We would all like to believe that the scientific field, scientific institutions, the medical field, and academia are places where science can be practiced in an optimal, fair, and free way. That would be lovely, but unfortunately that is not the real world. Reality is much more difficult than that. The problem with science is that, human beings, and institutions are deeply flawed, and science has to be carried out by those human beings.
Money, politics, sociology, institutional inertia, and power are deeply present in scientific institutions & society itself. Many people are sadly too naive and enter into the fields thinking that they're going to be able to act freely and spend their career doing the right thing and telling the truth, which unfortunately, for many, to varying degrees, is far from the real picture, but what can they do, they've already invested perhaps years, and tons of money and time and passion into it, naturally they will tend towards attempting to convince themselves otherwise, and they will fall in line with the machine operating around them (Sunk cost psychology). This is true provided they can actually see it and have not been placed under the illusion created by the training and indoctrination they receive, which many of them unfortunately have been.
It is also worth remembering just how easy it would be for an anti-science force to control the fields of science simply by ensuring that those who enter them are already selected on the basis that they will not threaten the preferred narratives. Whenever someone says ''99% of scientists agree that''
Well, you're already looking at a bias selection of the population. People who are already distrustful of the institutions/schools or hold certain views that are not in line with the interests of the institutions or fields, are probably not going to pursue an education in which they have to depart from those beliefs to graduate... and for those that did graduate, any that were strong enough dissidents to a particular narrative, probably got kicked out, or ... ''discredited''.
Setting that aside, people in any field, scientific or otherwise, can always benefit from outsiders, who can point out their blind spots and show them where they may be too arrogant, too caught up in their own ego or their own field/peers, or too convinced of their own superiority. Many scientists hold an inherent belief that they are more rational than everyone else simply by virtue of being scientists by trade. That belief does not make them less vulnerable; it makes them more vulnerable to anti-science thinking, to mistakes, to arrogance, to missing things, and to bias, because they start from the assumption that they are somehow less capable, or even incapable, of those failings. The moment you view yourself as uniquely immune to certain mistakes or biases because ''I'm an expert, I'm not a layperson!'' you are more vulnerable to those mistakes, because when they happen you will not acknowledge them.
Also, what do we mean by ''a scientist'' in the broad sense? Anyone can be ''a scientist'' they just have to practice science, they don't have to have a career in it, or have a PhD, they can just DO science.
--- Trade off:
There is an important trade-off that must be made to enter a scientific field, the scientific establishment, academia, or any similar institution.
You don't operate in a vacuum.
You now have to deal with money and incentives and pressures and deadlines and authority.
You have to manage time, energy, and efficiency. You face limitations on freedom. You develop habits, some of them bad, simply because you are doing the same things over and over again in a rigid routine, habits aren't bad by themselves, but, there's a trade-off whenever you're working on auto-pilot doing a sophisticated complicated and delicate task, because the result is, you stop thinking about what you're doing, or think about it less, you are just running a program in your head... And I get it, you can't sit there and think about the endless nuances of everything you do every day, because you'd never get anything done, but you will make a sacrifice.
You also have to protect your career. You cannot just do whatever you like. Something you believe is true and well-supported can still be so damaging to your career that you cannot risk publishing it, or you are simply too afraid to try. Do not tell me that people actually want to be outliers in the scientific field; that is nonsense, especially on controversial topics that genuinely threaten a career and require standing up against a large institutional machine. No one wants to be the one that upset a sensitive narrative and gets blamed for causing disruption or panic, or be the one who get's their license revoked, or (yes I really believe so) accidentally suicided, when they get too close to the truth.
Once science becomes a career, some of what you do is no longer primarily about the pursuit of science or truth (perhaps even most of what you do). It becomes about your career, about making money, getting grants, winning awards, achieving professional success, climbing the ladder, doing what your bosses or the authorities want, producing a product, or generating literature that can be used to justify a government or corporate decision.
