Trust was harmed because people were asked to trust scientists who were in no place to make well grounded statements. Robust science takes years to produce.
The whole "trust the science" mantra from the covid years was a complete publicity nightmare for science as an institution, as the scientists eventually ended up contradicting themselves when additional data came in.
Science ultimately does not operate on faith, but on skepticism and doubt. This is its greatest asset, that you can question it freely and it will have answers to all your questions (though sometimes they are "we don't know"). Propping it up as dogmatic truth that must be trusted and never investigated is probably the most anti-scientific thing you can do.
I think it’s even a little worse than that. A bunch of the people saying “trust the science” actually meant “trust a particular policy.” Science is not policy, and policy is not science.
Oh yeah, it's been an ongoing problem for years. The name of science has been used to lend credence to all sorts of unscientific nonsense, usually by slapping some citations onto it and calling it facts-based or science-based.
We began developing modern germ theory in the mid-19th century. We've gotten really good at retarding the transmission of infectious disease. We know what works.
Just like we've known for well over 100 years that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation.
To your point, science is not policy - but policy that is not informed by science is just wishful thinking.
Let’s pretend for a second that we absolutely, unequivocally, know and knew what would prevent transmission of COVID-19 [0]. It still does not follow that anyone in the government saying “stay home” or “no non-essential travel” or “wear a mask indoors” is science. It’s policy. It may or may not be well informed by science and it may or may not be a good idea. Science might be able to determine how disease spreads, but deciding what to do with that information is outside the scope is most science.
[0] At least judging by what various branches of the government said and still say, this requires a lot of suspension of disbelief.
It's then on the public policymakers to inform the public how the policy was driven by science so that the public understands why the policy is being adopted.
I'm curious about the "next crisis" and whether or not there's a swing in the other direction though. I feel like we're stuck in hindsight bias, and forgetting that a lot of decisions weren't made in ideal circumstances. That's not to say that there's not things to learn, and that's not to say that these lessons shouldn't be analyzed.
But during a crisis you have to balance skepticism and doubt with the need to take decisive action. The fact that we seem to be focusing our blame on the scientific community, rather than politicians, is this magical judo that politicians have made. The scientists goal is to share the data and it's impacts, the politicians is to shape that data and impact into policy.
It's that plus statements they made where you could clearly see the statement was in service of politics rather than science.
One particular example I remember is during the protests after the death of George Floyd, there were several scientists saying something along the lines of "you shouldn't attend large crowds, but it's OK if you are going to the protest" [1] [2] [3]
It was just so blatant and such an insult to people's intelligence and was just so obviously fueled by politics and not public health. IMO the real villans of the pandemic were the doctors out there trying to make themselves famous and shooting up the credibility of their field in the process while also giving fuel to the other side to make their points.
The kind of crowd matters. 1000 people attending an indoor concert is a massively more effective spreader of COVID than 1000 people marching outdoors at a protest.
The chances of getting infected from someone nearby who is spreading the virus depends on how much of the virus got in you which is a function of how long you are near to them, the rate they are expelling viruses, and how long those viruses stay around you.
In a crowd all of those factors depend heavily on what the crowd is doing and where they are doing it and what percent of the crowd is infected.
I remember seeing papers that looked at the actual results of various large crowds and found that the George Floyd protests in fact did very little to spread COVID.
> We have robust science about climate change for decades now and yet it is pushed against all the time.
There's economic incentives against the politicial policies interwoven with climate change studies, so of course there's pushback. But how is this relevant to covid?
> Is germ theory a "dogmatic truth" for you?
Why would it be? I'm allowed to ask any questions I want about germ theory, and there are no shortage of answers. Nobody is asking me to just believe in germs, I can look in a microscope and see the lil' critters with my own eyes.
> Scepticism is just a gateway drug to nihilism, were nothing is ever true.
That's a category error. The skeptic position is until demonstrated otherwise, things are not known. Nihilism is the position that all values are unfounded and nothing matters. One makes statements about what is known, the other about how we should act. That is not the same.
As if there hasn't been any economic incentives during COVID... If you want to debate, do it in good faith. I will reply to your other points, but I am not going to go any further when you aren't honest.
