Good scientists have a well tuned sense of how much to doubt and believe various ideas. Some things can be determined to be true to high confidence and are most

Good scientists have a well tuned sense of how much to doubt and believe various ideas. Some things can be determined to be true to high confidence and are most certainly true. Physicists try to get five or six sigma. For the LIGO black hole merger detection you get a statement like, "The signal was observed with a matched-filter signal-to-noise ratio of 24 and a false alarm rate estimated to be less than 1 event per 203 000 years, equivalent to a significance greater than 5.1σ." And then the physicists fight/debate over how good this estimate of uncertainty is. Technology is created based on using facts discovered by physicists - layer, upon layer, upon layer of very precise and constant use of fundamental ideas of physics. If unexpected things keep happening, it gets investigated and sometimes "new physics" is discovered. On the other extreme (of what some call science) there is the social sciences and psychology. A study with a p=0.05 (95%) claim to being true. Lots of problems with p-hacking and replication. Scientific experiments are either unethical or impossible. Here is a cute cartoon about the spectrum (https://www.xkcd.com/435/ https://www.xkcd.com/435/), although I would title it, "Fields arranged by certainty of truth". I work in geology research where the certainty of truth of the ideas/theories we promote vary across the whole range. This can be quite fun, but one needs a very well developed sense of how true the ideas you hold are to make progress. The subtleties on the probability of an idea being true and over which domain it applies to is why people consult "experts". Hard to choose an expert when you are not an expert.