As any other field, the science is as good as the scientist that produced it. For example, there is a serious reproducibility crisis in multiple fields, like psychology, and social sciences. In the latter it is hard to say of its due to systemic educational failure of the PhD students in those fields, or that the field and personal politics are merging too tightly.
Unfortunately, all it takes is one bad scientist to discredit the rest, e.g., Wakefield.
As for reproducibility, its my opinion that it has more to do with incentives and constraints than the ethics or intellectual capacity of the researcher (although those are real components too)
I don’t think we have a contradiction here. What I am saying is that science is made by people, and we as scientists have to be extremely vigilant today not to let “ends justify the means” crowd to use the name of science for their own agenda.
Yes. I have sociologists in my extended friends group, and we had a couple of heated discussions on why interviewing 20 subjects is not sufficient for the conclusions they have. But, turns out, it’s the norm in their specific field. Go figure