Why are so many people dismissive of experts and scientific results?

Yeah, we did MAHA, RFK Jr.'s radical changes to federal public health policy in January. But that focused almost entirely on policy changes, not on the limited but fervent public support that (along with the ideological certitude of its leaders and the lack of checks and balances) made implementing MAHA possible.

This week is kind of a Part II. It will focus on why contempt for professional expertise and even settled science that doesn't tell people what they want to hear has become so popular in recent years with a significant sliver of regular Americans. I hope this meeting can be about CAUSES. because I think important changes in our culture and politics have made anti-science and anti-expert ideology explode in importance, although maybe not in absolute number of adherents.

Candidates for what has changed do not make a lengthy list, IMO.

Politics: A lot of people have always been skeptical of experts and scientific results that seem fishy to them. But anti-science has now been heavily politicized. It has become a partisan political weapon in the hands of mainly ONE political party, you know, the one that has been growing a vast anti-intellectual propaganda machine for decades. I believe this has made a huge difference. In vaccines, climate change, health care, and even faith in elections. Having the right level of hatred of experts and science - and any fact! - you think is wrong or faked or being used as a partisan weapon by the other side is now a tribal political marker.

Internet: Politics is not all of it, by any means. I also believe that our ability to look up any fact or opinion we want instantly hits many Americans, of all political sides or no side, at a weak psychological spot: Their cognitive biases. We all have them, as we discussed at one of the old meetings linked to below. For Homo Sapiens, decision making is emotional first, and intellectual second.

Video world: As another link argues, we now rely so much on videos for learning that we may be losing our critical thinking ability for written material. And that's before the world of perfect deep-fakes and other AI visual tricks is perfected, as it soon likely will be.

Institutional distrust: All large American institutions are in disrepute these days. Private sector ones: Big Tech, Big Energy, Big Pharma, Big Finance, even big business in general. The mainstream news media's reputation is worse, so people feel they have to go spelunking for "the truth" on everything they hear challenged in some corner of an echo chamber. Govt is the least trusted of all, so NIH, CDC, FDA, USDA, etc., end up getting mud on them too.

Maybe elites of all kinds just failed us so often that the distrust rubbed off on the types of people that advise them - including scientific and technical elites.

Overblown? To be fair, a lot of prominent anti-science rhetoric is about only a few issues, even if they are important ones (climate, vaccines, evolution)? Still, it is unnerving, IMO, that so many of us - led by the MAGA right but not only them - no longer believe in... pretty much anything that they think originates from scientific or other experts.

Let's discuss the causes of this problem on Monday. Why do so many Americans believe they can "do their own research" on vaccines, or climate, or thrice-audited voting machines, or most any technical matter? Are Americans so accustomed to getting instant answers to any question that they do know that science getting things wrong and then self-correcting is how science works? Why do they think they can do better??

Optional Backgrounders –
· “The science of why we don’t believe science.” Fifteen years old, so it was a problem before MAGA, Trump, etc. Recommended.
· 2019 CivCon mtg: The Power of Cognitive Bias. Key link: How the internet amplifies our cognitive biases. Recommended.
· The dawn of the post-literate society. 2025.
· Republican voters and conspiracism. 2025. Includes polling results on how widespread such beliefs are. Recommended. Are such beliefs why Trump won in 2024?
· Long article: Given AI, do we need a right to reality? (Labelling AI content, and so forth.)