[cle]

> So read the science. Listen to the science. But read up further, and make educated decisions. Don't just listen to "experts" blindly.

This is not feasible advice. I can't read studies and correctly interpret and summarize them in every area of science which could affect my day-to-day decisions. That's insane.

We need to work on improving the trust of our scientific institutions, so that we can continue living our lives and focusing our efforts on our specializations. This may involve changing the institutions themselves to fix legitimate issues (like the funding fiasco), addressing misunderstandings by the public that also contribute to mistrust, etc.

There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As with many issues of our day, the challenge will be in disciplined focus on the issues themselves and what changes we should make to address them, instead of surrendering to tribal bickering.

[tjr]

This is not feasible advice. I can't read studies and correctly interpret and summarize them in every area of science which could affect my day-to-day decisions. That's insane.

But if you wanted to study something out and make your own decision, you should be free to do so.

I think nutrition is a great example. Despite decades of research, there appears to be no one single answer as to what constitutes a healthy diet, or what the most important aspects of a healthy diet are.

Low-calorie? Low-carb? Dairy-free? Meat-free? Low-sodium? Low-fat? High-fat?

As an individual, you have lots of choices, including eating whatever you want with no particular dietary plan at all. But if you want to read a book or read research papers and change your diet, you can.

[cle]

Sure you can, go for it. But I doubt that many people have the time nor the skills required to actually come to some justified conclusion. The scary part is that many of them think they do. Often the very ones who tell you "read the science" or "just go read some papers" are the ones who dramatically underestimate the amount of effort and nuance it takes to synthesize the results of numerous researchers into a coherent meta-analysis. You can try, sure, and personally I enjoy it, but unless you're already an expert researcher in the field, you should be very skeptical that any conclusions you make are actually valid.

It takes an enormous amount of domain knowledge to reasonably interpret the statistics of experiments, epidemiological studies, etc. We may think we can read them and come to our own conclusions, but I think it's usually our hubris that leads us to believe that those conclusions are justified and not just rolls of the dice.

[lmm]

> We need to work on improving the trust of our scientific institutions, so that we can continue living our lives and focusing our efforts on our specializations.

Putting it that way is putting the cart before the horse. Our institutions need to become more trustworthy, then we'll be able to trust them more. Even then, I suspect a certain level of scepticism is needed to keep them honest.

[cle]

That is a great way to improve trust. There are other ways as well, and we should work on them all.

[lmm]

Not necessarily. If our scientific institutions are actually untrustworthy, then the public is correct to mistrust them, and acting to artificially increase public trust in them would be counterproductive.

[cle]

There are a lot of people out there with unfounded mistrust. Some of it is justified, some of it is not. These things are not mutually exclusive.