Indeed, I did. I joined expecting it to be above mere politics. I paid for my folly.
> People work there, and it will have people's dramas and problems, like everywhere else: fraud, crime, jealousy, simple mistakes, etc.
Yes, but it's far worse in the scientific communities. In the "real world" the average person is way better at doing their average job than the average scientist publishing their work.
Imagine even a civilizationally incompetent modern society today (without naming any names). Now imagine what it would be like if >50% of the time you got into a taxi something far worse than the expected result occurred. You got: taken to the wrong destination; or cheated by the driver; or woke up in a bathtub missing your kidneys; etc. Extend that behavior to even a tiny fraction of the whole. That society would have collapsed already.
Compare that to any journal you please and let's see what percentage of their published works can be verified. Even for the "better" fields their rates are shockingly bad. Some are below 50%.
I don't know about you, but my standards for the behavior of scientists are considerably higher than that for taxi drivers.
> Despite their imperfections, the reason people with power trust their consensus more is because they are a lot more useful than other groups of people.
Hard disagree. The reason people with power "trust" scientific consensus is because they manufacture that consensus by controlling the funding. This is fact. It's not pleasant, and is far from uncontroversial. But it is what it is.
The people with power today who are telling you that <topic X> is "settled science" are the spiritual (and in some cases genetic!) descendants of the people who were telling Columbus that he was going to sail off the edge of the Earth and locking up Galileo. Eppur si muove!
If you want to naively believe that calling one's self a big-s Scientist makes one, if not immune then perhaps we could say resistant, to that fraud, crime, corruption, etc. then I suppose you're entitled to that opinion. I look at the data on their output and my vote is to trash the lot of them and start over. They've fallen that far from grace.
I'm inclined to trust the ancient Greeks, sure. Modern scientists, not so much.
> If you reject this statement, you can start by joining the Amish, since virtually all modern technology is built on top of the scientific community's consensus and work.
Unfortunately the Amish are automatically suspicious of the academically tainted such as myself. Otherwise I'd love to chill with them. Their lives are blissfully stress-free compared to ours.