Poll Shows Significant Drop In Number Of Americans Who Trust Science
Trend unlikely to be reversed by Dept. of Health and Human Services scientific integrity policy featuring the “Indigenous Knowledge” heavily pushed by Team Biden.
My colleague Mike LaChance reported on a conference being held at Harvard University on ‘Decolonizing Black Health,” including a session that included an homage to ‘indigenous knowledge.‘
Scholars at Concordia University are working to decolonize light — “advancing other ways of knowing about light, science and physics.” Courses will be developed in conjunction with Native scholars to “elevate” indigenous knowledge … while “Eurocentric” science is “de-centered” and “scrutinized for its alleged past and present contributions to colonialism.”
You know, the “Eurocentric” scientific “way of knowing” that brought us germ theory, antibiotics, and life expectancies that are close to 80.
As the elites in academia are moving away from support of the scientific method (consisting of systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses) to “non-traditional ways of knowing,” there has been a corresponding collapse in Americans’ trust in science and scientists. This trend is a marked turnaround from the respect once held for scientific institutions prior to the covid pandemic.
Overall, 57% of Americans say science has had a mostly positive effect on society. This share is down 8 percentage points since November 2021 and down 16 points since before the start of the coronavirus outbreak.
About a third (34%) now say the impact of science on society has been equally positive as negative. A small share (8%) think science has had a mostly negative impact on society.
When it comes to the standing of scientists, 73% of U.S. adults have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests. But trust in scientists is 14 points lower than it was at the early stages of the pandemic.
This trend is unlikely to be reversed by Department of Health and Human Services scientific integrity policies blessing “Indigenous Knowledge” and DEI. The Washington Free Beacon obtained a copy, and it is rife with pseudoscience and prioritizes social justice.
The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could soon employ “Indigenous Knowledge” in their research, a document obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows.
The document is a proposed revision of scientific integrity guidelines for the Department of Health and Human Services, which encompasses the FDA, CDC, and the National Institutes of Health. Going forward, agency staff should employ “multiple forms of evidence, such as Indigenous Knowledge,” when analyzing data, the document states.
….”A strong culture of scientific integrity begins with ensuring a professional environment that is safe, equitable, and inclusive,” the report says. “Issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility are an integral component of the entire scientific process.”
As a reminder, the Biden White House published a whole page promoting the “indigenous way of knowing” that it is now foisting on the agencies that are suppose to be focused in key scientific policy issues: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and National Institute of Health (NIH).
[The White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) jointly released new government-wide guidance and an accompanying implementation memorandum for Federal Agencies on recognizing and including Indigenous Knowledge in Federal research, policy, and decision making. This announcement coincides with the Biden-Harris Administration’s 2022 Tribal Nations Summit and responds to a 2021 OSTP-CEQ memorandum that called for development of the guidance with Tribal consultation and Indigenous community engagement, as well as agency, expert, and public input
Indigenous Knowledge is a body of observations, oral and written knowledge, innovations, practices, and beliefs developed by Tribes and Indigenous Peoples through interaction and experience with the environment. The Biden-Harris Administration has formally recognized Indigenous Knowledge as one of the many important bodies of knowledge that contributes to the scientific, technical, social, and economic advancements of the United States and our collective understanding of the natural world.
I will admit some instances of indigenous knowledge have been useful for health and prosperity. A classic example is the chewing of willow bark to alleviate pain, which ties into the pain-relief properties associated with aspirin (a compound similar to the salicin found in the bark).
However, aspirin was developed using chemistry and tested with scientific rigor. It is also substantially more effective than willow bark.
I predict that the Biden administration will use whatever “indigenous knowledge” means for the day to promote the agenda item de jour in any agency in which science is critical. The policies, rules, and regulations will be liberty-crippling, economy-destroying, and detrimental to the health and well-being of all Americans.
My hypothesis: Trust is science will collapse even more quickly than it has already. I am not looking forward to collecting this data point.
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Comments
I trust science. I don’t trust “scientists”.
I trust biology. I don’t trust “biologists”.
Fortunately there aren’t any on the Supreme Court.
Good one!
Thank you. Real biologists don’t buy into that transgender garbage; it is counter to real science.
Beat me to it
You would not believe the fraud in medicine. Numerous studies are not what they seem and you must be very careful reading any journal article, especially looking up the money the authors receive from sources. A good example is cholesterol. It has zero influence on illness, yet a whole industry was set up to treat it, with little influence.
One of the reasons I “fired” my doctor was his obsession with cholesterol. No eggs, no steak, no doctor.
Actually a low cholesterol diet has never been of benefit, in fact it is the exact opposite. Check out a you tube video called Heart of the Matter, if it is still on.
It is by slightly clever.
Exactly. Many are obsessed with salt.
My grandmother put salt in everything. She lived to be 103.
And, truthfully, if you lived to age 70, you have lived a good life.
My grandmother, born in 1894, smoked Camels (no filters, for those of you unfamiliar with them) for 50 years then quit cold turkey.
Of course, “cold turkey” meant switching to chew, and she could hit a pinto bean can from 5 paces. Before cataract surgery.
