Here is AI researcher Elizer Yudkowski, as recently quoted by Scott Alexander:
Beliefs do not become less worthwhile, if many others share them…
…and if you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage.
The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news.
And a little later:
Just don’t go thinking that science has to be controversial to be interesting.
Or, for that matter, that science has to be recent to be interesting. A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid.
Science and literature are similar in that sense. The novel that was published yesterday, even when highly reviewed, is unlikely to be as good as the one that was written decades ago and has stood the test of time.
An implication of Yudkowski’s observation is that it’s important for established scientists to remind the next generation of the old truths, especially those that aren’t intuitive. Here is my favorite example.
Nehaveigur 