I'm going to step even further back into the meta discussion. Hopefully you will see why.

> I used to have near absolute faith in academic scientists, with much the same reasoning as you

If I had to summarise my position today from my particular life experience it would be "trust no one". Especially politics and commerce, but including lawyers, doctors and academia and the rest. It rather unavoidably goes with human endeavour.

Most of my career has been in corporations. That's included some time as founder.

That has not taught me to prefer commerce, but to deeply mistrust it. The non-technical CEO or manager who requires some negative activity, or to not mention that our product is entirely unsuitable for the large sales prospect. The IBM or HP consultant presented as field expert, costing hundreds per hour, that over lunch turns out spent only one week on a training course. Last week in fact. Their only exposure to that niche.

Elizabeth Holmes conducting a personal visibility campaign selling snake oil. Bayer and heroin - the non addictive pain killer. Asbestos - the universal and entirely safe substance.

I could go on all day with the fraudulent, but then there's the inconvenient.

Sure GM companies have great research into GM. Then solely publish the studies that favour continued sale of their product. Maybe there are 30x more studies in their filing cabinets that show up the major danger. They stay in the archive, never published. No one knows they exist. Mention them and you are in breach of your NDA and contract of employment.

With luck, like tobacco, they might leak over the coming decades. So we only ever find out the negative far, far too late. or after regulator (that USA has tried to mostly gut), or academic (that the entire world has pushed nearer and nearer commercial intent)

That's also circular. With far stronger incentives to fraud. Fraud, fighting to ruin something that works and partial information appears to be the regular, day to day normality of commerce.

Which is probably a fit place to mention economics. Until the US deconstructed Bretton Woods and abandoned the gold standard, kicking off the inflation of the seventies, the groupthink was Keynesian. Though just about no government was actually Keynesian, most having adopted the obvious bits and completely ignored the challenging bits - that were the parts intended to compensate for the excess.

Come 1980 and we've moving into the groupthink of Friedman and Hayek. Less economics more extremist politics with a veneer of economics - particularly Friedman. Once again, just about no government is properly Hayekian adopting the convenient "free money" parts. The fact that both were far into political, or specifically irrational phobia of Communism in every corner, opinion ruins their economic credentials.

So someone trying to get an economic education can only get the groupthink. Just about none of the economics, or far more dangerous, Philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) courses that all modern politicians seek present the other economic models.

So bullshit all around us, but I find from my career, hearing of everyone else's career, and all I have read and experienced that the strongest negative incentives - to scientific honesty - come from corporations. If we had some trustworthy way to require research be declared before start, and results published to all, you would probably be right. As they frequently do indeed do the best research. They just never publicise the negative.