Science's secret weapon is the innate pleasure that many academics have in proving their colleagues wrong.

Unfortunately that also results in them trying to prove their colleagues are wrong about other of their colleagues being wrong.

So the bottom line is that ironically due to this science gets stuck on false beliefs and they can be a bit hard to dislodge.

We have even this principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle

That same spirit is also what's behind shorts in the market to keep overly optimistic players in check. As with crypto-ransom operations against corporations to keep their system security on alert. Adversarial actions (within reasonable boundaries) is the most important balance mechanism.

The problem is keeping the adversaries balanced. Otherwise you have one side overpowering everything (and typically not through the "correctness" of their argument, but scale and resources) and the adversarial system becomes detrimental to progress.