Comment by timr

If it makes you feel any better, the problem you’re describing is as old as peer review. The authors of a paper only have to get accepted once, and they have a lot more incentive to do so than you do to reject their work as an editor or reviewer.

This is one of the reasons you should never accept a single publication at face value. But this isn’t a bug — it’s part of the algorithm. It’s just that most muggles don’t know how science actually works. Once you read enough papers in an area, you have a good sense of what’s in the norm of the distribution of knowledge, and if some flashy new result comes over the transom, you might be curious, but you’re not going to accept it without a lot more evidence.

This situation is different, because it’s a case where an extremely popular bit of accepted wisdom is both wrong, and the system itself appears to be unwilling to acknowledge the error.