Science’s Biggest Fail

"I think science has earned its lack of credibility with the public. If you kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and trust you?"

I'm really happy to see that someone else sees this. I've been harping on this for a long time -- that the reason people believe things like anti-vaxx propaganda is not because they are idiots but because scientific authorities, the media, and the medical establishment have not earned their trust.

People subscribe to kooky conspiracy theories and fringe/quack medical ideas because those advancing those points of view appear more credible than our society's institutions. Much of that appearance of credibility is by default -- it's more that our institutions have ruined their own credibility by being overconfident or in some cases actually deceptive. I personally think it extends way beyond medicine. When the president tells us we're invading Iraq because it has "weapons of mass destruction," and that turns out to be almost entirely hot air, should people be considered stupid for suddenly trusting Alex Jones more than they trust the POTUS?

Trust is hard to earn and easy to squander. In addition when you have someone trust and then stab them in the back, the emotional reaction from that is far worse than if you never had any trust to begin with. Betrayal inspires some of the deepest negative emotions.

Edit:

Another phenomenon that I think is at work, especially with people like Alex Jones and wacky conspiracy theories, is a kind of "fuck you factor" that they have. Believing such things and perpetuating them is an act of (often subconscious) protest -- akin to things like calling yourself a "Satanist" in protest against fundamentalist religion. You might call these kinds of things "protest beliefs."

I have a friend who leans toward the view that we didn't land on the moon. He's a very intelligent person. I personally believe -- and I've told him this -- that this "belief" is more of a big fuck you to the backward-and-sideways direction NASA and America in general has taken post-Apollo. "Fine then... if you're going to cancel visionary projects so we can have more war and tax breaks for the financial industry, then I'm going to deny that you ever did it in the first place to spite you." He didn't really deny that, just kind of shrugged.

"How do you make people trust a system that is designed to get wrong answers more often than right answers?"

You can start by teaching kids how real science is actually done in order to get them to understand and trust the process rather than the we-only-deal-in-absolutes pop-news headlines.

The blame is misplaced here, though. There's no real avenue for science to interact with the public currently (except for /r/AskScience, which is a terrific development). A vast majority of the misleading described is perpetuated by news headlines ending in question marks and "doctors" with mail order degrees trying to sell books.

If there's any blame to be placed on scientific institutions it's not that they are bad at communicating to the public, but rather that they need to start communicating to the public. This is really a question of incentives - what do scientists have to gain from communicating reasonable conclusions about their results? And how can they compete with exaggeration by media outlets?

Insufficient repetition is a huge problem in medical science. There is no incentive to replicate existing studies, as it doesn't advance your career. A related problem is that there is no incentive to publish negative results.

> Science isn’t about being right every time, or even most of the time. It is about being more right over time and fixing what it got wrong. So how is a common citizen supposed to know when science is “done” and when it is halfway to done which is the same as being wrong?

This is asking the wrong question. A cost-benefit analysis needs to be done, when weighing scientific claims to act on, not just saying "this is right" or "this is wrong". If scientists are pretty sure that me eating an apple (for instance) is a good thing, it costs me little in exchange for a decent potential benefit.

This is why a scientifically literate populace is so incredibly important; without it, you get this all-or-nothing hogwash that this article makes out to be a good thing, for whatever reason.