Comment by psychoslave

> It's only with hindsight that we think contagionism is obviously correct.

We, the mere median citizen on any specific topic which is out of our expertise, certainly not. And this also have an impact as a social pressure in term of which theory is going to be given the more credits.

That's not actually specific to science. Even theological arguments can be dumb as hell or super refined by the smartest people able to thrive in their society of the time.

Correctness of the theories and how great a match they are with collected data is only a part of what make mass adoption of any theory, and not necessarily the most weighted. It's interdependence with feedback loops everywhere, so even the data collected, the tool used to collect and analyze and the metatheorical frameworks to evaluate different models are nothing like absolute objective givens.