I did medical scientific research for 12 years. I have seen how the sausage is made. It's not pretty.

Some scientists are truly rational and careful people, and I greatly respect them. And others are just trying to make quotas and get enough grants, and could care less about the actual science. And in academia, these two types of scientists are mixed all together and there's no mechanism to separate them. A lot of people are just doing research because it's their job and it's what they chose in college, and they're just trying to do the bare minimum to get through the day. These people still publish research.

There is an incredible amount of bad research that has been published. And there's very little incentive or push towards reproducibility. Reproducibility is the core of the scientific method, yet in modern academia is basically treated as an afterthought. There is no funding for reproducing studies. No one really wants to publish a study that merely reproduces another study. So people don't reproduce things. And that's one way modern academic science has divorced itself from the scientific method. Seeing this clearly happening in practice on a regular basis honestly changed my worldview.