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Okay, look, science has some ups and downs but unless you expand its definition to include all components of modern society, it's not charging people $300 for insulin. That's a result of the various problems of the US medical system. We can check this claim by comparing the price of insulin in different countries, where science (being the same everywhere in the universe) is the same but business works differently.

Right - "Trust the science" means that if your doctor prescribes you insulin for high blood sugar, it's likely to work and to help you live longer and healthier.

There are political decisions that cause it to be ruinously expensive in the US. The messy bit is where science necessarily interacts with politics.

Doctor's prescriptions aren't really scientific although they are a lot more science-adjacent than price setting.

What I think GP is hinting at is that low trust in science is part of a general low trust in elites. If you don’t trust elites for whatever reason, personally I think it’s more complicated than $300 insulin, then you’re also not going to trust scientific elites either.

In what universe are researchers elites and where do I apply for their work visa?

Elite is not equivalent to rich. In particular their high level of training and education puts them into a special social class that very much makes them elite compared to the rest of society.

You could replace “elite” with “professional class.”

Researchers and scientists are absolutely not elites. However, they almost exclusively rely on the ruling class for their funding, for their platforms, for their careers, and thus they become de facto toadies of the elite.

Just go see how well the ruling class is treating the doctors that are actually fighting covid on the front lines, showing it's a treatable ailment, saving lives. Since their perspectives don't align with Team Elite's clear agenda (inject everyone, boosters forever!), they are ridiculed, shamed, relegated to alternative or "low status" press.

> Researchers and scientists are absolutely not elites. However, they almost exclusively rely on the ruling class for their funding, for their platforms, for their careers, and thus they become de facto toadies of the elite.

You’re confusing economic class and social class. PhDs might not be rich, but they have a much elevated social status compared to the vast majority of the populace.

PhDs in general may have a very minor elevation in status compared to other social groups. There are many, many PhDs, many of them working shitty jobs outside their fields. Think outside STEM, wherein generations of poor saps were sold on the professorial life when entering their PhD program but now have their Gender Studies or Literature PhD proudly on their shared apartment wall while they drive bus for the city of Columbus.

I agree they aren’t elites, which is why I’m suggesting the term “professional” instead of “scientific elite” in the GP post above.

The professional class are the foot soldiers of the elite class. I subscribe to the view put forth in “Disciplined Minds,” a great book on the subject.

https://louisville.edu/journal/workplace/martinreview.html

Elite doesn't mean wealthy. It means superior, and when we talk about scientific research we're talking about work being done by people with elite training compared to the layman.

This is why we talk about peer review including the scientific community, not the community of all people. It is an elite group with specific skills.

Maybe PhDs or PostDocs are not elites but professors they work for, definitely are elites. If you need work visa you are not in elite category. It is like asking how to apply visa to be senator, governor, member of congress or millionaire entrepreneur and so on.

I would say we shouldn't trust institutions on just the fact that they are an institution (elite, other credentialized thing/person). That people will/should build trust based on demonstratable answers to the questions they have. If it's based on credentialing, then we'll end up with people choosing which credentialed person to believe... and taking veterinarian ivermectin because some figure they trust told them too.

In general, I think questioning (within reason) government and other institutions helps weed out bad policy and hold them accountable.

They aren't really talking about science. They are talking about "trust the science", group-think, and trust in societal institutions.

You're right that insulin price has nothing to do with science, but rather economics and societal institutions/policies. The trust in the institution presenting the science is important. The purpose if science is to answer questions in fact objectively through reproducible observations. Telling people not to ask reasonable questions and just "trust the science" is appearently antithetical to people who understand the process.

Telling average people to "trust the science" in practice means telling them to trust the guy who says "I am speaking in the name of science". Often, he is just lying. The average people are not going to "trust the science" by reading peer-reviewed studies.

Then there is the fact that someone can be a respected scientist in e.g. linguistics and simultaneously a crackpot in e.g. quantum physics, or vice versa. So you need to be careful even with trusting the actual scientists. (Similarly, the doctor talking about covid... is he an epidemiologist, or does he just fix broken legs?)

Trying to think about best solution to make the actual science accessible to average people... the "ask science" subreddit is probably the best currently existing option.

You don't even have to go that far. Scientists are just people. They are intelligent and experts in their fields but to be a Phd means you have a very narrow slice that you are an expert in.

