> “People just laughed at me,” Shechtman recalled in an interview this year with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, noting how Linus Pauling, a colossus of science and double Nobel laureate, mounted a frightening “crusade” against him, saying: “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.”
He was ridiculed and apparently even lost his job, or lost potential employment, for insisting on his finding. 30 years later he got his own Nobel prize in Chemistry:
https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-59724820111005
but then - what about those people who weren't vindicated and recognized for being correct after all?
For example, I have no epidemiological credentials, but I am an expert in information/media literacy as well as digital information dissemination and retrieval. So watching many aspects of the US's COVID response was like watching a train wreck. But in a lot of places, disagreeing with the/a government response meant you were a scientifically illiterate rightoid(TM) anti-vaxxer.
"I respect epidemiologists but most of them are terrible science communicators and our institutions are making tactical and strategic errors because our current information system is not suited to what they're doing," wasn't really seen as a viable opinion. The Overton Window did not allow it. That's less than ideal.
Thing is, there's a lot of angst about why people don't trust "experts", but not nearly enough on what these experts are doing to be trustworthy.
"scientist" is the new "priest", and many in that field expect to be treated as such.
Also, around the same time I remember seeing several people comment about how people like me that used masks were "as bad as antivaxxers" for "not trusting the science" by not removing all precautions other than the vaccine. As someone well versed in reading actual scientific papers, it was painful to read these comments.