| | Difference Between Trusting Science and Scientists
March 30, 2012, 7:39 pm
I don’t often defend Conservatives but I will say that there is nothing much more useless to the public discourse that bullsh*t sociology studies trying to show that Conservatives are dumber or whatever (and remember, those same studies show libertarians the smartest, so ha ha).
In this general category of schadenfreude masquerading as academics is the recent “finding” that conservatives are increasingly anti-science or have lost trust in science. But here is the actual interview question:
166. I am going to name some institutions in this country. Some people have complete confidence in the people running these institutions. Suppose these people are at one end of the scale at point number 1. Other people have no confidence at all in teh people running these institutions. Suppose these people are at the other end, at point 7. Where would you place yourself on this scale for: k. Scientific community?
A loss of trust in the scientific community is way, way different than a loss of trust in science. Confusing these two is roughly like equating a loss in trust of Con Edison to not believing in electricity. Here is an example from Kevin Drum describing this study’s results
In other words, this decline in trust in science has been led by the most educated, most engaged segment of conservatism. Conservative elites have led the anti-science charge and the rank-and-file has followed.
There are a lot of very good reasons to have lost some trust in our scientific institutions, in part due to non-science that gets labeled as real science today. I don’t think that makes me anti-science. This sloppy mis-labeling of conclusions in ways that don’t match the data, which Drum is ironically engaging in, is one reason may very scientific-minded people like myself are turned off by much of the public discourse on science. The irony here is that while deriding skepticism in the scientific community, Drum provides a perfect case example of why this skepticism has grown.
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