"Trust the science" is a silly slogan and should be dismissed.
But you should also remember that "science" doesn't guarantee that _every_ paper is good. No one can. "90% of everything is crap" is a law of the universe as solid as the second principle of thermodynamics.
Science is a _process_ that is able to weed out the crap more efficiently than anything else we tried. Any big name can put out crap, true, but as soon as they do, there is an eager army of people who jumps at the opportunity of "proving X wrong". If the original paper was crap, that would be a pretty easy thing to do.
Note that I said "more efficiently", not "efficiently" in general. There will always be an army of people "trusting the science" (the authority, really) and so it might take time for the crap to be weeded out. But it will eventually, because science is like evolution: if nothing can be built on top of the crap, it will be progressively abandoned, because it can't reproduce (pun intended).
> But you should also remember that "science" doesn't guarantee that _every_ paper is good.
That's correct and I agree. Actual Science doesn't require trust. As you aptly pointed out it's excellent at weeding out crap most of the time. The issue is the academic politics involved in it make it harder to determine if the process is weakened. The problem of course comes when a major result was not reviewed appropriately and it becomes the standard until someone is brave enough to write another paper failing to reproduce it. That's the scary thing - even if someone is brave enough to write a paper saying its non-reproducible they still have to get through the review committee to have their voice heard. Sure, they could post to Arxiv or a blog if all else fails...but none of that will ever get picked up where it is needed most.
> There will always be an army of people "trusting the science" (the authority, really)
This is really the crux of it. It's appeal to authority. Even higher order thinking people (that is, those outside pop-sci nonsense) fall victim to this because it's human nature. The authority is also how mediocre work gets past reviewers by attaching a name to it.
But you should also remember that "science" doesn't guarantee that _every_ paper is good. No one can. "90% of everything is crap" is a law of the universe as solid as the second principle of thermodynamics.
Science is a _process_ that is able to weed out the crap more efficiently than anything else we tried. Any big name can put out crap, true, but as soon as they do, there is an eager army of people who jumps at the opportunity of "proving X wrong". If the original paper was crap, that would be a pretty easy thing to do.
Note that I said "more efficiently", not "efficiently" in general. There will always be an army of people "trusting the science" (the authority, really) and so it might take time for the crap to be weeded out. But it will eventually, because science is like evolution: if nothing can be built on top of the crap, it will be progressively abandoned, because it can't reproduce (pun intended).