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.
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.