The problem is when these people try to public support certain government policies. Knowing climate science or quantum physics does not qualify you to be a policy maker. It does qualify you to inform policy makers on your narrow area of expertise.

I've seen a lot of scientists pull appeal to authority fallacies by saying, I'm an expert in X and I say the government should do Y. Most people aren't scientists but they are smart enough to know that scientists don't know everything and usually not any more adept at politics or government than anyone else.

Politicization of science by scientists has done more damage to the public trust in scientific institutions than anything else.

Criticizing "trust the science" isn't the same thing as criticizing science. "trust the science" is a euphemism for "trust the system" i.e., the media, special interest groups (e.g., pharma), government, etc. "Trust the system's portrait of 'the science' irrespective of whether or not it accurately represents the views of a quorum of scientists". In other words, "trust the system" is about institutions broadly, not science in particular. That said, "trust the science" rhetoric works precisely because science is so complicated for individuals to tease out--we depend on someone (our epistemological institutions) to synthesize it for us.

I agree with you in the abstract level you're operating on, but in the two cases I know of where the slogan "trust the science" is applied (vaccine safety/efficacy and global warming), the claims about the opinions of scientists are mostly true and the question is whether the studies are right. The big studies do say that the vaccine is effective, and they do say that global warming is real, and you don't have to trust the Institutions(tm) because, well, you can read the studies yourself.

Disclaimer: I have not read anywhere near every news article published on either topic, and if you want to make the case that the media is presenting a consensus different from scientist's, that would be worth looking in to.

I'm generally in agreement with you about those two cases as well, but it's hard to ask the public to "trust the science" in those cases when "the science" (i.e., epistemological institutions) don't seem trustworthy more broadly.

Moreover, my understanding of the actual science (and it's hard to say for certain because again, science is complicated and institutions distort) is that natural immunity performs at least as well as vaccine immunity (and maybe even quite a lot better), but a lot of people are (perhaps understandably) upset at "vaccine passport" policies which don't make exemptions for the naturally immune. Moreover, "the science" i.e., the media, governments, etc seem (or at least seemed--I haven't kept up with the issue recently and perhaps the media has finally picked it up?) very reluctant to talk about the merits of natural immunity. So even in what seemed like a slam-dunk, happy path where "the science" and the actual science seemed to align, the picture seems plausibly distorted. :(

Here are the facts about that which I know:

- Someone who has been vaccinated is several times less likely to catch it than someone who has not.

- Someone who has had it and gotten better is several times less likely to catch it again than someone who has been vaccinated but has not caught it yet. (This is one definition of "natural immunity.")

- For some reason, many registries won't count a positive test followed by a negative test as evidence for immunity.

The first two are clearly laid out in the Israeli study and are what I'd call "the scientific consensus," gathered by reading what actual scientists are saying. I'm lost at the jump from the first two points to the third because I can't see why it's done that way. The media is not completely silent on natural immunity, I think I saw one article about the Israeli study somewhere.

The media is never completely silent about anything, but for many, many, many months it was very difficult to get any information at all about natural immunity from the media. I recall Googling around about it because everyone was talking about vaccination numbers and progress, but for the better part of a year, no one was talking about how many people had natural immunity much less how effective it is. Even if you're inclined to argue, "but what if no one knew the answers to those questions?"--first of all, it's unlikely that epidemiologists and virologists had no estimates at all, and even if they did, that itself would be newsworthy. Moreover, it's the media's job to dig up these answers.

Everyone knows about "regulatory capture", the mechanism via which regulators who are supposed to work for the people become captured by the elite few who control the organizations they ostensibly regulate. But what I think most people fail to see is that the ruling class have effectively captured every major institution in the west, possibly the globe. From the academy, to the science industry, the press, government, the courts, everything, all the way down, is completely and utterly captured by a tiny elite.

That anyone, after the past couple years, could think that the elite are in any way well-meaning is absurd--I think the most charitably you could interpret the data is that they are so incompetent they shouldn't be trusted to judge a high school gymnastics competition.

When it comes to the scientific institutions, I think Horton, current editor of The Lancet, sums it up well: "The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness."

>. Insulin could cost $15 per vial, but they can cost $300.

I guess the lesson here is to educate folk that "science" doesn't set insulin prices?

Is that a widespread belief?

I think the OP is saying "high modernist science-imitating central planners" when they use the word "science." They're talking about the people who give prions names like "Shawshank Diagnostic and Treatment Center."

