>>12981555Yeah, that's actually an important question.
Scientists are getting more and more specialized and doing harder and harder things that keep getting further out of reach of lay people (and other scientists that are specialized in other fields).
It's not reasonable to expect laypeople to "do their own research" when it took a group of experts in the field multiple years to come up with just one result.
I only see 3 solutions.
1. Blindly follow the elites, for better or for worse. This doesn't sound good.
2. As a society, we could make a concrete effort to build trust. Whether it's more transparency or making friends with people in different fields like someone here suggested.
If you don't know anything about cars, why do you trust your mechanic?
If you know nothing about teeth, why do you trust your dentist?
We should figure something out and apply it to science as well.
I'm not sure how to accomplish this though. But if it's possible, I think this is the best solution.
3. Slow the fuck down. Instead of trying to advance science, we could try to improve education and access/incentives to learning. This way the gap between experts and lay people would be smaller so less trust would be needed. If a scientific claim sounds fabricated, a small enough group of laypeople would have the resources and know how to reproduce the experiment and get their own data and conclusion.
But I don't see this happening. If we slow the fuck down, other countries might not and then they'll surpass us.
This might also not be possible because some people might just be hopelessly stupid.
