Trust in scientists hasn't recovered from Covid. Some humility could help

Trust was harmed because people were asked to trust scientists who were in no place to make well grounded statements. Robust science takes years to produce.

The whole "trust the science" mantra from the covid years was a complete publicity nightmare for science as an institution, as the scientists eventually ended up contradicting themselves when additional data came in.

Science ultimately does not operate on faith, but on skepticism and doubt. This is its greatest asset, that you can question it freely and it will have answers to all your questions (though sometimes they are "we don't know"). Propping it up as dogmatic truth that must be trusted and never investigated is probably the most anti-scientific thing you can do.

Another case of a wide gap between what people say they want and what they actually want - but will never admit.

By which I mean Americans say they want scientists to be more humble, and then in practice trust more aggressive loudmouthed cranks.

It's not really discussed why people have lost trust in scientists. I wonder what happened, maybe I'm a bit biased in that regard as I had a scientific background for many years.

I think there's a big problem in science that a lot of of public facing is done by people who are not scientists or are the kind of scientists that no longer care about science. The reason for this is that people feel and scientists feel like they cannot communicate with each other.

With this in mind, you end up in a scenario where there's a lot of miscommunication happening with the scientist side promising things that are impossible or reducing the complexity of things to a point where the science that was done doesn't make much sense anymore.

I think there is really a need for better communication, humility might come from the perspective that scientists need to admit this is a problem. It's not that the people are dumb it's that academics are failing at educating them.

The replication crisis hasn’t helped either.

When done correctly, science can provide invaluable information. But publishing a paper does not mean science was done. And science communicators have on occasion treated inferences made from research with the seriousness of the research, not with the frivolousness of an informed guess.

Let me paint a bit of a difficult conundrum from the pandemic:

Masks work dramatically better when the person wearing the mask is the one who is sick. A grocery store where the one infected person is masked is better than the grocery store where the one infected person is openly coughing around 30 masked people. Everyone masked works best, but the heavy lifting is done by the sick persons mask.

In short; You wear a mask to protect others from you, not the other way around.

However, this creates a severe social stigma problem however: People wearing masks are outing themselves as being sick (whether or not they actually are). The result is people don't wear masks for fear of social retaliation.

So now you, as a scientist, have to figure out what the messaging around masks is going to be. Wear a mask to protect others? Wear a mask to protect yourself? Everyone wear a mask all the time because we say so?

It was a damned if you do damned if you don't situation. They went with everyone wear a mask all the time, alluding to the implication of masking being a tool of self preservation. Of course masks don't work great at stopping you from getting sick (outside of being specially trained in their use), which is easily proved, and half the country recognized they were being lied too (while never acknowledging that the sick person wearing a mask works great).

>It's no secret that scientists—and the science generally—took a hit during the health crisis. Public confidence in scientists fell from 87 percent in April 2000 to a low of 73 percent in October 2023,

Those are ridiculously high numbers that are completely unbelievable. I see the trick they are attempting.

Covid lies damaged trust in public HEALTH and here they are polling 'trust in SCIENTISTS', poll trust in public health and you're going to get far different numbers.

How to rebuild trust:

1. Acknowledge you screwed up big time. Apologize sincerely.

Literally nobody from public health has done step 1 yet.

2. Root cause analysis of how all these lies, deceptions, and manipulations came to be.

3. Make those reports public and take the beating in the media.

4. Create an action plan to prevent these abuses from happening in the future. This has to be done with the people whose voices were censored.

5. Start obeying international law and arrest all people who violated these laws.

That's right... significant arrests are absolutely necessary to rebuild trust. If you dont do this, not only are you refusing accountability you're encouraging exactly the same behaviours to repeat.

I fully disagree with many of the comments I read so far. This is my experience from France, but I guess it was quite similar in most countries. Every time a scientist would be invited to a debate about the status of research, the journalists would find some olibrius who would believe in stars or anything approaching, whom the scientists would have a hard time to counter. The result was utter confusion, and in some cases, some scientists would loose patience and eventually answer with awkward or strong comments. In this context, it was impossible to get any actual information, so much of it was diluted in pseudo-debates. Scientific discourses became an opinion in a sea of misinformation. One of my friend, who had been researching on vaccines for most of his life stopped participating in debates where he was accused to be a murderer or to propagate autism. Of course, there were some scientists with an agenda, but in this context, it is a little bit too easy to put all the blame on people who are not trained for public debates and who were manipulated by the media who played on fear and exaggeration.

