Most of the points carry over to other domains as well (e.g., music, art, ballet, stage acting, spiritual traditions that have "gurus" or "masters").

For example, there are many (e.g.) piano teachers who can trace their lineage back to Beethoven (and they know it off the top of their heads if you ask them), who are similarly overly deferential to historical masters, who see their knowledge and music in general as sacred knowledge. There is also the same extreme conservatism, and different teaching techniques and performance techniques cannot easily be tested.

[Edit: a pretty good test for whether these sorts of problems are characteristic of at least some practitioners of a given domain is whether (or how often) they get angry in the way preachers get angry at blasphemy and utter sentences that begin with "how dare (s)he ...".

Can anybody think of a domain where students spend decades learning, often with the same teacher or very few teachers, where the domain is the center of their life, which has existed for at least a few centuries, and where these problems do not occur with great frequency?]