Getting people to trust science is a matter of persuasion, not of “establishing scientific authority”. What's the difference? One is about acknowledging people

Getting people to trust science is a matter of persuasion, not of “establishing scientific authority”. What's the difference? One is about acknowledging people and their needs and seeking their well-being; the other is viewing things as a political tussle for power and anxiety about people who don't seem to be on the same “side” as you. --- There's a beautiful article that I think serves as a model example. In the field of education, there's a certain idea that's believed by many teachers, but which scientists (in cognitive psychology / learning science) know to be a myth. Against this background, this article (“Why mythbusting fails”) discusses why the scientists' approach towards transmitting this knowledge fails to convince its audience. It is worth reading, because it is really about persuasion, about dealing with disagreements between people: https://deansforimpact.org/why-mythbusting-fails-a-guide-to-influencing-education-with-science/ https://deansforimpact.org/why-mythbusting-fails-a-guide-to-... --- Science is many things: 1. A wonderful method for arriving at reliable knowledge. The best we have. 2. The set of facts accumulated via that method. This set will always be tentative, incomplete and contain some fraction of false positives. 3. The set of facts believed by professional scientists today. What would be good for people to trust would be (1) > (2) > (3), but for people taking sides, the priority is inverted: they care more that people be on the side of science (against religion or whatever), than that they apply the scientific method wherever possible. --- In his books like The Mosaic Distinction and the Price of Monotheism, the author Jan Assmann discusses the idea of “counterreligions”. Though many people in Western society may no longer be religious in one sense, they still retain certain attitudes picked up from it, like the missionary/crusader zeal of treating those who do not believe in the same things as them as enemies needing to be either converted or fought, general condescension towards “heathens”, etc. We see this in discussions about politics or nearly anything, where people neatly get polarized into opposing sides rather than a gradual spectrum as one may expect. --- In this very article, see things like: > Science denial, however, is like crime: combating it requires… (treating disbelievers as heretics to be fought) > Galileo cleverly acknowledged the values of his enemies. I don't know about Galileo's views, but why view acknowledgement of others' values as merely a “clever” device? How about replacing “cleverly” with “sincerely”, and “enemies” with “real people we'd like to persuade”?