I think there's a subtle miscommunication going on here (and my intuition is that this is an extremely common phenomenon, and not limited to only the topic of S

I think there's a subtle miscommunication going on here (and my intuition is that this is an extremely common phenomenon, and not limited to only the topic of Science). Whereas you are talking about Science, as practiced by scientists, person_of_color is talking about "Science", as it is perceived by the general public. Science vs "Science". And not to be overlooked are the layers between these two as well: the communication/information ecosystem. This may seem like a subtle, unimportant difference (or not noticed at all in normal(!), realtime cognition), but that's just an impression...perception - the actual importance is the systemic consequences in the world. We can wag our fingers all day at the idiots who "don't understand/listen to The Science", but if actual science (Science vs "Science") isn't actually communicated to the public, and also done in a manner such that it both(!) lands and sticks in these people's minds, we will then enjoy the suboptimal consequences that result. We can then (choose to) proceed to assign blame (enjoying the psychological/emotional pleasure that often comes with that) as to whose "fault" this is all we want - the current systemic consequences are what they are (however: the future consequences may be influenced by this blame assignment process). So says Science (or more precisely, would say, if we could be bothered to study such things, with the same depth and rigour that we study the hard sciences [1]). > Science is the process of flushing all the bad opinions out much like they are doing in this article. Is this article Science, or "Science", or a hybrid (in general, and also from this perspective of Systemic Consequences)? I would personally classify it as being far more towards the "Science" side of the spectrum. > Now in December the scientists will be comfortably ahead of the laypeople in their understanding of the Coronavirus. In most respects surely, but all? And again: might even seemingly completely innocuous statements like this possibly have Systemic Consequences? [1] How Much Does It Cost To Find A Higgs Boson? https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-does-it-cost-to-find-a-higgs-boson/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/07/05/how-much-d... > The Large Hadron Collider took about a decade to construct, for a total cost of about $4.75 billion. There are several different experiments going on at the LHC, including the CMS and ATLAS Detectors which discovered the Higgs boson. CERN contributes about 20% of the cost of those experiments, which is a total of about $5.5 billion a year. The remainder of the funding for those experiments is provided by international collaborations. Computing power is also a significant part of the cost of running CERN - about $286 million annually. Electricity costs alone for the LHC run about $23.5 million per year. The total operating budget of the LHC runs to about $1 billion per year. > The Large Hadron Collider was first turned on in August of 2008, then stopped for repairs in September until November 2009. Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion. That's a large amount, but there are over 50 billionaires on the Forbes list actually worth more than that. The money itself is provided by the CERN member countries, and a little over 70% of the annual budget is provided by Germany, the U.K., Italy, France and Spain. The money for the experiments also comes from large institutions such as universities and observer governments such as the United States, India, and Russia.