>I can look in a microscope and see the lil' critters with my own eyes.
That's not the proof of germ theory, as spontaneous generation will pretend those "little critters" appeared after the illness, aren't the cause for it.
And how does that work for viruses? There is AIDS denial at the higher levels of science (like Duesberg, or the very "inventor" of PCR, Nobel prize Kary Mullis) who argue that aids is caused by "lifestyle" and antiviral treatment, not by HIV. Have they not "seen" HIV in electron microscopes?
>The skeptic position is until demonstrated otherwise, things are not known.
And then doubt any "demonstration" ad infinitum. Sceptics just answer any proof - any data that would shut down their doubts - with more doubt, until it is all a planetary conspiracy by the New World Order.
> As if there hasn't been any economic incentives during COVID... If you want to debate, do it in good faith. I will reply to your other points, but I am not going to go any further when you aren't honest.
Sure there were some economic incentives, granted, but it's pennies in comparison. Covid policy became such a hot potato because it became strongly associated with controverisal political figures. It was really a proxy war for an entirely different conflict.
> That's not the proof of germ theory, as spontaneous generation will pretend those "little critters" appeared after the illness, aren't the cause for it.
Even so given it's possible to take a sample of bacteria, expose a subject to the sample, and the subject will become ill; and this can be repeated many times reliably, making it hard to defend spontaneous generation.
> And how does that work for viruses? There is AIDS denial at the higher levels of science (like Duesberg, or the very "inventor" of PCR, Nobel prize Kary Mullis) who argue that aids is caused by "lifestyle" and antiviral treatment, not by HIV. Have they not "seen" HIV in electron microscopes?
Well so what if a scientist questions a theory? Einstein was an outspoken skeptic of quantum physics, this sort of doubt is a central part of the scientific process.
Being wrong about things is in many ways the default epistemilogical state as a human being. It's ok to be wrong. I'm wrong about things. You're wrong about things. We're all wrong about things all the time. Even acclaimed scientists get things wrong.
This is why we should hold our opinions about things tentatively. That, not nihilism, is at the core of being a skeptic.
> And then doubt any "demonstration" ad infinitum. Sceptics just answer any proof - any data that would shut down their doubts - with more doubt, until it is all a planetary conspiracy by the New World Order.
Nothing is certain therefore this one particular conspiracy theory is a given? I don't think this sounds particularly skeptical. I'll grant many self-proclaimed skeptics are only skeptics with regard to things they do not already believe, but this practice is not a fool's skepticism.
> we don't relitigate everything all the time. E.g. is germ theory a "dogmatic truth" for you?
Sure. Germ theory is incomplete. This became obvious during COVID, but the incomplete version of it was indeed taken as dogma. Things ordinary germ theory does not successfully explain:
1. Why did SARS-CoV-2 variants immediately exterminate each other instead of coexisting side by side for the long term? And why did flu apparently disappear during COVID?
2. How did around 80% of people appear to have pre-existing immunity to a supposedly novel coronavirus, as measured by household transmission studies?
3. Why is it possible for people on isolated Antarctic bases to spontaneously get sick from a cold, when there is nobody to get sick from?
4. Why are respiratory viruses seasonal to the extent that influenza outbreaks start everywhere at once rather than spreading from an index case like COVID did (there are lots of ad-hoc folk explanations for this kicking around, none of which are obviously derived from germ theory).
5. If germ theory is correct, why do epidemiological models that implement it never correctly predict the course of epidemics? (and they don't, even though epidemiologists like to pretend they do).
What we're looking at here is likely to be similar to physics pre-Einstein. We have a theory, it sometimes yields very accurate predictions, and we have lots of evidence for it. But there are cases that it fails for. The theory must therefore need refinement. Non-dogmatic scientists would be intrigued by this and even excited to explore it, but if you look at the public health literature you don't see this kind of excitement. Instead you see lots of papers that ignore all the questions above and just sort of assert that the theory side is done, so here's our predictions Mr Health Minister.
How does ordinary germ theory not explain what happened with flu during the pandemic?
