Opinion What's the deal with layman(s) questioning the credentials and scientific ability of actual experts?

Probably has something to do with the fact that science has been weaponized post Enlightenment to push scientistic propaganda on the unsuspecting public and now it's glaringly obvious because of social media.

Maybe more people will start studying the philosophy of science and get a better grasp of what science is, and what it isn't. This includes scientists as well. More likely the case will be that people will just watch tiktok videos and then blame it on the left/right dialectic. Like you already see in this thread.
 
People remember when experts are wrong more than they remember when they're right. For example, I took my car in for an oil change and was told that because my car had been given synthetic oil in the past, now I couldn't go back to conventional oil. That turned out to be false, but I didn't find out until after I had paid significantly more for the synthetic stuff. And now, unfortunately, I've come to the conclusion that I can't trust anyone from that particular auto shop, because one employee was wrong one time.

Other times it's when "scientific" recommendations are clearly politically motivated, like when everyone was supposed to buy a Tesla to save the planet - all the way up until they decided they didn't like the guy who made them, so the correct response was apparently to burn Teslas and buy gas guzzlers. Or how masks were absolutely mandatory when Covid was going around...unless you were under three years old, or you were swimming in a public pool, or eating in a restaurant, or some other situation when it would have been inconvenient. Then the masks weren't so important.

If a scientist tells me I shouldn't drink bleach because it's going to harm me, fine, I won't drink bleach. I trust them, and I'm not about to "do my own research." But when you hear something is good, then it's bad, then it's good again, and so on...that's when you start to tune that sort of recommendation out.
 
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GrantB13 said:
At least in science it has the ability to correct and adapt.
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People like to proclaim that as a strength of science, and in large part it is, but the flip side of that is that science is wrong often enough that we can talk about how it gets corrected. What are the odds that today is the first moment in history that we've finally gotten everything right and there will never be any more corrections?
 
Because people confuse hard science with "science" based on what is basically how some experts view something when other experts view the something differently. Then you have the science that has been manipulated to support a view..

Science is based on the foundation of question everything. Question it intelligently but always question.
 
There has always been delusional guys and grifters making outstanding claims on this or that but they didnt have an platform to talk too. Sometimes some of them would get on TV/Radio and get some eyeballs, but upon further inspection (it could take some time) they would phase out of those platforms as the media would bring specialist too.

Internet and social media gave a platform to everybody to "tell their truth". Meanwhile traditional media lost public trust as people started to have access to different version of stories and could see different kind of biases, specially on the political stuff.

That gave "alternative media" more power as they weren't "restricted by sponsors interest" (funny thing is, most podcast are a ad nightmare nowadays). After that we had Covid and everything went to shit. It gave every fool the "but the scientists" or "the academia" is lying fallback on anything. As if the academia or science is a single body of consensus on every area all over the world, it's stupidity on roids. Hard facts and studies got conflated with all the polical stuff.

You go watch a podcast like Rogan and it's a long line of grifters talking dumb shit with no data to back it up. Their "own research" has no metodology, the host generally doesnt know or understand this and there's no pushback. For the podcast host, bringing an "alternative" guy brings more controversy and views than bringing the "boring specialist" who will give the standar acceptable knowledge.

So the average man knows he's being lied to in many things. If he has a controversial opnion in a thing that gets pushback, he'll be more sympathetic to opnions of people who is "being supressed" for their opnions in another things. This breeds distrust and the guy start to go with what he believes anyway, even if it's plain stupid.
I've honestly have been guilty on this on some stuff, it happens.
 
I like when people like Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan attack climate scientists and form conclusions based on their misunderstanding of scientific papers and a general inability to understand complex theories and forces. Ironically, then they turn around claiming to be the experts on psychology, or comedy, and every one must agree with their claims because they are the experts
 
BForrester said:
I think it's a combination of two primary factors: distrust in (scientific) authority, and too many scientific illiterates are "doing their own research."

Edit: I don't know if this disbelief in science is global or uniquely American, but there's a third factor in the states that I think plays a big role. One of our political parties is overtly sowing anti-science and anti-intellectualism among its followers.
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About it being global or American... It definitely is common on the Western world. USA has been exporting culture for decades and unfortunately it exported this kind of distrust too, at least here in Latin America.
 
