This has always been the part of academia I have not understood. Academics are supposed to "know" more than the public. They are paid to have some understanding of reality in a way that the lay public does not so they can have tenure - that is they can't be fired (or it is very hard) for researching controversial subjects with payoffs that are hard to define by someone not in the field.

Everyone else in academia is working towards this end result or drops out somewhere along the path and works in industry. The exception being those specialist degrees that are quasi-academic such as law and medicine, but which have more applied (and therefore measurable) results.

And yet, we don't hold these people to the standards they set for themselves as a cohort? I wouldn't expect every paper to be replicable, or every researcher to always be right. But I see things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive and wonder how many billions of dollar were put into this thing. It's essentially a state backed way of defrauding the public out of tax dollars to pay people with doctorates that made friends with other people with doctorates. What if the US spent the money that was used on the EmDrive on housing or social services for instance? Or building libraries or bridges?

All it would take would be for a few academic journals to demand that the statistical replication of papers be required, but it would mean that the editors would have to be guided by principles other than maximizing revenue.