The measures people took to reduce the spread of COVID would also reduce the spread of flu, and because flu is less infectious and infected people do not spread at for as many days those measures would be even more effective against flu.
If the flu season without COVID would have just been an average flu season instead of some particular infectious strain then it would not be hard for the measures taken for COVID to push the effective R value for the flu that year to under 1, which would mean it would not spread.
That's the explanation public health departments like but it's inconsistent with the data. Much more likely to be the same phenomenon that caused other variants to disappear as well.
> And why did flu apparently disappear during COVID?
Because they stopped tracking it to give resources to tracking SARS-CoV-2, nothing more. The CDC had a note at the bottom of their site explaining why their graphs flatlined, and despite it people used those graphs as evidence it really did disappear.
It disappeared because of social distancing. Influenza is less transmissible than SARS-CoV-2, so the measures used to keep SARS-CoV-2 under control were even more effective at shutting down transmission of the flu.
> Propping it up as dogmatic truth that must be trusted and never investigated is probably the most anti-scientific thing you can do.
Honestly, that's what all the science-denying cranks say. You may not be such a person, but you need to be aware of the mindset of many people making this claim.
With regards to the retardation of the spread of infectious disease, that is robust science. We've spent over 100 years developing and practicing it, too. Our success rate has been incredible.
Also, this wasn't even humankind's first rodeo with the SARS coronavirus. We knew what we needed to do, we failed to do it, and hundreds of thousands of Americans needlessly lost their life as a result. That's the nightmare.
Not only infection disease science is robust with humans, but it is also a veterinary science. And with livestock outnumbering humans and being a huge industry where every dollar counts, we have a good idea on the efficiency of e.g. vaccines.
> Honestly, that's what all the science-denying cranks say. You may not be such a person, but you need to be aware of the mindset of many people making this claim.
It's also what science advocates like e.g. Carl Sagan[1] says, because it's true. "Science deniers" may be wrong about other things, but not about this.
The truth does not fear questions, and does not require people to believe in it.
> With regards to the retardation of the spread of infectious disease, that is robust science. We've spent over 100 years developing and practicing it, too. Our success rate has been incredible.
We don't seem to really be making significant headway stopping these respiratory diseases. There's a new seasonal influenza every year, and then there's the common cold sloshing around on top of that. These annual global epidemics seem to be washing over us with such regularity they're a fact of life in modern society. Most of them less severe than Covid, for certain, but I think you're overstating our ability to stop them.
[1] e.g. "If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."
Common misconception, no there isn't. The vaccines target whole strains and it is extremely rare for a new one to show up. What happens is, every spring the best guess is made about which strains will be most common in the coming fall, then the summer is spent manufacturing the existing vaccines for those strains. For cost and compatibility reasons, yearly shots only contain a small handful of the possible flu vaccines, so you're supposed to get them every year to ensure you've gotten one that includes the currently expected dominant strains.
...and? We've deemed it far more cost-effective to vaccinate the population against the new flu variants that continually emerge. Our strategy changes when we have no vaccine, and the disease is particularly virulent.
> there's the common cold sloshing around on top of that
ditto with flu. Common cold is an annoyance, not a disease that we must eradicate. The cost to do so would be astronomical compared to the benefit.
Meanwhile, how many people do you know suffering from TB?
Skepticism is one thing; ignorance is an entirely different animal altogether. One challenge facing us is a populace poorly educated in science is increasingly unable to differentiate between the two.
If we had a $1 pill you could take that innoculated you against the common cold, it would be cheap and worthwhile to eradicate. These things are expensive exactly because we have poor tools to deal with them.
TB on the other hand mostly went away because we developed a working vaccine.
> Skepticism is one thing; ignorance is an entirely different animal altogether. One challenge facing us is a populace poorly educated in science is increasingly unable to differentiate between the two.
The solution to poor scientific understanding is not to bully people into beleiving in science as an article of faith, but to fix the scientific education so that's not necessary.
> If we had a $1 pill you could take that innoculated you against the common cold, it would be cheap and worthwhile to eradicate.
