It t so much what we don’t know that compromises science and its advancement, but what we know that isn’t so. Preconceived notions are often so ingrained in a field that they are never tested, or even considered appropriate to test. Often interdisciplinary efforts result in an interloper (scientists trained in a different field) naively questioning what the primary discipline has always believed. The interloper’s testing of that hypothesis often reveals “inconvenient truths.”
The “collective consciousness” of some fields is a major impediment even to publication of disparate evidence, let alone that which disproves pet theories. The term behavioral science could be used to describe the response of a field to new information, analogous to application of the term behavioral economics to describe response to assaults on the “imaginary world” in which some thrive.
