THis is like declaiming against the subject of statistics because the local numbers racket has been cooked by Mafiosi miscreants.

If the only examples we had of statistics were criminally-cooked numbers then that might be understandable.    But it's easy to find. statistical data that are accurate and useful.   Which is why I asked for a good demonstrable real-world counterexample on this topic.

I'm an old hand at this debate and I've taken on tougher crowds than this, so I'll tell you what the canonical counterargument to my position is (just to keep this interesting)   The pro-science argument is based on the premise that, given two theories about reality, the theory that can be shown to be more accurate, or have better predictive power, and which is more consistent with other data and models, is to be preferred, i.e., it is the one that represents progress.

The counterargument is that there is no basis for that assumption. That it's biased on my part to assume that just because a theory works better by accounting for the data and making better predictions, that we should prefer it.   Stephen Colbert once said that "reality has a liberal bias", and one might paraphrase here by saying that "reality has a scientific bias".   But there are serious thinkers who take the position that such a bias is just that: a bias, a value judgement.    A lay person might call this "ignorance is bliss", but there are some pretty serious thinkers who given that serious consideration.