- 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.