I know an ecologist who works as a consultant for the HS2 constructors building the new rail project in the UK. He has repeatedly told me that an ecologists job is not really to be an ecologist (not as he assumed when he studied it); it is to produce a professional, respectable piece of paperwork that can be used to justify demolishing a forest, or a habitat, or a piece of land. His role was essentially to tell the client what they want to hear, because they will not hire or pay him if he says ''no you cannot do that because it will disrupt this habitat, damage that ecosystem, or kill this animal''. That is an example of a scientist who quickly found out, he was not there to do science, or pursue truth, he was there to make money at the cost of truth.
There are many more problems I could mention, but this covers the bulk of them. Simply working in the field of science does not mean you are unshackled in the pursuit of real science; I would argue that you are often far more shackled than someone outside the field.
That is not to say there are no advantages. Insiders have access to more data, more training, colleagues and professors, more money, resources, funding, time, energy, and practice. But those advantages come at a cost.
-- There are variations of knowledge and expertise:
People often make the absolute assumption which is that you cannot achieve a better or wider understanding of a field or topic without formal scientific training, and that the only real path is through university or something similar. And they assume that all scientific training is true, accurate, and fair, just because it's... taught in academia. That assumption has no ultimate justification beyond a feeling a feeling of trust in institutions, in authority, in power, in the state of academia itself (academia 500 years ago would have taught the earth is flat, so we know you can't just assume what it's teaching or producing is always reliable). I am not saying the opposite is usually the case, scientific training is probably more accurate and reliable overall, and the textbooks and methods involved are generally good and reasonable. But that does not mean it is always that way, or entirely that way even when it largely is.
People can practice science without doing it as a job or without formal qualifications. It is not something that requires you to be an expert or a professional. Treating it as though it does is a perversion of what science is supposed to be, because it turns the enterprise into gatekeeping based on status, authority, and class rather than on evidence, data, argumentation, logic, and principle and method.
A field may excel in certain areas of knowledge and data while remaining weak or underexplored in others, especially topics that sit closer to the edges of the prevailing consensus. Those topics are not automatically false simply because they have received less attention, and importantly, people cannot claim expertise on the areas that they have not explored, even if they're in the same field they're training in.
I would use this analogy. There are different ways to explore a Minecraft world. You can dig a hundred blocks deep in forty places, ten blocks deep across a massive area, one block deep in a hundred thousand places, or a thousand blocks deep in a single spot. In the same way, there are different ways of understanding a topic, and some people have the advantage of being able to explore it in a manner that others cannot, sometimes because of the constraints of the environment in which they are studying. Someone in the medical field might have knowledge that is more widely spread but less deep, or a very strong understanding of one area paired with a weaker grasp of others. Meanwhile someone outside the field might have the time and freedom to examine a narrower topic in far greater depth.
Most doctors, for example, do not have the opportunity during their training or in their free time to spend five years reading vaccine-autism studies for hours a day. A random person working from their basement could do exactly that. This does not mean the person in the basement is automatically correct, but it does illustrate a real difference in the kind of inquiry that is possible depending on your situation.
There are freedoms available when you are not traveling the formal academic route, but they come at a cost. You lack ready access to the same resources, peer community, professors, and specialized materials that exist inside universities. Both paths involve trade-offs, and those trade-offs need to be recognized. You do not have to accept everything a non-expert says, but you also cannot dismiss someone simply because they are not, ''an expert''. Science should not be turned into an esoteric system that only people of a certain class or status are permitted to engage in or speak with authority about.
What I fear is happening to science is that it is becoming something antithetical to what it ought to be. At its best science enabled a single person to be able to undermine an entire established consensus. That is what makes science valuable. We are not supposed to rely on consensus, groupthink, authority, status, symbols, or what the overwhelming body of literature happens to say. One could argue that this is why science began in the first place: to reduce the extent to which we depend on our own status, egos, groupthink, tribalism, authoritarianism, biases, and the pressures of the systems (religious at the time) we inhabit. Science in the early Enlightenment was stronger in this respect because it was not practiced in the way it is practiced now. The current approach is very different, and I am concerned that we are moving steadily further away from what science is really about. That drift is incredibly dangerous, perhaps more so than superstition or religion.
