There’s a ‘study’ which concludes that Conservatives increasingly distrust science, and this group has shown the greatest change from trust to distrust in the last three-plus decades. The author attributes the intertwining of science and public policy as a possible reason. Left out of the coverage is the issue of rampant dishonesty and fraud, which has become increasingly visible to those outside the research fields.
In the coverage at the Blaze, there is an interesting comment that people don’t really agree on what science is. It’s a fact that most people, as a result of the dismal failures in education, have no idea that science is a methodology for studying the physical phenomena. Many of them erroneously think that science is an aggregation of information honored as “fact” by consensus.
Retraction Watch <—– See a blog which monitors science journal retractions. This exemplifies the main reason why there’s a growing distrust of science. People observe and hear of rampant fraud and abuse. An example of this, the Global Warming Hoax (cult religion), has become very expensive to us.
This former researcher, and present day pharmacist is often hard pressed to distinguish what appears in NEJM, JAMA and Lancet from what is written in the Journal of Irreproducible Results.
Among the false intellectuals who dominate academia, there is little sense of accountability. They scoff at the idea that a person has responsibility to others. This is passed on to their students.
The natural result is dishonesty and work product of low quality. Conservatives, who show a tendency to think in a more left brain fashion, would be the first to notice this and register the loss of confidence.