[ylem]

While this seems to give the impression that science is not functioning, I don't see this as the case. I will give an example from my field. Before Covid struck, I was at a conference in Japan. There was a talk about an interesting superconductor. Someone repeated some of the earlier measurements and determined that they were misinterpreted--that the measurement technique led to heating the material and thus the misinterpretation of the results and that the material wasn't so interesting after all. I think this was say 15-20 years after the original measurement. During the Q&A session, someone asked the original author what he thought. He stood up and said that the new measurement was correct. To me, that says science is working--it may work slowly, but over time, it does correct. Sure, there are people that take a long time convince (and sometimes they are never convinced), but science itself eventually corrects--but the challenge of new measurements that contradict the current consensus is that it's not that each one is correct--some are just measurement errors. For example, there was the case of a recent experiment that seemed to show faster than light travel of neutrinos. The authors presented it with the idea that there was a glitch somewhere that they couldn't find. After a flurry of papers (some with exotic new theories), they eventually were able to find the electronics glitch. It would have been exciting if they were correct--but they weren't--and science again worked.

[antonvs]

Agreed (10 days late, but still.)

These kinds of issues are issues with how human societies function. Scientific methods can't eliminate that, but they can help manage it. In fact that's largely the point.