by virgildotcodes | 2026-03-08 02:40:37+00:00
This is all a straw man, of course, as I've never said or even implied that scientists are infallible.

That said, to address your comment in some detail:

> What really drives distrust in science is claims of infallibility and demands for total trust

This is one hypothesis. Here's another -

If we look at COVID and the anti-vax movement in general, it seems apparent that a much greater driver of that distrust is grifters and kooks actively and profitably pushing emotionally satisfying misinformation. Ironically enough, they do this with far greater claimed certainty about the veracity of their conclusions than the doctors.

This is pushed out to an audience which is desperately looking for explanations for the unexplainable like why their child got autism. Reasoning and nuance goes out the window and they latch onto anything that will give them a sense of certainty.

A second element of this, is that these conspiracy theories are specifically intended to stir up distrust of scientists, "educated elites", and public institutions, and to latch onto the pre-existing distrust of the aforementioned that has been steadily cultivated by the right over decades.

Finally, in the case of COVID especially, we had a whole bunch of selfish motivations that were at play which resulted in people finding it expedient to believe anything that would align with their desires to do whatever they like without anyone telling them what they can and can't do (especially business owners whose financial incentives all aligned with not shutting down, and being in positions of power, they leaned into boosting this messaging).

The CDC and the medical field has for decades very clearly communicated the statistical nature of their specialty, the rate and severity of side effects, the uncertainty of prognoses and outcomes of treatments, etc etc. Quite painstakingly. There was no industrywide claim of infallibility, and yet here we are.

> Downton Abbey [...] the first doctor, he turns out to have been wrong,

Love Downton Abbey!

Climate scientists constantly communicate error bars around their measurements and the outcomes of climate change. Creating a model that predicts with any certainty how all the countless systems of the Earth will interact in such a dynamic process is insanely difficult, especially as numerous feedback cycles individually look poised to accelerate the whole process.

These many, many, many measurements and models all tend to converge around certain facts though, which leads to the probability of those being the case being as close to truth as science is capable of getting.

As "true" as 9.8 m/s^2, the heliocentric nature of our solar system, the spherical nature of our planet, the speed of light in a vacuum, plate tectonics, evolution, germ theory, etc. etc.

These truths are that the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere have been steadily rising since industrialization, that this is primarily driven by anthropogenic emissions, and that as the concentration of these gases increases, more energy from the sun will be trapped within our atmosphere resulting in a heating world.

This heating world is already, and will continue to, melt the ice caps, reducing the albedo of the poles as the darker water underneath is revealed and begins to absorb more of the sun's energy, accelerating the effect.

This heating of the world is again already, and will continue to, melt the permafrost which stores ~1.4 GT of methane, which is ~80x as potent a GHG as CO2, and whose release would represent a ~2x increase of the concentration in our atmosphere, again further accelerating the process.

This heating of the world is again already, and will continue to, lead to tropical forests like the Amazon beginning to emit more CO2 than they absorb, again further accelerating the process.

Etc. etc.

The consequences of all this are already, and will continue to, drive more and more extreme weather, with the 10 hottest years on record all happening in the last 10 years. This has negative consequences for food production, for the habitability of the equatorial regions, and will lead to mass migrations of people unless we think they will be content to just sit around and die, and thus destabilization of societies.

I have another piece of media which would be great to bring up here, it's called "Don't Look Up".

As opposed to your Downton Abbey example, the meteor turns out to be real, and it does hit the Earth, and everyone dies.

The reason humanity doesn't take this seriously and unite to address it is because there are countless predictable incentives to distrust the scientists and ignore the inconvenient truth of an incoming meteor. Financial incentives for the rich and powerful, engagement (and ultimately financial) incentives for the grifters and kooks pushing distrust of the scientists, a deep emotional desire in much of humanity to outright reject the horrors of this potential reality...

Anyway, not sure what made me think of that or how that's at all relevant here, but you should watch it if you haven't!