"Trust the science" will work as long as science works, which even to this day is pretty nicely, this practice is given a bad name by the "Trust the science*" crowd, which activity is based on having a position then attempting to legitimize it by quoting the abstract of a paper they have never read, prioritizing pushing ideas above factual matters.
This in turn allows certain people in institutions to trade legitimacy for agenda pushing, creating the current crisis of institutional trust, which the legitimate "Trust the science" crowd suffers from.
Science itself is all about testable hypotheses and facts. If we can't rely on it, chances are we are doing something wrong and science itself is perfectly fine.
The incentive structure in academia exacerbates that by encouraging authors to hype up their findings and obfuscate any deficiency in their models. Withholding information and making results difficult to reproduce is a symptom of that, as are academic jargon disconnected from terminology used in the private sector, and obtuse presentation. Those practices make it easier for bad data, bad methodologies, and misrepresentations of findings to slip past reviewers and readers and harder for other researchers to dispute, and undermine the scientific process itself as we get flooded with junk.
Agree on all points. It's worth asking: who maintains the academic incentive structures? If the social structures are harming science (e.g., promoting fraud), why do the social structures persist? Who or what stymies reform? As I've asked these questions, I am led to blame (i) scientists who gain power broker status by playing the game and (ii) university administrators who benefit from larger production numbers (dollars, papers, enrollment, awards).
Maybe it's a naive outlook but maybe "science" can continue to work... with, without, or despite all the politics, waste, cruft, and scaffolding that academia erects all around it.
This in turn allows certain people in institutions to trade legitimacy for agenda pushing, creating the current crisis of institutional trust, which the legitimate "Trust the science" crowd suffers from.
Science itself is all about testable hypotheses and facts. If we can't rely on it, chances are we are doing something wrong and science itself is perfectly fine.