Science is a funnel of filters; there's no single point - not publishing, not peer review, not cite counts - that reliably distingushes true hypotheses from false ones. But taken together, it works.
Have you tried to test your idea? Are engineers better than scientists at predicting which results will turn out to be true?
Have you tried to test your idea? Are engineers better than scientists at predicting which results will turn out to be true?
A core difference between scientists and engineers is that engineers only need one working prototype to validate a design, and scientists only need one strong counterexample to invalidate a hypothesis.
(Note that some fields where practitioners call themselves scientists but operate much more like engineers, with 'studies' as prototypes.)
Science is not particularly reliable.
And yet, we have remarkable technology, and can do medical marvels.
My tentative theory is that there's a lot of knowledge that's less formal than science in engineering, manufacturing, and the practice of medicine which makes it possible to get work done, and some fairly effective methods of filtering information that comes from science.