The science system isn't perfect, scientists are just people, and if you start out with an overly naive view of what the science system is like (as I once did!)

The science system isn't perfect, scientists are just people, and if you start out with an overly naive view of what the science system is like (as I once did!) you might get disappointed. Still, you're take is wildly, overly cynical. At the end of the day science is nothing more than systematically looking for explanations that help to make predictions. There is no way that that doesn't converge on something useful, since every explanation that is of any consequence will ultimately be put to the test and it will become entirely obvious whether it is useful or not. And so here we are, computers compute, drugs are effective, airplanes don't fall from the sky. Is there uncertainty at the margins? Sure! But no one who proclaims to know things better than "the scientists" due to some fundamental flaw in "science" as whole has anything to say that would be worth listening to. Because that's not how the world works. Understanding things is not about picking the right team, it's about deeply engaging with the data and formulating logical hypotheses. And once you're doing that, you're now also a scientist. Edit: To add a bit of personal experience to the somewhat theoretical argument above... I've met a lot of good people and a lot of assholes in academia. I've certainly met a lot of people who liked to make their results sound a bit more important than they probably really were. Never once have I met someone who didn't ultimately care about drawing valid conclusions from good data.