Toward Ecosophy

I'm not sure why you want to focus on profit and ideology when my point was that the problems with scientific fraud are much deeper than that. What I'm saying is that even in cases where there is no society wide ideology to support, nor corporate/government profit to be had by finding one thing vs another, we cannot trust the modern system of "scientific" research. If an interested and motivated undergraduate can look at something and say "This doesn't make sense", and upon investigation find evidence of either fraud or specatcular incompetence, and the general response from the academics who study the field is to say "Huh, interesting" and then move on to other things, something has gone horribly wrong.

"Our knowledge is not just finite but imperfect, which means that it contains some falsehoods, whether accidental or deliberate. Rooting out and removing those falsehoods is an important part of improving our knowledge."

Part of this process means identifying when a given source is so untrustworthy as to no longer be worth taking seriously. Given the rampant problems with our current systems of knowledge, and the fact that it does not seem to be self correcting, I'm far from sure it at this point that it is ever reasonable to trust anything that a scientist or any kind of researcher or acadameic says that cannot be personally verified.