The "I am trustworthy" part is totally taken for granted and too many supposedly trustworthy people lie straight to the public face just to maintain the narrative they are pursuing.
Ethos is the hardest claim to assert. You have to live that one out; your community must, quite literally, bear witness to your actions which earn trust.
It seems that many like to believe and follow leaders who affirm their beliefs even when they are caught lying repeatedly about important things. Posturing loudly and demonstrating confidence seems to trump all of the other principles for many.
It's similar but more emphasized with chimpanzees.
The problem is that we're not chimpanzees. We are smart enough to make very powerful technology, but not smart enough to use it sustainably.
This requirement places too high a burden on one person. Only a saint (or God) could achieve the standard claimed here. Objectivity on topics should be sufficient. Scientists who lose their objectivity cease to contribute usefully to the discussion.
Only God could be Objective; that whole Descarte's Demon thing makes True claims based on empirical observations a lot more fraught than you'd really like it to be, even in the best of cases where everyone agrees on: what language game we're playing today, what "an observation" is, that it was faithfully reported, and so on.
Nobody's perfect; what builds the sort of trust that permits action is a history of publically doing one's best:
I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I’m not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to do when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
Do that, and you'll earn your Ethical appeal easily enough.
Ethos is very hard, but pathos is harder, especially in secular society.
Let me be clear, I think arguments about ethos generate the most argumentation and heat right now, but the silent killer is really pathos. People feel comfortable arguing ethos. Most people will not argue pathos openly though.
We have a crisis of pathos in our culture. How do you claim that something is important without an appeal to authority? You can't. We live in a culture that is fragmenting its sources of authority; different groups of people have different sources of authority.
Here's a good example. The external dialogue that a lot of conservatives give on climate change is that scientists can't be trusted. The internal dialogue that a lot of them (though not all) engage in goes something like, "The earth doesn't matter. God is going to come back and set things right. So we don't need to worry about it anyway."
Nah, the Pathetic appeal is easy. It isn't sustainable, but the simplest form of Pathos is "Hey, fuck THOSE guys, right? You're better than they are, you're special! Git 'em!", and we're practically swimming in it right now.
I don't know. Ostensibly it looks like pathos is easy right now. Politics seems super intense right now, but it also seems super fake. Mostly I think shows of pathos are fake right now. Getting people to actually do things and act seems like the hardest thing right now. Posting on social media doesn't count.
> too many supposedly trustworthy people lie straight to the public face just to maintain the narrative
This is particularly apropos in the wake of Russell Brand's recent video on FB's Fact Checkers for Covid 19 vaccine information [1] funded by BigPharma, having a huge financial stake in bigpharma, and intentionally hiding their funding by BigPharma, and not adding a notification that the fact checkers are in fact funded/invested by/in BigPharma.
I am starting to read completely disinterested 3rd party sources more, because weighing the pros and cons of a thing is more challenging when the supposed experts are deliberating concealing material relationships. Some old Emeritus professor, already retired, with several phds and just a passing bit of information often gives great criticism of a thing without having any stake in the outcome.