Shuzan held out his short staff and said: "If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?"
I think the dichotomy you are proposing is one of many paradoxes where it just depends. Yes, if you break your wrists trying to bench press too much, you’re doing it wrong. If you try to bench press just under too much, you will achieve maximal strength gains overt time. You will also be very sore and experience some joint pain.
Absolutely agree we live in a culture of...
Another way to frame this is you need something beyond brute force systematic hypothesis generation, something that calls on informed intuition and non-rational ways of knowing. Unfortunately, it seems it’s not a problem of just raising awareness that people should do science better, it’s a more fundamental problem of population-level adult development levels needing to be raised more generally. For example, see Chapman’s https://metarationality.com/ or even just https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge .