I believe I previously recommended Science Under Siege, by Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez. I also recommend Nonsense on Stilts, by Massimo Pigliucci. I pretty much knew most of the contents before I read these books, but they helped me organize my thinking and connect some dots. There are innumerable entry points to this problem, but I have to start somewhere, so here goes.
We are often told that the argument from authority is a logical fallacy. And indeed, for much of history since classical antiquity, it has produced fallacious results. Until the scientific revolution, scholarship and expertise meant studying ancient texts. That’s what happened in universities. Scholars learned cosmology and human history by studying the Bible, and they learned human biology and medicine by studying the writings of the Second Century Greco-Roman physician Galen. Now we know that biblical cosmology and history are false, and Galen’s theories were equally bunk. Relying on Galen, physicians tried to heal people by bleeding them, giving them powerful emetics and laxatives and otherwise hastening their deaths.
However, scholarly expertise today means something entirely different. Modern scientists would like nothing more than to upend orthodoxy, but they can only get credit for doing so if they present powerful evidence. As we have seen in the course of this discussion, as scientific knowledge has grown vaster and more complex, deep expertise has necessarily come to apply to smaller and smaller fractions of the whole. The days when scientists like Galileo or Newton, working alone, could produce important innovations in multiple fields are over.
Here's a paragraph from a recent edition of Physical Review Letters. (H. Hwang, et al, Atom-Photon Entanglement with a Single Trapped Cesium Atom. Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 140801)
The emitted photon and the single atom ideally form the Bell state |ð+⟩ of Eq. . Because this Zeeman state qubit is sensitive to magnetic field fluctuations, the atom-photon state acquires a shot-to-shot random relative phase, which reduces the observable coherence. The magnetic dephasing is reflected in the Ramsey data shown in Fig. . The magnetically less sensitive clock state superposition between |ð=3,ðð=0⟩ and |ð=4,ðð=0⟩ exhibits a coherence time of ð*2=10.8(7) ms, primarily limited by atomic temperature and the differential light shift between hyperfine levels due to the trap light. The magnetically sensitive superposition of |↑⟩=|ð=3,ðð=1⟩ and |↑′⟩=|ð=4,ðð=1⟩ shows a much shorter coherence time of ð*2=130(10) Ξs dominated by magnetic noise. Although we do not directly measure ð*2 for the |↑⟩ −| ↓⟩ qubit we expect it has a similarly short coherence time.
Now, I can guarantee you that the most brilliant biologists, chemists, and cosmologists in the world would barely have a clue what any of that means. You can get a Ph.D. and do a three year post-doc and then have a forty year career of independent research in any subject other than whatever you call the above, and you won't understand it. For most people, it might as well be written in cuneiform.
So that's one place we can begin to locate the problem. Scientists in general are not skilled at explaining what they do to non-specialists, in fact the vast majority of them are not interested in even trying and they can even lose prestige among their fellows if they do. So it's very easy for people to start to think that this is all gibberish or fake. The credibility of science depends very much on its cultural prestige, and if it loses that -- which to a considerable extent it has -- the scientific enterprise is not well-equipped to get it back.
I'll pick up this thread next time.
