Why People Distrust ‘the Science’
By pitting science against nature and human experience, we rob it of its moral power
Our common sense and felt experience contradict too much of what we’re being told by scientific authorities. That’s a problem. Research scientists’ willingness to play along with industry and accept grants to prove the benefits of tobacco or corn syrup doesn’t encourage us to place more trust in them either. If those arguing in favor of vaccination enjoyed more public credibility, for example, more people would see the logic and ethics of taking a minute risk in order to benefit our collective immunity.
Instead, we get a population increasingly distrustful of scientific evidence, whether it’s about the low correlation between vaccines and autism or the high one between human activity and climate change. People fear that science misses the big picture, misrepresents reality to benefit its funders, or demands we follow counterintuitive and disempowering instructions.
The unemployed coal worker doesn’t want to be retrained to build solar panels for a company thousands of miles away, owned by venture capitalists aligned with progressives screaming about climate change. He wants to create value the way his parents and grandparents did, by digging up the local resource right under his feet…
