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.... or the next best explanation: - If I know nothing, I'm likely to defer to authority - If I know a little, I know enough to at least distrust questionable

.... or the next best explanation: - If I know nothing, I'm likely to defer to authority - If I know a little, I know enough to at least distrust questionable authorities The declining trust makes sense, with the replication crisis, grandstanding, intentional p-hunting, and all the other stuff happening today. I've been affiliated with an elite school for most of my life -- more weakly in recent years, and it just feels sleazy at this point. These things have gone from accidentally wrong results to games to win academia points (high impact factor publications, etc.) and get jobs and prestige. The political split makes sense too. Trust in authority goes, in part, with representation. Conservatives are not welcome on elite university campuses. It's not just conservatives; other groups (like African Americans and some, although not many, immigrant groups) who have been excluded have historically had a hard time trusting those establishments. I'm from an ethnic group about a fifth of whom were killed based in part on eugenics research at Harvard. Thanks Harvard! That was in my parents' time, so the distrust from that has faded, but it at least give empathy for why skepticism is reasonable. I think one of the things I find painful in reading an article like this one is how self-centered it is. It comes off as "Why don't they trust us?" with two presumptions: - everything we believe is true - so there's something wrong with them and not with us If that were true, eugenics wouldn't have happened. The scientific establishment is just as susceptible to politics, biases, and everything else as any other establishment. I think it did pretty well around 1950-2000. Sometime in the nineties or early 00's, a gradual decline started, which is now a freefall. Distrust in things like climate change and vaccines are very dangerous consequences of that. However, it takes a very high level of scientific literacy to sort truth from fiction in a post-truth era. It's undermined by a history of very intentional dishonesty in both of those domains too. Throughout COVID19, the scientific establishment often exaggerated -- now obviously (see: masks) -- to bring about the behavior it wanted. Why would people believe them about vaccines? And climate change predictions had (knowingly) exaggerated timelines and impacts in the eighties and nineties, which are now being cited as reasons for distrust. It's the boy who cried wolf. Climate change is real, but if you have a history of lying about it, some people won't believe you. I don't see this changing without fundamentally realigning incentives in academia.

speeder 5y ago
To add to that there is also outright commercial corruption too. For example a lot of governments made policy based on nutrition research on the US that later was found out to be fraudulent and corrupt, it caused a great damage to nutrition research, a lot of it is deeply distrusted now even when it is correct, and millions of people worldwide have bad diets based off this literally evil corrupt research that been destroying lives, sometimes literally killing people as they eat awful stuff thinking it is good for them. I was almost a victim of that too (when I was teenager, around 16, my Chrolesterol spiked to emergency levels, of the point people would want me to go into surgery to check if my heart was OK... medics and nutrition professionals only made it worse, giving me bogus advice, like giving me diets based on the "pyramid", I got better when I started to ignore them and do my own research). https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
forcry 5y ago
>I don't see this changing without fundamentally realigning incentives in academia. I think the corruption in science is a manifestation of Goodharts law. People started to believe everything with the science label blindly. Like if something that starts with "research has shown", then it must be true (now it is "overwhelming evidence"). And whenever that happens, what ever the label is, tends to get bought. (This is why we have toothpaste commercials with people in lab coats). So the long term solution is to actually decrease the trust of people in "science", the label. Then it will come to a point that just the label of science is not enough to sway the people. Then it has a chance to progress, un-disturbed by these corrupting forces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- murgindrag 5y ago
  That's part of the solution. Another part is to somehow change incentive and organizational structures. MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and similar schools made their reputations decades if not over a century ago, and the current people and structures aren't the same as the people who built those institutions. These are big institutions, with big money and big egos. The people at the top are politician types good at climbing corporate structures. It's hard to overstate the distorting impact billions of dollars and those levels of brand recognition have. It's also hard to overstate the degree to which Goodhart's Law is exaggerated when you have 1000:1 competition for faculty slots, among otherwise qualified applicants. It's Goodhart's law on steroids, turbo, and overdrive. You CANNOT get a faculty position at some labs without cheating, at least a little bit. I don't see this changing unless federal and philanthropic funds are radically redistributed.

speeder 5y ago

To add to that there is also outright commercial corruption too. For example a lot of governments made policy based on nutrition research on the US that later was found out to be fraudulent and corrupt, it caused a great damage to nutrition research, a lot of it is deeply distrusted now even when it is correct, and millions of people worldwide have bad diets based off this literally evil corrupt research that been destroying lives, sometimes literally killing people as they eat awful stuff thinking it is good for them. I was almost a victim of that too (when I was teenager, around 16, my Chrolesterol spiked to emergency levels, of the point people would want me to go into surgery to check if my heart was OK... medics and nutrition professionals only made it worse, giving me bogus advice, like giving me diets based on the "pyramid", I got better when I started to ignore them and do my own research). https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...

forcry 5y ago

>I don't see this changing without fundamentally realigning incentives in academia. I think the corruption in science is a manifestation of Goodharts law. People started to believe everything with the science label blindly. Like if something that starts with "research has shown", then it must be true (now it is "overwhelming evidence"). And whenever that happens, what ever the label is, tends to get bought. (This is why we have toothpaste commercials with people in lab coats). So the long term solution is to actually decrease the trust of people in "science", the label. Then it will come to a point that just the label of science is not enough to sway the people. Then it has a chance to progress, un-disturbed by these corrupting forces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

murgindrag 5y ago
That's part of the solution. Another part is to somehow change incentive and organizational structures. MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and similar schools made their reputations decades if not over a century ago, and the current people and structures aren't the same as the people who built those institutions. These are big institutions, with big money and big egos. The people at the top are politician types good at climbing corporate structures. It's hard to overstate the distorting impact billions of dollars and those levels of brand recognition have. It's also hard to overstate the degree to which Goodhart's Law is exaggerated when you have 1000:1 competition for faculty slots, among otherwise qualified applicants. It's Goodhart's law on steroids, turbo, and overdrive. You CANNOT get a faculty position at some labs without cheating, at least a little bit. I don't see this changing unless federal and philanthropic funds are radically redistributed.