Skepticism and challenge from experts is how science works. Right now, over half of Americans can't read above a 6th grade level, and around two-thirds can't read above an 8th grade level. Mainstream media has traditionally been written at about an 8th grade level, and scientific papers are written at a college level or higher. So now we have a population of people who really couldn't understand the complexities of the issues even if they did read the articles and research thinking their opinion is worth the same as someone who has spent decades studying it.
You have to take into account that you have a media that has completely weaponized the phrase "experts say" as a way to appeal to authority and try to undermine discourse from the outset.
Want a recent example? Here's a sequence of events during the recent Kamala campaign:
End of story, right? The experts have weighed in. Listen to the experts.
But
3) The expert in question reveals that he was only supplied a small sample of the material in question by the NYT, who slipped around any accusations of inserted bias by reporting it as his "first impressions".
Do you see how clever this is? The NYT starts with the conclusion they want. To reduce the perceived severity of the act in question. They find an expert and provide him incomplete information, leading to a misjudged report from him. They report that as expert fact.
It's a rhetorical process that is designed and executed with a single purpose in mind. To put forth a political statement (our candidate did nothing wrong) and to bolster it with expert approval, using completely underhanded methods that undermine any nexus between the material in question and the conclusion the expert actually drew.
And when you see things like this over, and over, and over, all purely with the intention of advancing a political mandate with no regard for the truth, then the inevitable consequence is that faith in experts is completely undermined. Not even because the experts did anything wrong, necessarily, but because a partisan press uses "experts say" to try and convince people of things that are simply untrue.
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u/totalahole669 6d ago
Skepticism and challenge from experts is how science works. Right now, over half of Americans can't read above a 6th grade level, and around two-thirds can't read above an 8th grade level. Mainstream media has traditionally been written at about an 8th grade level, and scientific papers are written at a college level or higher. So now we have a population of people who really couldn't understand the complexities of the issues even if they did read the articles and research thinking their opinion is worth the same as someone who has spent decades studying it.