> On the other hand there have always been (and probably will always be) people making confident assertions about things they don't know for certain.

Here's how it works: "Oh, that is just...".

Ignore billions of these per day in the system, and you get what we constantly complain about but don't know how it came to be. Science developed a method to deal with this phenomenon that works quite well, but it is only applied in very narrow domains.

At certain scale, systems no longer appear as systems.