That's looking at the wrong side of the equation and is tantamount to wishful thinking. The correct side of the equation is looking at the billions and billions of dollars you would have to spend developing that $1 pill. That is the actual cost to achieve. There are better things to do with our time and money.
If our hypothetical $1 common cold pill turns out anything like our COVID pill, it will only be effective for a few months before making you marginally more susceptible than you were before.
It's not really discussed why people have lost trust in scientists. I wonder what happened, maybe I'm a bit biased in that regard as I had a scientific background for many years.
I think there's a big problem in science that a lot of of public facing is done by people who are not scientists or are the kind of scientists that no longer care about science. The reason for this is that people feel and scientists feel like they cannot communicate with each other.
With this in mind, you end up in a scenario where there's a lot of miscommunication happening with the scientist side promising things that are impossible or reducing the complexity of things to a point where the science that was done doesn't make much sense anymore.
I think there is really a need for better communication, humility might come from the perspective that scientists need to admit this is a problem. It's not that the people are dumb it's that academics are failing at educating them.
It's related to self-censorship. Look at what happened to Martin Kulldorff. He was a statistician at Harvard that had some controversial takes during the pandemic. He got dismissed. Pretty sure you can find accounts from him about the pressure he faced.
It became clear during the pandemic that you couldn't communicate nuance to the public and that people were just picking sides out of fear.
Willing to bet most distrust in science is due to overexposure of "expert scientists" especially when their uncriticized recommendations lead to civilization regressing policies
> It's not really discussed why people have lost trust in scientists.
We also don't talk about why people trusted scientists in the before time either.
The egghead smears and distrust have been with us for a long, long time. Here in the US, the GI Bill after WWII got a lot of people college educations they would not have otherwise had. The emerging post-WWII managerial class valued and applied many sciences. The Cold War elevated scientists to an important status as they were seen as a key to winning the war. In schools, science was stressed. There were children's science shows like Mr. Wizard on TV to encourage kids to pursue science careers! As the Cold War wound down, that status and the propaganda supporting it slipped away, too.
When done correctly, science can provide invaluable information. But publishing a paper does not mean science was done. And science communicators have on occasion treated inferences made from research with the seriousness of the research, not with the frivolousness of an informed guess.
Is there a good resource or paper you would recommend that summarizes the replication crisis and provides some stats on how many papers have be retracted due to replication issues?
You can consider the beta-amyloid fiasco as a prime example of biomed's replication issues. ML/AL replication issues largely stem from the source data used for training not being available.
In my field, of psychotherapy, social and cultural factors change over time making perfect replication impossible. I'm working on a paper now and we are trying to account as much as possible for replication of our results.
Everything. When science communication to the public uses capital-S science as the big group of boffins figuring things out, theres not a lot forgiveness for after the fact subtleties.
I’m in no way qualified to answer, but I recall reading about a slew of publications being retracted across all fields after the results couldn’t be replicated. If I remember right there was a team that has become infamous for simply trying to replicate studies and finding a very large number of them can’t be.
Let me paint a bit of a difficult conundrum from the pandemic:
Masks work dramatically better when the person wearing the mask is the one who is sick. A grocery store where the one infected person is masked is better than the grocery store where the one infected person is openly coughing around 30 masked people.
Everyone masked works best, but the heavy lifting is done by the sick persons mask.
In short; You wear a mask to protect others from you, not the other way around.
However, this creates a severe social stigma problem however: People wearing masks are outing themselves as being sick (whether or not they actually are). The result is people don't wear masks for fear of social retaliation.
So now you, as a scientist, have to figure out what the messaging around masks is going to be. Wear a mask to protect others? Wear a mask to protect yourself? Everyone wear a mask all the time because we say so?
It was a damned if you do damned if you don't situation. They went with everyone wear a mask all the time, alluding to the implication of masking being a tool of self preservation. Of course masks don't work great at stopping you from getting sick (outside of being specially trained in their use), which is easily proved, and half the country recognized they were being lied too (while never acknowledging that the sick person wearing a mask works great).
it also depends upon the mask type who you're protecting? IIR surgical masks tend to only protect other people, whereas you can protect yourself with FFP2/FFP3/N95/P99/...
but deciphering that is part of the problem, the layman had to come to terms with the difference between IIR masks and the other more protective to self standards.
the messaging was unclear but it required the avg person to do their own research.
imo, the real problem was the culture war?
i don't think there's any problem with someone making it clear that they're sick; society needs to be more accepting of the sick and more accepting of call-outs of work due to illness. this would help everybody in the long run.
