[quote=Imperfectionist]These are what I am taking issue with. You see the "scientific community" as a callous and contradictory group (maybe one that manufactures controversy and false beliefs, based on what you said and linked to about global warming), when in fact they are none of those things, nor is there even a single group. There are a vast number of different sciences, each with their own experts and each with their own failings, but I contend that they're all doing the best they can, technology is expanding, and we're on the path towards full understanding of the cosmos
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I have some experience with peer-reviewed academia (majored in political science) -- it's frequently a dirty business. How it ultimately works is that you need to publish in order to land tenure. To publish you need arguments and data; data is frequently solicited and reused from public record or other studies -- the idea being to take data that already exists and use it to generate a job, via a supportable thesis. The gatekeepers are the reputable journals, which are largely comprised of peers (thus 'peer-reviewed') who ultimately are trying to accomplish the same goal of tenure themselves -- using the same practices to obtain and retask data. This is [i]the actual system[/i] that exists, not the ideal we like to imagine.... it's full of conflicting interests and exploitative methodology. The tyranny is the consensus.... you picture a clean room with beakers and lab coats, I picture an angry mob, the actual truth is closer to the middle than either of us would like to believe. [i]It's not what you think it should be.[/i] 

That sounds unfair, doesn't it? And that's sort of my point. It's unfair to talk about what's wrong with our way of doing science. [i]That's a very bad way to approach things.[/i] I want to do away with this implicit reverence we have for the field. Scientists [i]are[/i] people. Just people. Only people. We seem to insist on treating them as something more than that.