[JohnFen]

> One thing the scientific community never got around to accepting themselves and admitting to the public is how much of the learning is trust-based rather than fact-based.

In the years I spent working with research scientists, I observed the exact opposite of this. They were acutely aware of this and it was a common topic of discussion. It's important to them because they need to be as aware of and to call out as many assumptions as possible.

[SuperNinKenDo]

Then perhaps only the latter part is true.

Having spent time in academia myself though, my reading is that while everyone professes an epistemology that accepts its own limits, in practice everybody behaves as though they'd grasped absolute truth through divine revelation.