Much of the aura of infallibility with which we surround science comes from ability of scientist to refine ideas and measurements over long periods of time. If you look at the history of science at any particular juncture in time, you will find many ideas that turn out to be wrong or so incomplete that they might as well be. It is only because we tend to forget the legions of failed hypothesis that exist for every successful one that we believe science to be so superior to other areas of endeavor.

I have often thought that one of the major difference in mindsets between academics and other professions like business and the military is that academics are under no real world time pressures. Academics get into the mode of thinking that people should always be able to take as long as they want to make a decision just as an academic can take as long as the need to find the correct answer. You certainly get that impression from reading academic analysis of military, political or business decisions.