Epistemic status: Almost entirely opinion, Iād love to hear counterexamples
When I hear proposals related to instilling certain values widely throughout a population (or preventing the instillation of certain values), Iām always inherently skeptical. Iām not aware of many cases where something like this worked well, at least in a region as large, sophisticated, and polarized as the United States.
You could point to civil rights campaigns, which have generally been successful over long periods of time, but those had the advantage of being run mostly by people who were personally affected (= lots of energy for activism, lots of people āinherentlyā supporting the movement in a deep and personal way).
If you look at other movements that transformed some part of the U.S. (e.g. bioethics or the conservative legal movement, as seen in Open Philās case studies of early field growth), you see narrow targeting of influential people rather than public advocacy.
Rather than thinking about ācountering anti-scienceā more generally, why not focus on specific policies with scientific support? Fighting generically for āscienceā seems less compelling than pushing for one specific scientific idea (āmasks work,ā āhousing deregulation will lower rentsā), and I can think of a lot of cases where scientific ideas won the day in some democratic context.
This isnāt to say that public science advocacy is pointless; you can reach a lot of people by doing that. But I donāt think the people you reach are likely to āmatterā much unless they actually campaign for some specific outcome (e.g. I wouldnāt expect a scientist to swing many votes in a national election, but maybe they could push some funding toward an advocacy group for a beneficial policy).
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One other note: I ran a quick search to look for polls on public trust in science, but all I found was a piece from Gallup on public trust in medical advice.
Putting that aside, Iād still guess that a large majority of Americans would claim to be āpro-scienceā and to ātrust science,ā even if many of those people actually endorse minority scientific claims (e.g. āX scientists say climate change isnāt a problemā). But I could be overestimating the extent to which people see āscienceā as a generally positive applause light.
Epistemic status: Almost entirely opinion, Iād love to hear counterexamples
When I hear proposals related to instilling certain values widely throughout a population (or preventing the instillation of certain values), Iām always inherently skeptical. Iām not aware of many cases where something like this worked well, at least in a region as large, sophisticated, and polarized as the United States.
You could point to civil rights campaigns, which have generally been successful over long periods of time, but those had the advantage of being run mostly by people who were personally affected (= lots of energy for activism, lots of people āinherentlyā supporting the movement in a deep and personal way).
If you look at other movements that transformed some part of the U.S. (e.g. bioethics or the conservative legal movement, as seen in Open Philās case studies of early field growth), you see narrow targeting of influential people rather than public advocacy.
Rather than thinking about ācountering anti-scienceā more generally, why not focus on specific policies with scientific support? Fighting generically for āscienceā seems less compelling than pushing for one specific scientific idea (āmasks work,ā āhousing deregulation will lower rentsā), and I can think of a lot of cases where scientific ideas won the day in some democratic context.
This isnāt to say that public science advocacy is pointless; you can reach a lot of people by doing that. But I donāt think the people you reach are likely to āmatterā much unless they actually campaign for some specific outcome (e.g. I wouldnāt expect a scientist to swing many votes in a national election, but maybe they could push some funding toward an advocacy group for a beneficial policy).
****
One other note: I ran a quick search to look for polls on public trust in science, but all I found was a piece from Gallup on public trust in medical advice.
Putting that aside, Iād still guess that a large majority of Americans would claim to be āpro-scienceā and to ātrust science,ā even if many of those people actually endorse minority scientific claims (e.g. āX scientists say climate change isnāt a problemā). But I could be overestimating the extent to which people see āscienceā as a generally positive applause light.