I completely agree that the rhetoric around “Science!” has gotten increasingly more toxic. I say this as a trained scientist, we really do at bad job of communi

I completely agree that the rhetoric around “Science!” has gotten increasingly more toxic. I say this as a trained scientist, we really do at bad job of communicating. This is made worse by a media and a general public that isn’t used to thinking in scientific terms. By that I mean we spend so much time as scientists living with and making decisions about which course of action to take in the context of uncertain data. Other fields obviously do too, but for a bench scientist, every day is is a constant tradeoff on which data you buy, what experiments will you run to confirm/exclude it, and what’s the downside of that decision. The best rarely speak in full certainty, they talk about probabilities. Contrast to public messaging or journalism which is, “do this, not that.” This has led to people holding “science” as an identity, a talisman of righteousness. That’s not how science works, but people want to feel better by judging people so here we are. I personally would have preferred a short, coherent statement on what we know for sure and what we don’t, how confident we are about the same, and to treat people as adults.