Trust In Science Drops: Good

Trust In Science Drops: Good

I found it hilarious that an article seeking the reason why trust in Science is declining opened with this sentence:

As we are approaching the end of the fourth year of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed close to 7 million people worldwide and 1.2 million in just the US alone, both estimates being almost certainly significant undercounts of the true toll, I was depressed to see yet more evidence indicating significantly declining trust in science and science-based interventions to combat disease, such as vaccines.

Why are fewer people trusting Science? There’s your answer right there. Goofy hersterical overreaction to a faded, trivial threat, which the author still pines for in the name of utopianistic Science.

Perhaps if so many Experts and rulers hadn’t lied their keisters off, repeatedly, loudly, angrily, and, worst of all, obviously about Following the Science! trust would not have tanked so precipitously.

Thus, trust should fall.

And does. Pew’s survey on trust in science (which our author above discusses) asked the percent of adults who say science has had a positive or negative effect on society. Positive went from a high of 73% (always remembering there are large plus-or-minuses to all these numbers) in January of 2019, before the covid panic, to only 57% now, as the panic squeaks out its last gasps.

Science, good science, is always a positive. Bad science is always a negative. In an of themselves, and not necessarily for society. Here is where the distinction between Science and scientism arises. That “for society” bit. We don’t know if Pew’s respondents distinguished the difference. Most do not.

A True fact about how the world works is good in and of itself, as all Truth is. Good Science brings us Truth.

If good Science brings us Truth, bad Science brings us Error and Falsity. For all the many reasons we discuss, there is now much more bad Science than good. There is a lot more Falsity and Uncertainty taken as Truth.

As in the “solutions” during the covid panic. And the “solutions” for global cooling, a.k.a. global warming, a.k.a. “climate change.”

The uses to which Science are put are not Science. Thinking the uses of Science are Science is scientism.

It’s difficult to keep the two separate. Here’s an exaggerated example.

Suppose you learn a Truth that if you add this gene and slice that one out in some bug you can create a new virus that in unstoppable, and if created will with certainty kill everybody. The knowledge itself is good, because it is True. But the uses to which it can be put are evil. It is better not to know this Truth, because while it is good in and of itself, it is not good for society. Because scientists cannot be trusted with this much power.

From this we can argue that not every person should know every Truth, but that is a story for another day.

Here our focus is Science and its differences from scientism. Which I’m betting, but I of course do not know, that the Pew respondents did not keep straight. Because of that “for society”, which seems to imply the uses of science.

Many scientists, especially in the covid and “climate change” panics, misconducted themselves and mixed up Science and scientism. They assumed their opinions on what should be done was Science, because they knew some Science, though I use the word “knew” loosely. Scientists, who you would think must know the difference between Science and the uses of science, do not know. They are even more prone to scientism than people ignorant of Science.

This is why other result of the Pew survey makes sense. They asked the percent adults who were greatly confident scientists (and other groups of people) had the best interest of the public in mind.

Both medical scientists and general scientists beat all other groups, like politicians who came in at negligible levels of agreement (yet people still vote for them). Docs peaked at 43% at the beginning of the covid panic in April 2020, then dropped about half to 25% this past October. General scientists were almost the same: same timing, peaking at 39% down to 23% now.

There are too many scientists now, doing far, far too much in the name of Science. People, I say again, are right to distrust them, especially in medical science. You can know the Truth about how to slice off a young girl’s tits, but it is never anything but pure evil to do so in the name of gender “science” or “theory”.

We must all stop looking to Science to provide answers it cannot give.

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10 Comments

  1. Scientific Truth has become ever-so-flexible given the influx of government grants and “donations” flowing in to sway it in any direction asked of it. And, the people’s trust in science is going the way of their trust in the Federal politicians.

  2. McChuck

    You want profound truths, that are not yet accepted science?
    * Potential energy is a real thing: (perceived) time. It is a sort of spin, and is measured in imaginary units (square root of -1).
    * Lime disease microbes hide in the joints, and can be treated with long-term (as in years) of antibiotics. (Veterinarians know this. Doctors are forbidden from admitting this and from using this knowledge.)

  3. Trust in everything has declined.

    Trust in governments
    Trust in government scientists
    Trust in the mass media

    That is because lying has reached new heights with leftists in charge of te Presidency, Congress, most universities, most schools and mist mass media companies. Leftists have a tendency to be pathological liars.

