Alex WellersteinVerified account

What do you think of the premise, that scientific authority has fallen? Notwithstanding all the crisis talk and the well-demonstrated rise of various agnotologies, it's less clear to me that 'scientific authority' is in decline. When/where was Crease's golden age?

What would he have 'us' 'get back to'?

I just want to note that the question is about the confidence of people running the institutions... that is not the same thing as saying you agree with scientific predictions, etc., much less "confidence in the scientific community."

You could imagine a barrage of alternative questions that might have given alternative data (e.g., "if a scientific study reported that X was bad for you, would you give it up?" — and then compare that to, say, a priest or your local doctor or whatever).

One of the other questions is about confidence to act in the public interest, where science rates highly too (I could see STSers responding in the negative here...). Also note they distinguish science from medicine, which has experienced declining trust.

I suspect people privately divvy up “science” such that you would have a lot of people who have confidence in science but not in certain fields to live up to what they regard as scientific standards.

Yeah. I have had a lot of conversations that have led me to think that when people say "science" they mean a radically different set of ideas depending on the context (even STSers). It's not the best-defined term despite it being invoked frequently.