This is so true. Trying to explain to lay people how garbage peer review is (I show them my accepted NeurIPS paper reviews as evidence of how bad it is) tough. Most people imagine that (especially at the highest levels) that folks are independently reproducing results or at least doing something more than running ChatGPT on the paper. It's exactly the opposite - peer review is a joke.

The number one thing that made me mistrust scientists/science was doing it myself. I realized that they are not the arbiters of truth that Plato/Aristotle tried to make them out to be. The allegory of the cave/allegory of the divided line were fake/complete lies - and most of western philosophy implicitly acts as "footnotes" on these wrongful ideas.

As the secret of science-as-slightly-better-than-chance gets out to more and more, existing anti-intellectualism is supercharged. It's not just attacks of "cultural/postmodern neo-marxism" against your comparative literature department - it's claims of systemic academic fraud of your whole STEM field laboratories because it became known to the public that everyone cut corners so that they could be one step ahead in the academic careerist rat race.