[Meta: Sigh, I have indeed become that "grumpy old man".]
I don't know. Assuming you went through the normal college course straight out of high school I'm ~12 years younger than you but I've been coming around to the same conclusions. Personally I think between the internet and some other things it's just that we're getting the data now that says that we need to tune our trust of science down a bit. I still think it's the best way of learning there is, it just isn't as powerful in practice as we'd like.
I remember thinking in the 1990s that as I read about the history of various sciences, the only fields where the dominant consensus didn't spend long periods of time being dead wrong were fields too young to have a dominant consensus. (Perhaps not in those words at the time, but along those lines.) I recall seeing the casual assumption that all that stuff was in the past, and wondered what major sciences were actively wrong. It turns out that in fact they weren't all exactly right and indeed I think that some entire major fields were wrong at the time.
(Bringing up the interesting question of who is wrong today? Back then I could mouth the words but hadn't really internalized the idea, but now I seriously wonder, who is wrong today in a way that I don't even suspect? The odds of it being "nobody" are basically zero.)
I am not talking about popular reporting of science. I am talking about science.
Recently a paper went by on how something like 90% of medical studies are not able to be replicated in follow-up studies. If you really understand science qua science (as opposed to science-as-religion-substitute), you should understand this isn't a minor interesting tidbit to be discarded, this is a dagger to the heart of the field. Other fields seem to be having similar problems.
I reiterate, science is still the best we've got and I don't anticipate a replacement. But the evidence strongly suggests that the quality of the real science being done is a lot lower than it may appear at first glance, or what some people would have you believe.
Coincidentally, this just came up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199230 It is almost exactly what I mean. Unfortunately, if the results are sufficiently bad there's actually no salvaging the science; meta-analysis can improve things but still requires good data to start with.
Science itself isn't at fault, because science isn't really a thing. In this case, it was the institution of medical science that we trusted erroneously.
Actually, it's really amazing how many dangerously wrong ideas medicine has come up with over the years.
I don't know. Assuming you went through the normal college course straight out of high school I'm ~12 years younger than you but I've been coming around to the same conclusions. Personally I think between the internet and some other things it's just that we're getting the data now that says that we need to tune our trust of science down a bit. I still think it's the best way of learning there is, it just isn't as powerful in practice as we'd like.
I remember thinking in the 1990s that as I read about the history of various sciences, the only fields where the dominant consensus didn't spend long periods of time being dead wrong were fields too young to have a dominant consensus. (Perhaps not in those words at the time, but along those lines.) I recall seeing the casual assumption that all that stuff was in the past, and wondered what major sciences were actively wrong. It turns out that in fact they weren't all exactly right and indeed I think that some entire major fields were wrong at the time.
(Bringing up the interesting question of who is wrong today? Back then I could mouth the words but hadn't really internalized the idea, but now I seriously wonder, who is wrong today in a way that I don't even suspect? The odds of it being "nobody" are basically zero.)