Reflect on this: there are at least 200 factual errors on the front page comment sections of Hacker News. Do you nod along while you read it being entertained, or do you pinpoint the errors?
I'm not even talking about nigling details. I saw one comment about relativity with a huge scientific howler right in the middle of it. And people upvoted it sky high.
The people who upvoted it were being passive. The users of this site receive a passive experience and generally speaking are too childish to handle asserting their own mind. Even comments are largely passive. People don't even reflect on the subject-verb agreement of the sentences that they write. They are so childish that asserting themselves by the tiniest amount on their writing is not trivial nor has it reached the point of automaticity.
How does science work? It's largely like reading Hacker News. Scientists download research papers, understand them, and test them... and occasionally come up with new directions and ways (equiv 2 commenting on the newslink).
None of that are assertive. When an assertive person presents himself on a subject, he causes a PARADIGM SHIFT. He doesn't go along with the presuppositions: he creates his own presuppositions. This is Thomas Kuhn's "groundbreaking" thesis on scientific progress: some people internalize other people's presuppositions until they are fossilized in their brains resulting in them kicking and screaming on their death bed when it's time to admit it was a bad idea... or some people are like creative genius Thomas Hobbes who said he didn't bother reading all the failures before him because he was too busy thinking his own presuppositions.