    For Covid:
    How could doctors know anything about a new disease in 2020 when it takes years to understand exactly what happened and why? That didn’t stop some of them from bloviating about Covid.

    Before 2020 we did have knowledge from prior pandemics … that was thrown in a garbage can. We knew Covid would mutate to a much less deadly virus in a year or two, and the pandemic would end. This time low infection fatality rate virus mutation was called Omicron.

    We knew a vaccine would not work because the virus would quickly mutate to evade it.

    2021 US excess deaths with the “vaccine” were no lower than 2020 US excess deaths with no vaccine. All cause mortality too. Covid in 2020 to 2022 happened just as historical data suggested it would … but “experts” did not care to learn from history.

    Climate science I have followed for 26 years.
    It currently consists of:
    (1) Real climate science
    (2) Climate junk science
    (3) Wild guess, data free, wrong since 1979, predictions of the climate in 2100

    Thanks to the media, what the public hears is mainly wild guess predictions based on some real science, but mainly based on junk science.

    These are predictions of catastrophic manmade global warming (CAGW) — a new type of climate that has never before happened. So there are no historical CAGW data. There are never data for the future climate. Therefore, CAGW predictions can not be based on data. They are just guesses based on worst case assumptions — not data. Science requires data, but predictions of climate doom do not.

    These predictions of climate doom come from scientists who are paid by governments to make them. Just like cigarette companies once paid scientists to say that cigarettes were safe.

    After 44 years of scary global warming predictions, since the 1979 Charney Report, more and more people have realized the climate predictions are meaningless climate astrology, and as a result, they do not trust scientists.

    I would not buy a used car from a scientist.

  4. Tim Owens

    I recently saw a video where a woman suffering from Lyme disease, was attacked by a swarm of African killer bees and she was allergic to bee venom…normally. The venom attacked and killed the Lyme bacteria and she fully recovered after her several years of suffering. She is now leading an effort to bring this event into a viable treatment.

  5. Tillman Eddy

    Hmmm… I consider myself a “scientist”, having been cited on one paper in the early 1960’s about I-131 tracer uptake as related to a therapeutic dose for thyroid ablation… my sole original contribution to the literature. I hasten to add I was not the name researcher, rather the assistant that performed all of the hands-on analysis under the Doctor’s guidance.

    Following the Army, I attended FSU and received my BS in Biology, all while working in the local Blood Bank and in the Infirmary at the school. I graduated with no debt and a terrible GPA… and no debt!

    My working career was in Clinical Laboratories, Laboratory Sales and Management, eventually owning my own laboratory related businesses.

    During the course of that career, I also developed a methodology for diagnosing fine needle biopsies in “real time”, confirming adequacy of the specimen, preparing histological slides for diagnosis using a sophisticated frozen section technique with liquid nitrogen and using the internet to provide the Anatomic Pathologist with real-time imaging for diagnosis. The patient was diagnosed before leaving the surgical suite!

    Sadly, insurance companies did not care to reimburse for the procedure – it was not important that the women would have to wait three weeks before knowing the adequacy of the specimen and the diagnosis.

    I like to think my small contributions to science were for the betterment of my fellow human beings; I think that “scientists ” following a politicized, phony goal are reprehensible! That opinion, and a dollar, will get me a really bad cup of coffee. My main complaint is that the efforts are deliberate, with malice aforethought.

    Rant over!

  6. Cary D Cotterman

    The article invokes the name Hotez. Nothing citing that assclown has any credibility.

  7. I find it deeply depressing after the coof debacle and the transparently nonsensical climate change clown show that a majority of genpop still seem to have faith in scientism, in between over-eating processed food and consuming Disney+ woke propaganda. The Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse overtook us and we didn’t notice it happen.

  8. Rudolph Harrier

    It is the modern way of things to expect to gain respect just for a position, regardless of your personal actions.

    It’s the same reason that teachers in the pandemic would say “you need to recognize that teachers are frontline heroes too!” and then they would ignore their online courses for days on end without a trace of shame. They are teachers, therefore they are heroes. What’s educating a bunch of snot-nosed brats got to do with their heroism?

    Similar things can be said about nurses, politicians, etc. and of course scientists.

  9. Gunther Heinz

    Real scientists never say “tits”. They say gazoombas …

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