I feel the HN community might resonate with how startups are seen currently. Most of them fail, some are outright fraud, but a few completely change the game.
The model to assess the scientific enterprise should be similar to a VC. Most will fail but the few big successes will more than compensate for the losses.
The anti-pro-sciencers are claiming there is not just noise, but a sea of deliberately fabricated conspiracy theories concocted over many decades with an ultimate end goal of putting tracking chips in them.
It's obviously not a completely worthless institution - there have clearly been some impressive discoveries despite all of the bullshit.
I think the main source of distrust comes from the jarring disconnect between the way that the institution is presented to the public vs. the way it actually functions in real life. "Messy" is a beautiful way to describe things from the inside.
The problem, in my opinion, is how external entities treat science. Some examples:
* Media reporting low grade papers as "Science" which constantly contradict each other. "Scientists found out $something causes cancer", then a year after that "Scientists found out $thatsamething cures cancer
* Pseudo scientific drugs being sold for a health-and-beauty-obsessed general public with little to no effect
* Political think tanks funding flawed research to push their own agenda and heavily echoing those researches in their echelons for political gain
It seems that academia has become a foundation for other entities to cling on for profit, and now the it's the acamedia's reputation that has been shattered.
There absolutely is. Scientists and universities are constantly declaring themselves to be bastions of reason and enlightenment, and their research that they themselves know is shit to be of great significance and rigor.
I'm not even talking about the outright corruption that you mentioned - just the more mundane things like researchers publishing papers with completely useless/misleading information (e.g. testing a ML algorithm on a single dataset and declaring it as a breakthrough in neurosignal decoding) just to get those updoots from your mates.
Despite all the brilliant minds and appearance of professionalism and pride and campus pageantry...
it's easily a much more insecure, drama-filled, immature, and petty social dynamic and environment than most high schools.
That seems imo to be due to a combination of academia itself and a govt (or govt style) administration apparatus, where everyone is constantly trying convince everyone else of the importance of what it is they do.
I get the feeling that you claim that it is all fraud and lies, and that those who disagree can see no wrong with it at all.
Then someone responds with a nuanced reply, something that I, as someone who lives in a university town in Sweden, have the impression that almost everyone in academia actually agrees with.
And then it turns out that you also mostly agree. So, now I'm asking myself (and you): Why did I read that first post of yours as so hostile? As someone who was actively trying to create mistrust?
Is it just because how the debate climate is on the internet, or should you perhaps consider trying to be a bit more nuanced when communicating on the internet?
I think this happens all the time - popular opinion swings far in one direction, criticisms then go in the opposite direction as disillusionment and problems get exemplified, again too far, back and forth, rediscovering the lessons of the past and settling down.
How else do you define bullshit?
When I hear people disillusioned with how science works, more often than not I see someone who is forced to see that the mental model they had of how it works doesn't line up with how it actually works. It's messy, and has always been messy. Just read some history books, and you'll see "scientific" ideas in the 19th and early 20th century that persisted for a long time simply because some people disliked specific other people with opposing ideas. You'll see horrible egos, non-scientific arguments to reject ideas, people scheming and trying to undermine each other, and so on. Basically, humans being humans to each other. There never was a time when science was performed in the idealized model that we sometimes wish it was done: it always involves people being people, flaws and all.
Plus, I don't know any working scientist who doesn't assume most scientific discoveries are complete bullshit (or, more likely, they aren't bullshit as much as they ultimately contribute no new knowledge or understanding). We all know how the game works and why people put ideas out there (especially with the increased volume of publications people are expected to have now). What keeps people like me going is that I know most ideas are dumb or flat out garbage, but good ones emerge from that churn too and push things along. I like to think that some of my dumb ideas, when I throw them into that churn, will also occasionally push things along.
Don't get me started in the "believe in the science" line. The fact that we've turned that phrase into a political cudgel is not helping the situation.