Seriously. Relatedly, it is seriously impressive that systems this comprehensively screwed up seem to still converge on producing acceptable work much of the time. Big companies manage to get us all fed and fly us around the world. That scares the bejeesus out of me. I have put my lives in the hands of someone who was selected by an HR department (assisted by, even worse, a union)
Convergence of scientific results could be validation of the theory. But it could also be because people are anxious to publish contradictory results.
From Richard Feynman's1974 CalTech Commencement:
"We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis"
I get your point, but those results were still diverging from the original wrong answer and converging on the right one, just not di/converging as fast as would be ideal.