One danger is that people working inside scientific spaces tend to believe they are incapable of repeating the same errors their predecessors made centuries ago. They assume that because they are doing things that look scientific or involve data and numbers and microscopes, they must therefore be doing science, but one tiny assumption, one little mistake, one tiny thing missed from a dataset, one little bias, one bad habit, could undermine ALL of it, the microscopes, the model, the sample, it's all completely meaningless because of one small error.
They also carry a form of arrogance that religious people often lacked (I'm not saying they didn't have arrogance, or that there isn't nuances here). Religious traditions frequently acknowledged the limits of human knowledge, admitted that they were operating on faith, and recognized that they were merely fragile human's in comparison to God. What worries me about science is that it can push us toward treating ourselves as though we are God, as though we aren't fragile humans, as if we can play God, as if we aren't operating on any faith, or any feelings, that we can simply know things because we ran a study, because we used some fancy high tech equipment we can now decided that we know X is true, or that our highly flawed and limited senses have somehow disappeared. We exaggerate how well we actually understand the world simply because there is lots of information, but lots of information does not automatically equal lots of quality information, or truth. Quantity > Quality.
Some say scientists are humble, but that humility tends to appear mainly when it is convenient. On certain topics they become extremely confident, when that confidence is unwarranted. Science can improve our understanding of the world, but what gives science it's strength, also makes it highly weak and vulnerable too, it can also be equally used to deceive people and lead us astray from reality, into false perceptions of reality, and it can do so especially by giving people the impression that something has been found and proven by data and not by belief.
The forces that existed before the Enlightenment did not simply vanish from humanity. They adapted. They recognized that science had become the new vehicle for advancing a narrative and for shaping what people think. If you can make something look like science, you can influence belief while also making the effort appear legitimate and fact based, because it is packaged in a scientific language and appearance.
Science is a very very delicate and difficult thing to do properly, which is precisely why it becomes so dangerous when that difficulty is not taken seriously. It is remarkably easy to produce something that looks like legitimate science yet is undermined in its actual integrity by a single tiny overlooked flaw, whether the flaw was intentional or not. It is easy to make mistakes you never notice, easy to underestimate how complicated an issue really is, and easy to achieve a large scale deception with relatively little effort. Studies and research can be gamed in endless ways. You can manipulate science without EVEN committing outright fraud or statistical trickery. Simply refusing to publish a study or a result you dislike is available to anyone who wants to steer a narrative. It does not require faking or tampering with data; the study can remain on a private computer. Publication is not always mandatory. You also can just change the endpoint or method of a study half way through when its not looking in your favour and then you've changed the entire study.
Scientific fraud and manipulation are often extremely hard to detect because they can be subtle, and because thinking scientifically is not inherently easy. That difficulty is exactly why science was invented: we already know how fallible human beings are. As a result, even millions of scientists can fail to notice small errors that have catastrophic consequences for the outcomes and reliability of their research, whether those errors were deliberate or not.
In order to believe ''science'' or believe ''experts'' so readily, you have to fundamentally fail to understand human nature, social dynamics, society, institutions, anthropology, psychology, philosophy.
Anyone who understands those things, becomes far more cynical of scientific establishment/expert consensus.
Perhaps the most scary thing about it all however, is not all of that ^, but actually, the very fact that, these things are not being discussed, not being acknowledged, and that people are not showing concern with some of these issues, and that anyone who does, often is met with aggression, attacks and condescending mockery.
That indicates to me, that we are really at danger, because we appear almost totally unaware or in denial of our own misapplication of science and just how dangerously close we are to becoming the VERY thing we tried to overcome - Dogmatic, status driven, authoritarian, money driven, tribalistic, arrogant, egotistical mouthpieces for the establishment.
Behaving just like the religious zealots we claimed to invent science to fight against.