For future reference, here's a well articulated description of what went wrong in the US:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1diXKxuoDOQ (see 22:35/23:00)

The video is about the popularity/rise of RFK Jr, however at around 23:00, the author does a retrospective on covid policy in the US. You don't need to watch the entire video, just 5-10 minutes starting at the timestamp above. Here are a few of the points raised in the video:

1. The risk-benefit ratio of the vaccine was different across different age groups and there was a mandate for young healthy adults which was scientifically unsupported.

2. Transmission rates were unaffected by the vaccines (studies referenced in the video at 23:38), yet mandates remained in effect. The point he was making here is that the US was slow to respond, and this had detrimental effects to people's livelihoods.

3. Paul Offit, who is a well known figure in virology, himself didn't comport with the CDC policy regarding vaccination. The point here is that even well regarded experts disagreed with the CDC.

The video goes on to describe how masking recommendations differed across countries, especially for young children. So yea, there's no need to wonder why trust in public policy has been eroded in the US.

In general we seem to have a media/politically driven issue with "studies" being trotted out to try to influence a particular course of action rather than as pure information dissemination.

It's not an issue with "trust in science/scientists" in as much as it's an issue with information flow being controlled in order to produce a narrative, and people can see through that.

Science is - we've done the maths, we've done the study in the wild, if people drive at 25mph then we get N% fewer accidents and M% fewer fatalities from the accidents that do happen.

Politics is - we're enacting a speed limit, putting cameras up and making the fines punitive in order to force you to do it.

The former is far less controversial than the latter.

Honestly the results as reported mostly tell me that the positioning run by organisations that find certain scientific consensuses inconvenient to have been effective.

> Public confidence in scientists fell from 87 percent in April 2000 to a low of 73 percent in October 2023

It's incredible public confidence in scientists is still that high.

When the public turned to scientists with valid questions, they were met with "just trust me bro" and mockery for "doing your own research" in response to being dismissed.

Even worse: the "just trust me bro" people kept being wrong about one thing after another, then pretending a year later the opposite position was their position all along.

The general public isn't smart, but most people can remember life-and-death information they were given a year back.

I hope that over the next 10-20 years the more social media native Gen-Z/Gen-Alpha kids start learning how to mix hard science with good general public communication skills. But also I think the scientific community has to lean into the fact that communicating the truth is harder than communicating falsehoods.

I think there's this somewhat justifiably lazy narrative that if you have the truth on your side you're job will be easier, and so we excessively blame scientists for not adapting faster to this new landscape. The idea that if you can't communicate the truth well, you must be doing something really wrong, rather than failing to do something right. The linked blog post really changed my perspective in this area. It made this argument that basically if the average person, even the average earth science major tried to have a debate with a flat-earther. The flat-earther would destroy that person in a debate. Counter-intuitively it's not that flat-earthers are uninformed, many of them have a perversely in-depth knowledge of physics and earth science. Much deeper than the average person would consider having on a topic like the shape of the earth.

Edit, Found it: https://benthams.substack.com/p/conspiracy-theorists-arent-i...

Masks, social distancing (6ft, stickers, circles, plastic shields), 5% projected death toll, did not come from lab, don’t question, no alternate views allowed, mark and ban things on all major social media channels if they are deemed “harmful misinformation”. This was my life while living in SF at the start of the pandemic.

Yeah I think we need some intellectual humility. And I definitely listen for intellectual humility when I’m reading or listening to something.

the science was like 95% right from the beginning. High seroprevalence heterodox theory was wrong. Natural immunity heterodox theory was wrong. Hydroxychloriquine and Ivermectin theories were wrong. Lockdowns ultimately counterproductive was wrong. Great Barrington was wrong. The Covid truthers are eager to tear down our institutions but the alternatives they offer are much worse.