Lived to 94, no issues. Sometimes, it is just the genetics.
My dad got the same advice from a doctor once, about no eggs. Dad declined to tell the doctor he ate two eggs for breakfast every day. He’ll turn 91 next month.
Bingo. I also trust the constitution, I just don’t trust politicians who “interpret” it for me.
I know how both of them work. The sole problem is dealing with powerful people who deliberately pervert either.
“Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others.”
–ANDREW JACKSON
Thank you Dr Fauci. As for the “indigenous knowledge” next time a Demo pushing that deal shows up for cancer treatment just give him a cup of herbal tea, blow smoke in his face and dance in a circle chanting a nice song then send him on his way
It’s not science that we distrust it is the politicized “Science” that government officials push.
Botany and medicine have been linked for thousands of years. The difference between traditional medicine’s identification and use of medicinal plants (that actually seemed to have a therapeutic effect) and modern (western) medicine, is that modern medicine wasn’t satisfied with simply identifying such plants. Western science provided methods for determining why certain plants had medicinal uses, allowing the extraction, concentration, and study of the medically-active chemicals found in them, leading to the chemicals’ eventual synthesis and industrial-scale production. “Traditional” medicine never moved beyond the plant into an investigation of the chemistry.
It’s called pharmcognosy. Toyed with the study before I went in another direction.
It’s all in the dosing.
Homopathic Medicine in fact does use chemistry, and science in the service of medicine, not in service to profits.
All science and scientists are suspect, because they are all chasing grants that are awarded by people pushing the leftist agenda. If you propose a study challenging The Science™, you won’t get funded, period.
This is like when they say you’re against education. Education is a great thing. But when they say “education” they mean the public education system…which doesn’t educate particularly well.
They do a good job of miseducating.
It has progressed (pun intended) to maleducation
Or simply indoctrination.
Anyone pushing this garbage should not be allowed to use any results of Eurocentric science, like modern medicine – rather like denying anyone in favor of zero carbon the use of anything made from oil/gas or byproducts.
Also, IMO the credibility of scientists has suffered a lot more at the hands of the Climate Change charlatans than here. Their impact on the world has been “big time” negative – trillions borrowed/spent for no meaningful impact.
Peer-review is basically nonfunctional. Science has been for sale at least as long as I have been old enough to pay attention.
The scientific method is perhaps the most powerful technology any civilization has ever developed. It is a shame we seem to have cast it aside.
The very idea that ‘trust’ was required for SCIENCE is absurd on its face.
You don’t TRUST real science. You PROVE it. You VERIFY it. ‘Trust’ has no place in the equation.
And that’s why these hacks are panicking. Because none of their crap is actual science, and they CAN’T prove it to anybody that doubts it.
Proving something is not the goal of science. You base your conclusions on the evidence you have. Your conclusions are supported until more evidence is found that fails to support them.
I was sitting at a presentation at a conference in 1995 with a colleague. Some findings were presented, and we just looked at each other and said :this changes everything.” It turns out that the animators who did cartoons of pulsing brain cells were a lot closer to the truth than we ever expected. It wasn’t publicized much, but in the course of a week some deep fundamental rules of brain science changed, a lot Now, not all cells act that way, but bugger all if some actually do. Pure science is still pretty good, IMHO. It is when they get to the fringes that results and outcomes become distorted. The area which I choose to attack is the concept of harm reduction, which in practice is suffering prolongation. As a scientist, I am obligated to find several alternative explanations for a phenomenon and also test them to exclude that possibility. The science which is suspect is that which only ever sees a single cause-effect pathway and refuses to examine the others. Climate, gun control, addiction are the main offenders that I bother to focus on, in my current amateur status. It is fun to argue with a non-scientist, mostly to see how quickly their position is either say shut-up or walk-away. Those who come with prepped statements are always the easiest. The only study that I have ever accepted based on purely annecdotal evidence is the hot-crazy matrix. In fact, it might be the first “law” derived purely from anecdotal data. I’d base my life on it, literally.
The giveaway with climate science is that they don’t present the data in a coherent, but rather attack those who challenge them.
If you pay attention, both astronomy and volconology are going through some serious changes based on new data from just the last decade. Hubble was just cocktail hour compared to the main course of Webb. And again, some artists were closer to reality with their imagination than we were with our measuring tools. The stuff coming from Kilauea and Iceland have really changed some fundamental concepts now that we are seeing events that are normally observed in geologic time being captured in our time. And because they can’t resist the opportunity to exploit a crisis, we are also seeing how the MSM communicates the events and distorts the reality surrounding them.
Rather than distrusting science and/or scientists, people should be encouraged to learn the process as opposed to being satisfied with accepting a list of facts. And one should always identify the assumptions and conditions. Portland recently stated that minor crime was down, without acknowledging that their data relies on submitted reports, which people no longer bother to make, because why lose and extra hour or two for no benefit. It is like a doctor closing his office and thus concluding that all of his patients are healthy.
Please see reply below.
Loving it! Can we start a club?
Playing devil’s advocate is just hilarious with students….”but what about (X)?” You can smell the smoke.
“The only study that I have ever accepted based on purely annecdotal evidence is the hot-crazy matrix.”
