This one can be quite complicated, but I wonder how much of it is actually related to the quote that goes something like “science progresses one death at a time

This one can be quite complicated, but I wonder how much of it is actually related to the quote that goes something like “science progresses one death at a time”. Which is talking about a bigger problem in science, which is that tenured scientists have either too much invested in their careers or too much vested in their models to allow the spread of upstart scientists’ ideas. There’s often a generational aspect (though don’t confuse this with age, since someone new to a field at 70 would be a younger generation) where newer scientists pick up on some thing that older scientists ignored and they start spreading it’s importance, then 20 years later, once the last of the old guard leave the field, it’s no longer downplayed and science can ‘advance’ (there is some risk that said thing wasn’t actually important, but for hard sciences data tends to trump all else). So then the question to your question becomes more, are these contrarians representative of some new wave? As a trained economist, I’ve been trained to be skeptical of entrenched establishments, usually people will fail to believe that which threatens their paychecks. So the other question is, are there big incentives to encourage the established field to continue believing what it believes? I will say there are a lot of crackpots out there, and novices tend to be wrong a lot, so the way science is currently done isn’t such a bad thing. But it would be wise to at least listen occasionally to cross discipline contrarians. They will often bring up arguments that are strong from their primary field, without being weighed down with baggage from the other field. You get an occasional Eli Whitney, or if you’re really lucky a John Nash. One last thought. Hard sciences are hard for a reason, reality keeps them in check. And experiments allow for falsifiable hypotheses. There are a lot of sciences that rely primarily on observation, with little to no experimentation. This makes falsifiability tricky. This also means you’re going to see more general dissent associated with these fields (and if you don’t see it within the field that might be a red flag).