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The internet gave everyone just enough knowledge to be on Mount Stupid of anything they wanted to look up, and social media/podcasts/youtube gave those idiots a false courage that the experts are wrong and Joe Blow on youtube (who conveniently agrees with my pre-held beliefs about everything) really knows whats going on.
 
BFoe said:
Like others said, there’s always been some of that in America. But MAGA type republicans have especially waged war on it, because they have a fixed worldview based on emotions and they see these things as threats.

Fact checkers blow apart their worldview, so they hate fact checkers.
Education blows apart their worldview, so they hate education.
Science blows apart they’re worldview, so they’re anti-science.

Obviously the rational thing to do is to adjust one’s beliefs in the face of data, but these are not rational people.
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Fucking retarded... You still believing everything they're telling you?










This Asshole is still giving presentations on the National Stage for Climate Change. And worse, world leaders listen to him... lol

Yeah... I'm anti-science and education. I'm a Civil Engineer in Water Treatment. My career is strictly almost all a meritocracy. Can you do the job or not. Because it's immediately apparent when you lie about your abilities and what you can do. lol

However, I collide on the world where politics fuck up public projects. I see it all from the inside from the Government and Design side, including the incompetence and negligence of so called "experts". I know how to design and build these projects... that's all I care about. But that's not the real world.

I've about a jaded as you can get with politics, big corporations or anyone with agendas. I've seen massive fuck ups and how the news gets almost every detail wrong.

Dunnig Kreger is right. You're fucking clueless... as we all are. And the so called "experts" are likely clueless or worse, compromised, for an agenda. If they can lie about one topic, they're definitely lying about other topics. Why wouldn't they? And why would you believe anything "they" say.

And you're dumb as fuck if you take anyone's statement of "Fact" on face value. In one of the biggest government fiascos of human history, Fauci fucking lied several times. Why? To protect his ass and his associates.

Lockdowns? Face mask? 6' social distancing... Social Distancing. Are you fucking kidding. A term they grabbed out of their ass and shoved down your throat. The set back US Children several years over their incomptence.

Who are you supposed to trust now? CNN? MSNBC? Fox? Are you fucking kidding?

We just watching the Biden Admin literally lie about everything from the border to the economy for 4 years. Including Biden's health and mental competency.

lol...
 
Gamer2k4 said:
People like to proclaim that as a strength of science, and in large part it is, but the flip side of that is that science is wrong often enough that we can talk about how it gets corrected. What are the odds that today is the first moment in history that we've finally gotten everything right and there will never be any more corrections?
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Better than claiming to have to answers once thousands of years ago and for all time. Ideas shouldn't get radically challenged on a regular basis. Just refined over time. Shifting a paradigm requires high levels of evidence and confidence.
 
Brampton_Boy said:
For my job, I often have to speak at conferences and events sharing aspects of my research, or being asked to comment about certain topical issues.

I make a fairly concerted effort to be as neutral as possible and rely on what the available data is telling me - in fact, my talks are often specifically about something called "material agnosticism" (there is no such thing as a good or bad material, it depends on the context and application in which it is being used). It is a position that is gaining a lot of traction in the product design space, as it doesn't ascribe value based characteristics to something like plastics vs. paper.

On several occasions now, I have had members of the audience make baseless claims completely divorced from scientific reality. The most recent examples were about micro-plastics - at one conference, an audience member said "Microplastics cause heart attacks". The exact opposite occurred at a different event, where somebody claimed that microplastics don't exist. Trying to explain to people what the data is actually suggesting is a fools errand. They either accuse me of being a paid shill, or that they read their own trusted sources (usually on reddit/facebook/youtube).

I don't go into a mechanic and say "I know more about fixing a transmission because I watched a youtube video", so why are these people with no background questioning my knowledge? It takes every ounce of restraint not to call them retarded, and I am forced to be conciliatory and feign respect for their opinions.
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If all the experts in your field always agree on everything 100%, why do you need to have conferences?
 
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