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I would like to point out that "scientific truth" does not really exist, or at least is far from straightforward to define and establish. Basically, you should see each piece of research as evidence for a certain hypothesis, and the more evidence is available, the more that hypothesis is believable. But the larger issue here is that all public institutions are, by that definition, broken. For example, businesses also won't hesitate to spread falsehoods to sell their stuff, governments will try to convince their people that they are needed through propaganda and policing, and so on. How do we solve these problems? We have laws to regulate what businesses can't do (nevermind lobbying), and we split governments' responsibility so that no single branch becomes too powerful. In general, we have several independent institutions that keep an eye on each other. In case of science, we trust other scientists to replicate and confirm previous findings. It is a self-correcting mechanism, whereby sloppy or fraudulent research is eventually singled-out, as it happened in this and many other cases. So I guess the gist of what I want to say is that you're right in not trusting a piece of research just because it was made by a reputable institute, but look for solid results that were replicated by independent researchers (and the gold standard here is replication, not peer review) |
They do hesitate. It's quite hard to catch businesses openly lying about their own products because, as you observe, there are so many systems and institutions out there trying to get them. Regulators but also lawyers (class action + ambulance-chasers), politicians, journalists, activists, consumer research people. Also you can criticize companies all day and not get banned from social media.
A good example of what happens when someone forgets this is Elizabeth Holmes. Exposed by a journalist, prosecuted, jailed.
Public institutions are quite well insulated in comparison. Journalists virtually never investigate them, preferring to take their word as gospel. There are few crimes on the book that can jail them regardless of what they say or do, they are often allowed to investigate themselves, criticism is often branded misinformation and then banned, and many people automatically discard any accusation of malfeasance on the assumption that as the institutions claim to be non-profit, corruption is nearly impossible.
> It is a self-correcting mechanism, whereby sloppy or fraudulent research is eventually singled-out, as it happened in this and many other cases.
It's not self correcting sadly, far from it. If it were self-correcting then the Stanford President's fraud would have been exposed by other scientists years ago, it wouldn't be so easy to find examples of it and we wouldn't see editors of famous journals estimate that half or more of their research is bad. In practice cases where there are consequences are the exception rather than the norm, it's usually found by highly patient outsiders and it almost always takes years of effort by them to get anywhere. Even then the default expected outcome is nothing. Bear in mind that there had been many attempts to flag fraud at the MTL labs before and he had simply ignored them without consequence.