I mean we can't really spend decades systemtically ruining people's lives then hope they beleive whatever we say about thier health/research can we?

catchphrases like 'trust the science' don't even make sense everyone knows it really means just 'trust who ever is in-charge'

credibility problems all-around

>I mean we can't really spend decades systemtically ruining people's lives then hope they beleive whatever we say about thier health/research can we?

I don't really know what that means.

Dude working on COVID research didn't create the medical industry...

How do you know you can trust dude working on COVID research? It’s impossible for an individual to verify everything.

Trust doesn’t scale. If somebody could solve this society would be a lot better off.

I don't know where this idea is going.

If we're talking about people who think of medical prices as part of "science" but apparently also are worried if they can trust a given researcher who happened to be working on COVID?

I don't think any of this is how people actually think / what motivates them.

I agree with this. Relatedly, the media's portrayal of "who trusts the science" (with respect to vaccination rates in particular) has been really interesting. It seems like they're deeply invested in giving the impression that conservatives don't "trust the science", and the coverage seems particularly unsympathetic. But when one digs in further, it seems that poor people don't trust the science, including poor liberals and progressives, which is why even blue cities hardly outperformed the national average for vaccination rates for so long. Of course, when the media broaches that, the reporting becomes sympathetic, e.g., "why is science failing communities of color?" and so on.

And of course, these kind of shenanigans further discredit the media--including the science media--to the poor, minorities, and conservatives thus propagating a cycle of division. It's not enough to have a media that shares our (wealth, predominantly white liberals and progressives) biases, we really need to get back to a media that aspired toward objectivity and neutrality.

EDIT: to put a finer point on it, when we politicize science, we make it harder for people on the outside to trust science. And we have some pretty big problems to tackle right now--covid and climate with the latter being orders of magnitude more serious than the former--and we should want to make it as easy as possible for people to trust the science and do what they can--specifically vote--accordingly. And with respect to climate and covid, it's not liberals who are primarily responsible for distorting the science, but we do distort it on a wide array of social issues and it's hard for lay people to know which science is distorted and which is reliable. If we care about these things, we need to put on our grown-up pants and stop using these issues as political footballs (this means not responding to this comment with some variation of "but the other side is worse than us!" as though it absolves us of our own responsibility). /soapbox

If we want to say science is a byproduct of the social system we have in place, then I understand your point. We don't need that system to have science tho. You can practice science yourself. That's kind of the point of it really.

> You can practice science yourself

Being a gentleman scientist, back when it was a thing, required you to be a gentleman, that is, rich... and well, usually a man too, but that was how it was back then.

Science needs years of study, training in the use of complex machinery and strict methods, access and being able to understand scientific publications meant for peers.

Chances are you're not a peer. With much effort, under the right circumstances, maybe a stroke of luck in your youth, you could aspire to be one of such.

But you probably aren't, and trusting the science means trusting scientific institutions, men and women in white robes delivering what's, at this point in time, accepted as truth.

That's a big responsibility to bear of them, and if there's an erosion of trust in social institutions, then people won't bestow it upon them either.

You're describing the social constructs we currently have in place. Science, the practice, doesn't require complex machines. If it did, dissecting animals with knives and drawing what you see with pencil and paper and describing what you did and how you suspect the body works wouldn't be Science, but I believe that it is.

Today we have peer review journals, LHC, computers etc and we use that when we practice Science but the tools and the social structure are not Science. Science is a process and anyone can do it.

The insulin issue is purely a broken American issue. It isn't an issue anywhere else that I'm aware of.

Insulin does not cost $300 in >90% of countries out there. You are just cherry-picking examples to fit your narrative.

This is a swing and a miss.

While I agree insulin prices are way too high and the government allows Big Pharma to profit off death and the taxpayer, this is really nothing to do with science and all to do with the legislation around intellectual property that, for example, prevents the import of cheaper and equivalent substitutes from Canada and elsewhere.

The example of institutional failure and its effects I always come back to is autoworkers unions. An entire generation of millions of autoworkers have left Detroit (once the richest city in the world per capita) and become anti-establishment conservatives as a result of broken trust and mistreatment.

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Yes, fixed. Thank you.

Dont conflate science with capitalistic empire built on top of it

The cause of that problem is capitalism yet people trust that system blindly.

Do you even know what capitalism is?