1. Bad work only being displaced by good work: everything works like this. To replace some useless commercial product (take your pick) someone has to come up with something better. Same goes for information.
2. Nobody liking criticism can be rephrased as it being important to attack ideas, not people, when you have to work with those people.
3. "Never question a scientific superior" is the first piece of advise I think is too cynical. As a warning against undermining a colleague in public when you need their support, I agree, and that's kind of a restatement of #1 and #2. But science really does have a culture of publicly debating contentious ideas. You can definitely be more critical in an event specifically held as a debate / open forum than in a presentation Q&A though, and at a social event it's polite to be at least vaguely supportive.
Kind of a tangent to the later points: Day to day scientific research is mostly chasing dead ends and other activity that is (in hindsight) mostly useless, but there is genuine societal value in having a large body of skilled workers available. That is, science spends a lot of time spinning its wheels trying to figure out the right question to ask, and once this becomes clear there is rapid progress. This means the papers published in between the breakthrough periods aren't really worth paying attention to unless you work in that area. Having a lot of scientists and engineers in the workforce so we collectively have a decent chance at obtaining and exploiting next breakthrough is the point, the papers are just a byproduct.
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