I watched Angela Collier, an astrophysicist, on YT the other day. I'll paraphrase an off-hand remark she made:<p>This is a really cool technology, but then you think how big companies are going to ruin it for profit, as they do with everything. It's hard to get excited about technology these days.<p>I think this is the root of problem. If you want to make technology cool again, you need to cut out the gold rush that's ruining everything. Almost tautologically, the motivation for a society to do things must be something else than "make more money".
Science was never meant to be a political tool where you can bludgeon those who dont agree with you as being unscientific. The more you use it as a weapon the more people will start resenting it for being used on them.
Still as people moved from religion to ideologies like communism and nazism as their new God, now they abandoned those and moved to science as the single spring of truth and morality. For most laypeople science is now a religion that must be "trusted" instead of a tool fundamentally based on falsification.It is not a tool for establishing principles of morality and conduct.
If you think you can trust the "science" then you are fundamentally unscientific, science is based on finding counterexamples not on trusting.
Science is a tool. I'm sure most people would have a positive view of science if it was performed by people or institutions they trust, for goals that they hold.
Maybe I'm just missing it, but does the writeup show the actual survey questions?<p>Personally, my trust in <i>survey results summaries</i> is pretty low.
Sadly, due to some scientists no longer including ethics in their research, by fudging data to keep their funding, siding with corporate interests, and showing their elitism by treating their word for gospel as if they're infallible.
Covid is a very big part of the answer to this question. Unfortunately on HN covid is a heavily moderated topic and only one opinion is allowed.<p>So I'd like to tell you from my point of view, but my posts were removed for being pro science. On HN. So since this is turning into reddit.. where have all the techies gone?
Science allowed itself to be politicized. On the one hand, we are told to trust the science, but on the other hand, we are told to believe things that are absolutely contradictory to science, and common sense. It's no wonder people have lost faith.
After covid my trust in future of humanity has plummeted. It feels like every time I see people they're talking about "science" where they've actually thrown the science part out and are having a lot of feelings how things are. Apparently everything is impossible to know, even all the things that are extremely well studied and really simple, and you can replace all the modern science by reading some tweets, listening to bro science podcasts and feeling them out, and always ending up the result you were looking for anyways. It's hard to understand how people's understanding of complex subjects can be on so ridiculous level but still be thinking they know everything they need to know. Maybe my view is biased but it's always the same story everywhere I go, though I've stopped going out as I find it so frustrating and depressing. I even meet people who have been "studying science" for years but don't really know how scientific method works and obviously don't even know what scientific paper looks like.
This should be qualified that trust is lost in academic paper-mills and “expert” policy advisor scientists—in other words, any scientist who attends cocktail parties—not in the fruits of science itself.
Shannon solved this problem at the dawn of telco age when everyone was broadcasting and noise exceeded signal, by giving us error correcting codes, and clear limits above which the system turned useless etc.<p>We need something similar today or the thousands of orchestras playing different tunes will never sync or get coherent. HN front page is a great example of pure randomness. You can't produce focus and trust using such systems. Just endless distraction and confusion.