You want to know why people don't trust science the way you want them to?

What if, every few years, engineers pointed to a bridge and said "Guess what? I'm doing such a great job, that bridge is about to fall down!" and then the ... bridge fell down.

Science moves forward by proving that the last set of pronouncements was partly correct, limited in its applicability - despite being trusted universally, or even fundamentally wrong. Science students learn in every course how the last one they took was misinformation. Scientists advance their careers by showing how something was misunderstood. DNA the only molecule of heredity? Guess again! 400 species of bacteria in your intestine? Try 36,000. Planet getting cooler? Wait, no, warmer... Sun around the earth? Earth around the sun? Whole thing around the center of the galaxy? Everything relative?

You can't rely on science to be immutable. At best, it is constantly being refined, at worst, the rug gets pulled out from under you regularly. Overselling of results is part of the problem, but if you didn't oversell them, you'd never get anywhere because experiments are inherently quite limited in their scope - a keyhole look at the mansion.

Scientists know this. So do people. They like scientists. They trust them - to a point. But they know that this and that food chemical was safe before it was dangerous, before it was good for you, before it was dangerous again for a new reason, to one part of the population...

In short, they are making a somewhat educated assessment of the risk of leaning on science and medical knowlege. Do scientists not like the implications that their results are untrustworthy? Of course! Do they quickly run to get grant money to prove that their peers' work is incorrect? Yes!

I think that you, like early Kuhn, are overestimating the degree to which all of this happens. Yes every scientific idea is simply "not wrong yet", but much of what gets overturned remains true in a narrower sense.

I think the bigger problem for our society is the structure of news. If a paper came out showing some marginal value for a set of the population from eating more salt it would have really little impact on the views of most doctors and nutrionists. All the reasons we know salt is bad would still be in place, the odds ratios of hypertension, stroke etc. wouldn't have changed. Yet the reporting would give a very different view to the lay person who would see that a) doctors aren't really sure even about this basic stuff b) maybe salt is good for me. This will always happen because theres no news in another paper that confirms salt is bad, but a huge amount of news in the idea its not (disproportionate to the strength of the evidence and because controversy and drama sell.

I used to agree with you, but I see quite clearly that the need for funding, prestige and job satisfaction, scientists write in peer-reviewed publications both necessary extrapolations as well as overstatements of the impact of their research. If they stuck to the raw facts, it would be a dull read. You are certainly right that the whole result is relatively rarely overturned - unless it turns out that the P values didn't carry it, for example. Still, that doesn't make it 'all right' in terms of the doubt cast on science as a whole.

Benk asserts, on behalf of the populace, a mistrust of all science because it is constantly changing and evolving. His philosophy is esasentially denialism: "I don't understand it, therefore it isn't true". But anyone should be capable of asking "What does this assertion mean?", and almost every professional or expert or scientist should be capable of explaining the statement with comprehensible language.

Diogenes

I find your claim amusing. I am a working scientist, publishing in pretty good journals. What I'm saying is that 'science' has a massive problem getting people to trust it because the way motivations are aligned for scientists encourages them to enhance the popular distrust of currently written 'facts.'

As for making things 'comprehensible' - while you express an ideal, the real issue is that most papers require quite a bit of extrapolation to lead to an interesting result. Usually a paper is 'an example of X' or 'suggestive of Y' rather than proof positive of universal truth. Look at yesterday's Nature article about cold fusion for a fun (and exaggerated) musing on the problems of this strategy.

BenK wrote:

"Look at yesterday's Nature article about cold fusion for a fun (and exaggerated) musing on the problems of this strategy."

I do not have a subscription so I cannot read it. But Nature's reporting on cold fusion has been highly inaccurate and biased. Last month, for example, there was a cold fusion conference in Rome, Italy, sponsored by the ENEA (the Italian National Agency for New Technologies Energy and the Environment -- like the DoE), the Italian Physical Society, the Italian Chemical Society, the National Research Council (CNR), and Energetics Technologies. There were major results announced from Italy, Japan and especially the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). The people at the NRL did several hundred positive experiments in a row confirming the Arata method. This produces excess heat only with no input power. Another replication of it at Kobe U. was recently published in Phys. Lett. A.

So there is a lot going on in cold fusion, but you will not read one word of it in Nature, except (apparently) for ridicule.

The April 2009 CBS "60 Minutes" segment on cold fusion was a lot more scientific and accurate than Nature.

I have a collection of 1,200 papers on cold fusion which I copied from the library at Los Alamos, plus 2,500 others from proceedings and other sources. I have uploaded ~1000 papers and the news of the Italian conference and much else, here:

http://lenr-canr.org

You're extremely optimistic. The main problem is that the political and economic system is constructed in such a way that it favors exploitation, subordination, conformism, subservience, and incentivizes young people to go in certain desirable directions (very often, they are desirable for the maintenance of +/- the status quo). Science only reflects it. There is some "fringe science", some really great science, but this is really marginal. At any rate, there is a lot of room to optimize the system, but who cares? The people who profit from it and have a voice in the market will change it? It's so sick...so sick...but it's a flourishing place for the great majority of people, and conservatism is very, very strong

"Do they quickly run to get grant money to prove that their peers' work is incorrect? Yes!"

You talk about Bebchuk? Summers? Come on, it's not as simple as you put it; the U.S. is a world apart in some respects, and probably freedom of speech is much more respected in American than, for instance, in Europe. However, there are many factors that play a role in maintaining the status quo, and you excessively simplify the complex situation.