found there to be cognitive discrepancies between people with genealogical lineages that closely align to the socially constructed races, under these new guidelines, since arguably the "effects on society" might be negative.
And I know people who would ignore the science and fight to the metaphorical death to suppress that type of information regardless of the terminology used. So, understandably, I'm not super confident this will be handled carefully and appropriately. Notice there is no burden of proof or scientific rigor required to determine that the effects some some research are negatively impacting society. A presumption that they might is all that's needed. I worry scientific pursuit will suffer.
A lot of the time, when someone in the Humanities use the term "Social Construct" they mean a categorization scheme that have overlapping categories, especially when used by someone in a way they don't like.
Someone with some level of understanding of natural science knows that this problem apply applies to a multitude of category schemes, if not most. In biology, one could argue that our definition of a "species" is a social construct. Even alive today, there are plenty of animals that exist on a continuum between different "species", and over evolutionary time, every living organism exists on this same continuum, and at the start, there were even no clear distinction between living and non-living.
The person in the Humanities like to use the word "essentialism", while still giving Humans special knowledge, when in reality we all live on a continuum that includes monkeys, fish, rocks and oceans. We're all recombinations of atoms and ions.
Still, there ARE clear and real patterns in this madness, and most of science is precisely about understanding these patterns. While we DO exist on a continuum, most of the continuum is empty, and especially if we consider only one snapshot of time.
A biologist can talk about "tigers" without making an effort to consider ligers and tigons, or pre-historic ancestors of modern-day tigers that were similar but not identical to modern tigers.
Biologists will also use the terms male and female tigers, knowing that the intermediaries are vanishingly rare. The continuum between them is there, but mostly empty.
Or a physicist may even speak about a "red" laser, knowing perfectly well that the wavelength used to separate "red" from "orange" is a "human construct".
So, if someone claims that "biological sex" is a human construct, they may be correct in some uninteresting way, but are primarily just obfuscating.
I hate to make the comparison because it's such a trope, but, IMO this is one of the most insidious things the Nazis did to indoctrinate the population:
They did things like send people into schools and they would cherry-pick the weakest, least intelligent, least-liked Jewish kid they could find and set him alongside the most athletic, attractive, smart, well-liked Aryan looking kid.
They'd bring them both up in front of the class and from that point on, they'd use "scientific" discussion and observation of their qualities to convince the kids that the Aryan kids were superior in every way. I'll tell you what, I was a pretty savy independent thinker and empathetic kid, but I really think I might have fallen for that type of technique, masquerading as science.
Moreover, I've spent the last 2+ years horrified by how willing "scientists" have been to generalize to wild real-world conclusions from miniscule data based on Twitter outrage, so I have zero faith that a board of clerics is going to use these rules with magnanimity. Whichever political faction that controls the board will be tempted to define "inappropriate" to mean "whatever conclusion we don't like".
Just to make it concrete: run an RCT that shows that masks don't have any effect on Covid transmission? Good luck getting that published in a top journal, even today. With these new rules, literally anyone who doesn't like the conclusions will claim that the result is an "overgeneralization". There will be no study large enough to satisfy the clerisy...unless The Science says something approved, of course.
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Edit: and lest you think I am exaggerating with my example, consider the following, directly quoted from the new guidelines:
> Harms can also arise indirectly, as a result of the publication of a research project or a piece of scholarly communication – for instance, stigmatization of a vulnerable human group or potential use of the results of research for unintended purposes (e.g., public policies that undermine human rights or misuse of information to threaten public health).
They're literally saying that they're open to censoring research that might be "misused" to "threaten public health". And they've defined it broadly enough that pretty much anything that displeases "a vulnerable human group" can be covered. Convenient.