> But when you think about it, governments, state agencies, and even universities themselves are not actively trying to improve this

They are, all the time, doing outreach. It's just as Isaac Asimov said:

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

The origin story the government brainwashes everyone through public schools is partly to blame. There are people challenging it, but mostly they end up pushing for a different form of anti-intellectualism :(.

Since 1974, when science increasingly underwrote policy, it’s become entwined with politics through the EPA, climate change, treatment of gender and sexuality, public health, mandatory teaching of evolution, and “critical race theory.”

Conservatives don’t have as much of a problem with science when it avoids “impact science” and sticks to topics that don’t conflict with church teachings or business interests.

But trust in science has never been universal. Trust in institutions and experts had to be built painstakingly over generations. The Social Transformation of American Medicine is a great account of this process for American doctors.

There is active propaganda against scientists and institutions; and scientists are decent but not excellent communicators. They lost the communication war and now the general public is very distrusting of science.

My parents have been religiously listening to the likes of Rush Limbaugh since the early 90's on a daily basis. I recall listening to it on our drive into work together.

30+ years of hearing whatever the tv/radio host du jour says, without critical thinking, taking it at face value, 8+ hours every day. In the car to work, radio on while working, drive home, and then turn the TV on till bed time.

Then take a drive through rural America and see that education isn't an important pillar.

I went to college (neither of my parents did) and made it out with a different perspective, but my brother did not. He peddles in conspiracy theories and doesn't believe humans landed on the moon. My father regrets sending me to college.

I won't answer your questions, but I think you'll find a lot of answers in Sapiens and Nexus, both books from Yuval Noah Harari. They explain a lot about the fantastic questions that you are posing.

My personal theory is that many responsible for teaching science in the K-12 grades are not doing a great job of communicating that science is a process for finding truth. Definitely not laying this at teachers’ feet - standardized testing and curricula, overcrowded classrooms, underfunded schools etc all contribute I’m sure, but I get the impression from talking to even well educated people that they were taught science much like they were taught math: there is a right answer, your job is to regurgitate it.

Biology in particular but also chemistry is often taught with rote memorization at its heart, and it’s easy to lose sight while getting the current thinking jammed into working memory that in the bigger picture, science is a process. Fast forward to various stages of adulthood, and when ‘science’ (not actually a thing as a whole but presented as such in the media), in light of new information, changes course or updates its priors on something you’d accepted as fact, and you might perceive scientists, a group of whom you may know none, as condescending and overconfident. In fact scientists disagree over everything and doubt way more than the public would believe but that’s often a footnote to the way the story of the scientific process is presented.

In Europe we actively pushed the crazies to emigrate to the US. We had so many crazy religious people that we got tired of them. They went to the US and we thought we got rid of them, but now they are back with a vengeance.

I hate blaming things on social media, but I think that's at the center of it.

Once you start pausing on anything related to anti-vax or anti-science, you'll start seeing more and more people talking about alternative views.

And soon those alternative views are all you see, and those alternative views start feeling like mainstream views. And then you become confused when you're at a dinner party and no one agrees with your stance on vaccines.

I don't think it's any more complicated than that.

And it doesn't help that anti-vax views are spread with the support of bogus science. Anti-vaxxers don't view themselves as anti-science.

I would put some blame on medical billing, and the opiods pandemic also made some fertile ground for trolls (a work injury turning family member to an addict, followed by minimal fines and zero jail time for the conspirators that grew the pandemic). Basically a perfect setup to grow mistrust.

Just a couple of decades ago both sides of the US political aisles laughed at antivax style rhetoric, and didn't see forcing the issue further than it was as worth it (us religious grounds and similar).

You need a certain baseline of power and influence in order to inspire a backlash like what we're seeing in the US.

It happens because so many Scientists are influential, and in particular because of the way that influence was used during COVID.

(I enthusiastically take my vaccines)

The fact that there are so many people standing for a pro-science position is precisely the right circumstance for this situation.

The GOP has fully adopted the alt-right playbook. Here's how it works:

1. Publicly announce that you hold an overtly bad position.

2. Reasonable people begin to argue with you.

3. Bicker with them about it instead of arguing.

4. Illustrate that your in-group is divided from their out-group along the axis of this position.

5. Profit from the increased engagement.

First, the politicians and talking heads start the cycle. Everyone who considers themselves part of that in-group copies the behavior. Because engagement drives voting, people in power hold overtly bad positions; guaranteeing that people from the out-group will argue with them. The cycle cannot be stopped.

Public health operations are hard because often when you reduce total life years lost you also redistribute the life years lost. Take the original Oral Polio Vaccine. I suspect that’s what I received as a child in India but it was also originally used here in the US. It had a small risk of causing paralytic polio. Until the ‘90s the US still had single digit cases of this. Would those people have gotten polio without being vaccinated? Since they lived in a mostly polio-free society probably not.

So “free rider” antivaxxers would find themselves at lower risk in that society because herd immunity would protect them.

My understanding (limited as it is) is that OPV was sold as a “we’re all in this together” thing while simultaneously there were far fewer sources of information and so governments were on a different scale of information distribution than individuals.

But trust in those who speak for science isn’t automatic. Most people could look out and see that claims from these institutions were calibrated to create outcomes and not strictly speak the truth. I sympathize with the institutions because many of the people present inherit a memory of a time when these institutions controlled information spread in a more systemic way.

As an example, it’s pretty well-established (from first person views) that the HHS and their governed orgs claimed that masks don’t work expressly in order to ensure that masks were available for healthcare providers. One could imagine they came from a tradition which praises allowing Coventry to be bombed for the greater good of hiding that we’d broken the German code.

But “we lied to you for the greater good” lands poorly these days because information spreads easier and from multiple sources.

Take the case of COVID-19. Some jurisdictions interpreted restrictions to disallow people from hanging out in groups in public. In Dolores Park (I think, but in some park in SF), we had these little circles you were supposed to stay in. Meanwhile, scientists signed letters endorsing large scale protests.

Stories like this abound. A scientist who wants to stop a dam finds an endangered species that would be destroyed and blocks the dam. Years later it is found to be not a distinct species but genetically identical to another species that is not at threat.

In the past, information control permitted suppression of these things or reframing of them in a different way - the people of Coventry were heroes, even if they were volunteered as sacrifice unknowingly. Today, I think that wouldn’t work so well.

Today, people see scientists as individuals as well. If you believe in disparate impact being the standard of discrimination, it is now worthwhile to ask whether the guys who vote a certain way would vote to sacrifice you for their people.

Anyway, as an aside, GCHQ says today that the Coventry story as told is a myth. Pretty interesting read: https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/the-bombing-of-coventry-...