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July 27, 2022

Pew Research recently released a poll showing a significant drop in the public’s trust in science — specifically, medical science. While the “trust trend” towards science has been downward for a while, the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced the issue in ways harder to ignore and exacerbated the trend.

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The results of this poll lead to two questions: Why is trust in science dropping? What can we do about it?

In a recent series of articles in Ubiquity, a publication of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), one article points out how much more complex science has become, using mathematical science as an example. One measure of this increasing complexity is the declining number of single-author papers and the increasing number of papers written by interdisciplinary teams. According to the article, increasing complexity reduces trust in science in two ways.

First, increasing complexity makes it harder to understand the results of science. The average person just doesn’t have the training or knowledge to parse scientific papers, and people don’t trust what they cannot understand. Increasing complexity doesn’t seem a likely culprit for the declining trust in science, however — it’s always easy to blame your audience for not understanding you. Still, it’s rarely the audience’s fault.

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Second, increasing complexity reduces our ability to falsify results. Theories are proposed and accepted as truth, only to be overturned years — or worse, days — later, leading to the impression that scientists change their minds a lot and that “science-backed truth” is not really “truth” at all.

While this might play a role in the declining trust in science, it doesn’t seem decisive. Most people accept that science is a process. Things we once believed to be true will be disproven when new experiments are made possible via new techniques because someone finds a flaw in some older experiment, etc.

Another article in this special issue argues trust in science is falling because we aren’t trying hard enough to falsify broad, general claims made under a scientific mantle. The authors use examples from software development, but a recent study expands the problem to the medical field. At least some of the “science-backed” standards used for hospital care seem wasteful at best and harmful to patients at worst.

Trust in science does, however, take a hit when broad scientific claims are used for financial purposes. For instance, a recent article in the Epoch Times describes pharmaceutical companies driving the off-label use of medications for financial gain — even though this can sometimes contribute to patient harm.

The recent COVID-19 vaccines are another potential instance of this. From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, medical authorities held out vaccines as the “only” way to move past draconian lockdowns so normal life could resume. However, it turns out the vaccines aren’t very good at preventing the disease from spreading, nor are they very good at preventing death, nor even at reducing symptoms.

When health authorities change the meaning of the word “vaccine” to match what they’ve created, evidence that naturally developed immune reactions are effective is suppressed, and treatments with mixed effectiveness and no known side effects (such as Ivermectin) are labeled “dangerous,” the average person is justified in doubting the sincerity of the medical establishment. Revelations of health officials “earning” hundreds of millions of dollars in patent royalties and record-high pharmaceutical profits make it easy to see how the average person might see “science” as just another rigged game used to make the rich richer at the expense of the middle class and poor.