If you pay it any attention, equally strong evidence can be gathered to support the “art-crazy matrix.” The “right brain” is such a swamp.
The hot -crazy matrix and the companion hot-rich matrix both seem pretty legit based on my anecdotal experience and observation of my family, friends, co workers and acquaintances.
Climate science is such a fraud.
“I am science.” Fauci
safe and effective.
bs
Well, when Dr “Science” Fauci is running around there, a little skepticism makes sense.
Political weaponization of science is the problem much like it was with religion in England before North American colonization.
They used to call it the Inquisition.
The analogies are unlimited.
Tale of Valor: “[Meriwether] Lewis felt bilious. […] He thought it might be a good thing to take a stroll through river woods and chew some willow and kinnikinick bark.
I think one scrapes green bark off spring branch growth. Always wanted to try doing that, or make “aspirin” tea.
String theory. Dark matter and energy. What happens to information after it enters a black hole. Big bang inflation theory. Multiverse. And hundreds of other things.
The James Webb telescope has all ready overturned theory related to early galaxy formation.
I don’t mind enquiry into these topics, and only wish physicists et al. would be less apt to overselling – or outright lying about them -to obtain research funding.
Especially in regards to machine AI and quantum computing.
I don’t trust scientists.
I don’t trust Science.
I trust reality.
Science is fine. It is the people pretending to be “scientists” that are the problem.
That, and government funding…
I wish the state of California had listened more to the Indigenous People for management of forests rather than the environmentalists. The stewards of the land and forests for centuries understood the importance of forest management having used controlled burns to allow the forests to thrive prior to the arrival of European settlers.
I have a Master’s in Science.
The scientific profession has been corrupted because most of the money for research comes from government grants, as a previous poster has explained.
Scientists are human beings, they have wives, children, and mortgages, and need to thrive. Bucking the status-quo will hurt themselves and their families.
Erronius
As others here have stated it isn’t science that many distrust. Instead it is the folks who turn incomplete data and bad logic posing as settled scientific truth into a political tool. Those along with hacks who over hype their findings have done serious damage. Then there are the ‘celebrity’ scientists. All these folks have an individual axe to grind and it isn’t about science it is about fame, fortune and power. Add in the pharmaceutical companies and the politicians who jump to their bidding and the pernicious impact of pharma advertising on legacy media. Add in the zealots of our public health system that revealed their embrace of totalitarianism during the Covid mania. It isn’t difficult to understand why the public trust for the scientific community has fallen.
There’s an ancient expression “cui bono” or “who benefits”, now sometimes expressed as “follow the money”. Out of 20 people who were either employees or close friends, every single one got Covid even though 19 had even gone through the full vaccine and booster process, Two now have pacemakers. Only a fool would look at this without asking
‘cui bono”.
This be very bad juju, mon.
Yes, let’s consult people who have barely had the written word for 200 years. What could go wrong?
nothing has changed in history
but the power structures
and with that
allll other “changes” have occurred
MajorWood: The giveaway with climate science is that they don’t present the data in a coherent
There’s a wide range of evidence for anthropogenic global warming, starting with the basic physics of heat and energy. Without greenhouse gases, the Earth’s surface would be a chilly -18°C rather than the balmy +15°C that it is. If you increase the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases, as humans are currently doing, then the Earth’s surface will tend to warm, while the stratosphere will tend to cool—and that is what we observe.
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For those unfamiliar, Z is a member of a high school debating team and the Z changes with the school year. They know just as much as the average high school kid which is nothing. As you can see, his statement actually says nothing, typical for a debater. He is mining you for his debate project.
I recommend this book:
Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
Book by Ethan Watters
Focus is social science, psychology, trauma, and medical diagnoses. In short, these “scientists” are incompetent and ego driven. It’s eye opening.
My brother in law, a college physics and astronomy professor, told me accepted scientific theories usually change after the old school scientists die. Challenging them while they are living is just not acceptable, regardless of the facts.
Homeopathic aspirin: Stir a swimming pool with a willow branch. Take a cup of water from the other end of that pool, dump it into a second pool, and stir (not with another willow branch). Repeat ten or twenty times.
Nah. Just skin some weeping willow bark and chew on it.
That’s not homeopathic at all!
Trust the Seance! That’s what Biden thinks, after his recent conversations with long-dead European leaders.
Well done. Mitterrand and Kohl approve
I love science. But when “scientists” and “doctors” started telling me the guy with a penis was actually a woman, and that men got pregnant…yeah. Glad I got my Biology degree when there were 9 planets and 2 sexes.
I must admit, I am still angry about Pluto.
May I ask why? I thought that decision was long overdue. As soon as it was discovered that Pluto’s size had been way overestimated, and that it was nothing but a particularly large Kuyper Belt object, it should immediately have got the same treatment that Ceres did. Ceres used to be a planet, for a short time after it was discovered. Then the other asteroids were discovered and Ceres was downgraded. So why not do the same to Pluto? (Or rather to Pluto and Charon, since we now know they’re about equal in size, so it no longer makes sense to speak of one as the “planet” and the other as its “moon”.)