That procedure (I guess you speak about fit tests, especially with a dust of saccharin) is important when you need to be 100% sure to be protected, such a dealing with with ebola or equivalent; but even a badly fitted mask will reduce the inhaled dose and improve the chances to develop a benign infection.
Of course masks work well at protecting you - why do you think people wear masks when exposed to dust?
The problem is that you can't wear it when you eat, and who does one eat with? Family, including children, who are prime infectors.
The great lie here in Switzerland has been to pretend that kids don't get ill and don't infect others, to keep schools open (without any attempt at e.g. air filtration) to keep people working (because the prime function of school here seems to be daycare, to free both parents to go to work)
Over 100 years of medical use helps, too. You know, the idea of using masks to prevent the spread of infectious disease isn't exactly a new idea and is widely employed by medical staff every single day.
Masks are worn by surgeons to protect the patient in case spittle drops into them whilst the surgeons lean over them. It isn't to stop the spread of respiratory illness, at which they are completely ineffective and always have been.
My impression of mask effectiveness for aerosolized illnesses like COVID (it doesn't spread primarily through spittle, unlike what a lot of public health authorities assumed early on in the pandemic when the initial mask recommendations were made), after reading the arguments on both sides during the pandemic, is that they can be usefully analogized to birth control methods:
- Surgical masks: douching after sex. Probably has some small effectiveness compared to doing nothing, but shouldn't be considered as a serious method to prevent propagation.
- N95-level masks to prevent transmission: coitus interruptus. Definitely effective, but also almost impossible to use at anything resembling 100% effectiveness. With coitus interruptus, pre-ejaculate and general inability to precisely control ejaculation mean the method will assuredly fail after a while. Analogously, N95 masks would probably significantly reduce transmission if everyone used them, although probably not to 0. But outside of hospitals, compliance is probably not strong enough to significantly affect the progress of an infection wave.
- N95-level masks to protect against infection (including masks with vents): condoms. Almost 100% effective if used perfectly, but can easily still mess it up on occasion. N95 effectiveness is much worse than condoms in practice outside of hospitals because masks have to be worn for the majority of the day, unlike condoms, which are only worn during the sex act itself.
- Abstinence: staying away from any carriers. Unlike with sex, almost impossible to do for a contagious respiratory cold-like pandemic like COVID.
People do not wear masks correctly to withstand being around sick people. This was abundantly clear during the pandemic.
To wear a mask to keep viral particles from spreading is fairly hard to screw up. To wear a mask to stop viral particles from getting in is very easy to screw up.
If someone is walking around with a water mist sprayer, is it easier to keep people dry by having them wear all manner of layers, or to simply drape a cloth over the mist nozzle?
>People do not wear masks correctly to withstand being around sick people. This was abundantly clear during the pandemic.
Enough people wear masks correctly, so well that almost all airborne diseases disappeared during COVID.
But everyone seems to have forgotten that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely contagious, with a R0 extremely high amongst viruses (I think it is only topped by measles?), far higher than flu.
> If it isn’t severe, then why bother protecting yourself at all? (Leave it to those that want to, or need to, to protect themselves.)
It was a severe disease for a certain portion of the population, especially before the vaccine.
If you're willing to write off anyone with any preexisting condition and with older than a certain age, or just have them not participating in society for a few years, that's one kind of tradeoff. Everyone taking extra precautions like wearing masks and trying to socially distance is a different tradeoff.
There's no getting around the fact that given a novel risk, we as a society had to make tough choices and tradeoffs over how to deal with it. There was no way to get out of this with zero negative impact - because the world gave us a bad situation.
Revisionism these days seems to accept that we didn't get it right, but rhetorically asks "could you have done better?", and gives only a shrug.
We should have done better, and we could have.
