[Interview+] Why People Stop Trusting Science? And How Can We Fix It

Great interview, great conversation. Keep em coming. 👍🏻

Scientists HAVE lied to us, Frazier. Many times. That’s why we don’t trust them — at least in some fields. Two notable examples — climate change and Covid. As for the former, the (in)famous hockey stick graph is one of the most notable examples. But, there are many, many more. If I had time I would go back through my articles and paper files and quote yo chapter and verse. As you know, the U.S. federal government funds quite a bit of research. Many politicians and news organizations have an agenda regarding climate change. If they feel a piece of research will fit their narrative — even if the researchers must tweak their results — they’ll fund it. Otherwise, they won’t. Enough on that. Now take Covid. They lied about masks — repeatedly. They finally admitted the truth — masks do little to help, even N95 masks. They lied about toddlers and young kids and pregnant women needing the vaccine. They even lied that what they developed WAS a vaccine (hence the CDC changing the definition of a vaccine). Frazier, the bottom line is that … perception IS reality for many of us. And, we perceive some scientists, ESPECIALLY Fauci, lied to us. It is going to take a long, long time to restore the public trust. Fortunately, the public doesn’t view all scientific endeavor in this light. I think your fields are relatively unscathed.

This occurs when there is a philosophical split between rational thinking, based on scientific facts, and one’s ethics, often based on irrational values. Science can only tell you how to get somewhere. It cannot tell you where to go. All decisions to act are based on what one values and wishes to obtain, which is quit often irrational. Thus often the mistrust of scientific facts that do not align with achieving one’s values.

Thought provoking. Thank you for the discussion. I’ve crossed a lot of bridges and learned that if the other person won’t step into the bridge the best i can do is leave a morsel they can pick up when they are ready. History has shown how important timing is. Is it time for scientists to do the science so they can take the reins when the pendulum swings back? I understand the financial frustrations and the need for a support system however the foundations of science have often made huge strides in less-than-optimal times.

Cheers from Columbus, Ohio! Thanks for this discussion

I think you recently suggested just switching from youtube's homepage, where we are at the mercy of the algorithm, to the subscriptions page. Its a decent idea.. but it also points out that you, creators, do have a bit of power to enact change. If the other creators you associate with began giving the same advice it could really catch on. Its not enough though. Youtube would probably adjust. Youtube like any social media does not make its money by maximizing truth and serving the public good. Trying to force it or regulate it to do so would be like trying to herd cats.. where we are the mice. We know social media is poisoning all our discourse. It may have been just accidental at some point, and that would be bad enough, but there are lots of datapoints, such as that mechahitler debacle, they are being tweaked to serve the political objectives of people like Elon Musk. At the very least, social media has undermined electoral finance laws in every democracy. Legal political adverts are inconsequential to the russian botfarms and the algorithm itself. Even NZ now has political parties spouting maga slogans, and if comment sections in the runup to elections reflected reality, they would have 90% of the vote. The situation may be about to become inconceivably worse. AI doesnt have to be smarter than human to destroy us. It only has to be smarter than our mob consciousness, and social media lays that out like a rat brain in a lab with electrodes measuring and tweaking every neuron. You think elections are weird now. It may be only the beginning of the madness. Which finally gets me to my central point. Where are there serious discussions of legislation to fix this? Where is the protest I can march in? What, specifically, would I be marching for? I have a bunch of ideas, from "democratic media" to fact checking trust networks to making social media and OSs public utilities, but there are surely brighter people with better ideas.. where are they? Before we could enact legislative change, maybe we could figure out what we actually need in order to trust a social media platform. I think there are various open source options to start with. I see various content creators esp. political ones begging me to subscribe to alternative SM like patreon and substack just in case youtube suddenly bends the knee. If we knew what we wanted, maybe we could start a Patreon campaign right here.

I think there's a really simple insight I rarely see discussed, with unfortunately no way to do anything about it. People like science when science gives them good news, and don't like science when it gives them bad news. When science says holy shit, airplanes, no one complains about that. When the balance of scientific evidence says the vehicles that people rely on for their personal lives and financial stability are doing bad things to the environment, or that a way to protect higher risk people would be for lower risk people to stay at home, or potentially even lose their job in the disruption that causes, they don't like that, and rationalize that maybe the scientists are just wrong/paid off/in some nebulous conspiracy. Unfortunately, scientists can't force the universe to only give them good news, so it may be just inevitable that anti-science rhetoric may go dormant but will never be extinguished as long as human nature remains unchanged, and may flare up at any time.

You talk about PR departments, but while PR departments may raise visibility but would they really raise trust. Big corporations all have large PR departments, but does that make you trust them more? Political parties have large PR departments, but does that make you trust them more? The basic problem is that you are confusing trusting the science with trusting the scientists. Science is about the results of experiments. If you show someone the results of an experiment, then they are likely to trust that. You ask someone to trust a person just because they are a scientist then they might (rightly) be more sceptical. Science should be impersonal, it should be about experiments, without regard to the human beings associated with those experiments.

You talk about science and politics with regard to Galileo, but what about the interplay of science and politics with regard to eugenics? That too was an excuse for racism (a political agenda) wrapped up in a cloak of scientific 'respectability'? Even some of the arguments supporting black slavery (i.e. that the blacks are racially incapable of looking after themselves), some of those arguments could be said to be pseudo-scientific in nature.

As you say, the Covid pandemic did bring science into conflict with politics, but that was as much about scientists being corrupted by politics as about politicians challenging the science. The problem is that science can link cause and effect, but it cannot tell you right from wrong. When scientists try telling you what you should do then they cease to be scientists and start becoming politicians. Scientists can, and should, tell you the likely consequences of choosing option A, or the different outcomes of choosing option B; but it has to be a political, and not a scientific, judgement as to whether option A it more undesirable than option B, or visa versa. Some of this is also about the cowardice of politicians. Because politicians feel the public don't trust them any longer so they become too willing to wheel out scientists to front for them, but this trades on the assumption that the scientists are more trusted than the politicians, but in doing that it then undermines the trust the public place in scientists. As for the debate as to whether people in the past were worse off because they had less science, that is a value judgement. Of course, it is reasonable to say that people centuries ago were materially less well off than we are today, because science is all about the material world (more specifically, it is about studying the way matter works). What is much more difficult to say is whether people in past centuries were happier than we are today, because science in no way addresses the happiness of human beings. This is not a criticism of science (no branch of philosophy can address everything at once), it is just to highlight the limitations of science.

I think a combination of hands on and book learning is good for learning. This is my personal opinion just so you know.

When I heard " ... and they killed him for it! " I desperately started searching for the Stop button. Fortunately I heard Fraser correct Mr. Bertley just before I completed exiting the podcast. Thank you Fraser! BTW, I think you found your answer......

Perhaps the visable experts are a bit too arrogant and condescending and seem to chase fame and publish paper after paper, many of which are simply wrong.