alt Hacker NewsI've said this before in not the same words, and I am always downvoted here on hackernews: people need to understand theory of knowledge before they understand science. Physics and physicists are the worst offenders.
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If by "theory of knowledge", you mean they need to have read a bunch of philosophical musings on epistemology, then I strongly agree with the downvoters, because that's utter nonsense. If you mean anything else by that, then you're being way too vague to contribute to a technical discussion, so again I agree with the downvoters. Try defining what you mean by "theory of knowledge" and explain why you think that's required to "understand science" (and you might want to explain what you mean by that too) and I suspect you'll see a lot fewer downvotes.
Amusingly, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programma - an A-Levels like uni-prep course - has a subject called TOK: Theory of Knowledge with these intentions.
This strongly depends on what you mean by "theory of knowledge".
If you mean the practical importance of self-honesty, and a historical awareness of how easily we slip into self-delusion, then I agree. See, for instance, https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm for a very famous speech on exactly this topic. A lot of Feynman's writing touches on the same issue.
If you mean the musings of philosophers on epistemology, then I emphatically disagree. The philosophers in question generally have failed to demonstrate that they understand science. And when they venture into science, they generally fail to live up to the ideals that they proclaim that scientists should follow. As an example I direct you to the sight of Karl Popper arguing to the end of his days that quantum mechanics cannot be a correct scientific theory. An opinion that began because a probabilistic theory cannot in principle be falsified.
In fact QM is a scientific theory, and it stands as an example falsifying Popper's criterion for science!
I find it very ironic that Feynman is so disliked by philosophers for having been honest about how irrelevant they are to science. And philosophers in turn have failed to recognize Feynman's explanations of how to do science as a key topic that should be included in any proper philosophy of science.