As long as people mislead or make mistake unknowingly, it's fine to rely to self-correcting mechanism of science. The institutional rot is much deeper. It is not good to leave all this fraud to self-correcting mechanisms of science. We also have "trust" to worry about.
Maybe instead of throwing around ideas of "institutional rot" we can realize that there are hundreds of thousands of people doing "science" in the right way, are not out for material gain, do not engage in fraud, and are interested in truth and scientific advancement.
The fact that there are a vanishingly small # of cases where bad things happen in the process are the exceptions that prove the rule, IMHO. Certain segments of society like to hype these up (or even lie about their frequency) in order to discredit the scientific method.
"Institutional rot" is a meme that needs to go away. Identify the problems at the edges, fix them, and move on to letting the bulk of the work continue as it always has - quietly building upon previous valid results to the betterment of society.
The popular version of the Dunning-Kruger effect says that stupid people overestimate their capabilities. This is true, but the effect is more general than that.
It says if your expertise level is different from the average, then you judge the "average competency" differently. So if you have above-average expertise. Folks who had above-average education tended to overestimate what average education looks like (and vice versa).
I notice it when I use LLM. Things that I know well, I can spit LLM slopiness. On other things, LLM output reads like 'expert'.
Something similar can be said about "values". They help you make hard decisions. You don't need values if only make easy decisions.
But values conflicts with each other. You can't value more than a few at the same time. E.g. If you make a decision which is good for your employee who is struggling (value employee), it may not be a good decision for your client who is already delayed (value client/speed). Etc..
I use cheap android devices. My current one is a cheap Motorola and before samsung and Chinese vendors. I've never seen bugs like I have encountere since the last update (2 months ago).
Unless I reboot the device everyday, I can't make a call. The button is pressed but never proceeds to ring, doesn't even show an error message. The play service complains that I am logged out but shows my account info in the login panel!! Rebooting is the only way, android is like windows currently.
I am just scared to update anything these days. And not just android apps, Even rsync gave me a minor scare (fortunate my backup jobs are on debian stable).
Yup.. I only remeber three knots: 1. tie cows to a pole using a rope, tile show laces, third one is the most basic one which everyone knows. Sometimes, I learn a few occassinally watching youtube video and forget the next day.
My own experience during my PhD was that a few, if any, PI cared about your growth as a scientist. All they cared about was progress on their project which sometimes are the same. Most of the time they are not.
Admittedly I have had the luck of a very good PI, and then a very good lab to work at.
Some of my coworkers have shared some of those horror stories from previous positions, PIs insisting on primary authorship, making students do work for projects without getting any credit etc.
However, despite those abuses, I think the ultimate purpose of the PhD remains the same. Though perhaps it is easy for me to say because I didn't experience the abuses myself.
As long as people mislead or make mistake unknowingly, it's fine to rely to self-correcting mechanism of science. The institutional rot is much deeper. It is not good to leave all this fraud to self-correcting mechanisms of science. We also have "trust" to worry about.