We put those with preexisting conditions and those over a certain age at greater risk by pretending our protection measures were good enough when they really weren't.
That narrative ignores the actual flip-flopping on masks. First we were told not to use them because they were ineffectual (probably an attempt to hoard PPE for health care workers) then we were told that we had to wear them. So do you believe what the scientists (Fauci in particular) said initially, or believe what they said next, completely contradicting themselves and not explaining how the science had changed.
A lot of us accept that science is constantly growing and only gives us the best answers we have in the moment (as opposed to hard truths like in mathematics). That's a strength of science! When there's a sudden change in alleged consensus for no apparent reason, it seems political.
>It's no secret that scientists—and the science generally—took a hit during the health crisis. Public confidence in scientists fell from 87 percent in April 2000 to a low of 73 percent in October 2023,
Those are ridiculously high numbers that are completely unbelievable. I see the trick they are attempting.
Covid lies damaged trust in public HEALTH and here they are polling 'trust in SCIENTISTS', poll trust in public health and you're going to get far different numbers.
How to rebuild trust:
1. Acknowledge you screwed up big time. Apologize sincerely.
Literally nobody from public health has done step 1 yet.
2. Root cause analysis of how all these lies, deceptions, and manipulations came to be.
3. Make those reports public and take the beating in the media.
4. Create an action plan to prevent these abuses from happening in the future. This has to be done with the people whose voices were censored.
5. Start obeying international law and arrest all people who violated these laws.
That's right... significant arrests are absolutely necessary to rebuild trust. If you dont do this, not only are you refusing accountability you're encouraging exactly the same behaviours to repeat.
Canada is a signatory for ICESCR, UNESCO bio ethics, nuremburg code, rome statutes, and the 2005 IHR. EACH of which are individually good enough for arrests and obviously these criminals would accept the plea deals for their crimes.
The harms done are certainly far exceeding the thresholds to bring international legal mechanisms into play; but we need not go there.
If Public health wants to restore trust, as they absolutely must and should be their highest priority by a huge margin. There needs to be significant arrests.
99.99% this wont happen and public health will never restore their trust.
Okay how did they do this? By requiring masks and social distancing, which both work btw? Not that it matters much - even if they didn't work, I don't see how you can argue that's breaking the nuremburg code or whatever.
I fully disagree with many of the comments I read so far. This is my experience from France, but I guess it was quite similar in most countries. Every time a scientist would be invited to a debate about the status of research, the journalists would find some olibrius who would believe in stars or anything approaching, whom the scientists would have a hard time to counter. The result was utter confusion, and in some cases, some scientists would loose patience and eventually answer with awkward or strong comments. In this context, it was impossible to get any actual information, so much of it was diluted in pseudo-debates. Scientific discourses became an opinion in a sea of misinformation. One of my friend, who had been researching on vaccines for most of his life stopped participating in debates where he was accused to be a murderer or to propagate autism. Of course, there were some scientists with an agenda, but in this context, it is a little bit too easy to put all the blame on people who are not trained for public debates and who were manipulated by the media who played on fear and exaggeration.
I've definitely noticed a retconning of where the signal was coming from and where the noise is coming from. All of this focus on sciences inability to communicate, and no mention of the dishonest framing of the data by the media/everyone. So many intentional attempts to misguide people.
I had a few friends who were COVID conspiracy theorists, and so many of the articles they sent me were hilariously bad. Alex Berenson published a blog post that pulled one graph from a 50 page document that showed some counter-intuitive correlation, but only if you ignored 1 bar on the chart that he cut off in picture he put in the blog post! (Not to mention ignoring the entire other 50 pages of the report)
The video is about the popularity/rise of RFK Jr, however at around 23:00, the author does a retrospective on covid policy in the US. You don't need to watch the entire video, just 5-10 minutes starting at the timestamp above. Here are a few of the points raised in the video:
1. The risk-benefit ratio of the vaccine was different across different age groups and there was a mandate for young healthy adults which was scientifically unsupported.
2. Transmission rates were unaffected by the vaccines (studies referenced in the video at 23:38), yet mandates remained in effect. The point he was making here is that the US was slow to respond, and this had detrimental effects to people's livelihoods.
