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I think the backlash against "experts" comes from the fact that way too many things get mixed into "science". When you look at fields like social sciences, nutr

I think the backlash against "experts" comes from the fact that way too many things get mixed into "science". When you look at fields like social sciences, nutrition and economics there are a lot of "scientists" that get publicity for results of very undisciplined work. They don't crosscheck their result for contradictions and often just seem to look for confirmation of their own biases. This contrasts to most physics I read about. Physicists seem to make a big effort to reconcile all their measurements and if they contradict they admit that and say "we don't know yet". So physics and other hard sciences suffer from being put together with a lot of other bad science in the public.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
There are also people - usually rich and/or corporate - deliberately muddying the water in fields such as climate change, pharma testing, and so on. The public doesn't understand science, but it understands corporate PR even less. The corporate PR industry has no plans to change this. One of the biggest and most destructive wins for corporate PR has been the steady erosion of scientific credibility with FUD and character assassination, combined with science-for-hire commercial shilling. This has done huge damage to the credibility of tentative research, and made it very hard to get away with saying "We just don't know yet. So we need to keep looking, because looking where we don't have answers yet is our job." But... not only does the public not understand how corporate PR operates. The scientific community often doesn't either. There's a presumption of good faith in scientific debate. No matter how personal the to-and-fro gets, there's an assumption that everyone is doing the same job for recognisably similar reasons. That presumption is wholly wrong in any situation with significant political and/or financial consequences outside of science.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

There are also people - usually rich and/or corporate - deliberately muddying the water in fields such as climate change, pharma testing, and so on. The public doesn't understand science, but it understands corporate PR even less. The corporate PR industry has no plans to change this. One of the biggest and most destructive wins for corporate PR has been the steady erosion of scientific credibility with FUD and character assassination, combined with science-for-hire commercial shilling. This has done huge damage to the credibility of tentative research, and made it very hard to get away with saying "We just don't know yet. So we need to keep looking, because looking where we don't have answers yet is our job." But... not only does the public not understand how corporate PR operates. The scientific community often doesn't either. There's a presumption of good faith in scientific debate. No matter how personal the to-and-fro gets, there's an assumption that everyone is doing the same job for recognisably similar reasons. That presumption is wholly wrong in any situation with significant political and/or financial consequences outside of science.