3. Paul Offit, who is a well known figure in virology, himself didn't comport with the CDC policy regarding vaccination. The point here is that even well regarded experts disagreed with the CDC.
The video goes on to describe how masking recommendations differed across countries, especially for young children. So yea, there's no need to wonder why trust in public policy has been eroded in the US.
In general we seem to have a media/politically driven issue with "studies" being trotted out to try to influence a particular course of action rather than as pure information dissemination.
It's not an issue with "trust in science/scientists" in as much as it's an issue with information flow being controlled in order to produce a narrative, and people can see through that.
Science is - we've done the maths, we've done the study in the wild, if people drive at 25mph then we get N% fewer accidents and M% fewer fatalities from the accidents that do happen.
Politics is - we're enacting a speed limit, putting cameras up and making the fines punitive in order to force you to do it.
The former is far less controversial than the latter.
Honestly the results as reported mostly tell me that the positioning run by organisations that find certain scientific consensuses inconvenient to have been effective.
> Public confidence in scientists fell from 87 percent in April 2000 to a low of 73 percent in October 2023
It's incredible public confidence in scientists is still that high.
When the public turned to scientists with valid questions, they were met with "just trust me bro" and mockery for "doing your own research" in response to being dismissed.
Even worse: the "just trust me bro" people kept being wrong about one thing after another, then pretending a year later the opposite position was their position all along.
The general public isn't smart, but most people can remember life-and-death information they were given a year back.
I hope that over the next 10-20 years the more social media native Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha kids start learning how to mix hard science with good general public communication skills. But also I think the scientific community has to lean into the fact that communicating the truth is harder than communicating falsehoods.
I think there's this somewhat justifiably lazy narrative that if you have the truth on your side you're job will be easier, and so we excessively blame scientists for not adapting faster to this new landscape. The idea that if you can't communicate the truth well, you must be doing something really wrong, rather than failing to do something right. The linked blog post really changed my perspective in this area. It made this argument that basically if the average person, even the average earth science major tried to have a debate with a flat-earther. The flat-earther would destroy that person in a debate. Counter-intuitively it's not that flat-earthers are uninformed, many of them have a perversely in-depth knowledge of physics and earth science. Much deeper than the average person would consider having on a topic like the shape of the earth.
Masks, social distancing (6ft, stickers, circles, plastic shields), 5% projected death toll, did not come from lab, don’t question, no alternate views allowed, mark and ban things on all major social media channels if they are deemed “harmful misinformation”. This was my life while living in SF at the start of the pandemic.
Yeah I think we need some intellectual humility. And I definitely listen for intellectual humility when I’m reading or listening to something.
Yes and multiple 180 degree turns by official media did not help either. In Germany the messaging was:
- It's just some Chinese flu, stop fearmongering
- It's bad but masks don't work, stop panicking
- Masks work but it cannot spread via air, just don't touch anything when you go shopping while infected
- It is actually extremely infectious and only vaccines help, natural immunity does not count
- All the dystopian vaccine passports, regulations, segregations and punishments did not even put a dent in the curve but now it's over thanks to Omicron and we no longer talk about it
And today we still refuse to openly talk on what happened or prepare a plan to prevent it next time... unbelievable.
Scientists should have refused to visit political talkshows because now they have to share the reputation damage caused by media and politics.
the science was like 95% right from the beginning. High seroprevalence heterodox theory was wrong. Natural immunity heterodox theory was wrong. Hydroxychloriquine and Ivermectin theories were wrong. Lockdowns ultimately counterproductive was wrong. Great Barrington was wrong. The Covid truthers are eager to tear down our institutions but the alternatives they offer are much worse.
The whole "trust the science" mantra from the covid years was a complete publicity nightmare for science as an institution, as the scientists eventually ended up contradicting themselves when additional data came in.
Science ultimately does not operate on faith, but on skepticism and doubt. This is its greatest asset, that you can question it freely and it will have answers to all your questions (though sometimes they are "we don't know"). Propping it up as dogmatic truth that must be trusted and never investigated is probably the most anti-scientific thing you can do.