Trust / Slow Science and Social Media:

Cory J. Clark & Bo M. Winegard:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Cory-Clark-2/publication/395385848_The_Siren_Song_of_Influence/

I love quite many statements from this paper. A great read.

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"Science has something helpful to offer. And helpfulness leads to status and influence."

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"Of course, discovering genuinely new and useful information is hard. It can take years of uncertain and tedious work. And in some disciplines, the well of discovery may be running dry."

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"it may be that “honesty is the best policy” for maintaining long-term public trust in, and thus deference to, science."

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"in the age of social media, a growing number of scientists appear less interested in the patient work of discovery ...."

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"Trust doesn’t come from demands for deference. It comes from repeated demonstrations of competence. It’s earned by delivering results."

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"Science earned its authority ... by ... offering high-quality information that helps people solve problems[.]"

"the hard-won and always-precarious reputation of science as a dispassionate arbiter of truth."

"Evolutionary scholars have documented status conferral across cultures, showing that generating benefits for others is the primary path to earning prestige and influence (e.g., Cheng, 2020; Durkee et al., 2020). Status gained through dominance or coercion can work in the short term, but it breeds resentment and unstable hierarchies, not durable trust."

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"Likes, retweets, and follows reward attention-grabbing content rather than careful analysis."

"A viral tweet can return more validation in twelve hours than a peer-reviewed paper offers in two years."

"And the more you post, the greater your chances of going viral. Quantity trumps quality, since each tweet, however meagre, is one more shot to win Twitter for the day."

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"Ideally, science rewards rigorous, methodical work, a system that is constraining and at times, painfully slow."

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"Earlier generations of scholars earned prestige over decades through meaningful contributions to their fields. A rare few reached broader public fame. Today, a scholar with little expertise but 4 strong opinions and a fiery temperament can swiftly reach “public intellectual” status. It doesn’t take much experience with social media to learn that the currency of influence is provocation, not precision, and that fanning the flames of controversy drives engagement."

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"The scientific method, though imperfect, is specifically designed to minimize biases, flawed analyses, and imprecise claims."

"science is the best system for arriving at truths (at least for now)."

"So long as scholars stick to their core mission, i.e., identifying and describing empirical reality, they can offer something genuinely useful to the world."

"Science has something helpful to offer. And helpfulness leads to status and influence."

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"Firing off a polarizing tweet, by contrast, might take just a few minutes and still deliver thousands of likes, hundreds of new followers, and a fleeting but real sense of importance."

"The job of an academic used to be much quieter. Scholars were known to their students, immediate colleagues, and perhaps their broader subdiscipline, but few scholars reached public awareness. Now, with podcasts, blogs, and especially social media, scholars frequently speak directly to the public, amassing followers, attention, and influence."

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"scientific communicators who embraced accountability—by inviting discussion of dissenting views, acknowledging uncertainty, and taking responsibility for previous errors—elicited more trust and engagement than those who adopted authoritarian messaging, dismissed dissent, or labeled critics as “anti-science.” "

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"Academia often responds to problems with strategic plans, committees, and more bureaucracy. ... In this case though, the solution lies in a collective recommitment to the core values of science and a scaling back of everything else. Instead of overstating certainty, scientists should model epistemic humility, acknowledging uncertainty where it exists and being transparent about the limitations of our knowledge."

"Neither does issuing sweeping “consensus statements” on unresolved social issues. Where true consensuses exist, there is no need for such statements. ... And scholars should resist the urge to demand, “Trust the science!” The moment such a command is felt necessary is usually the moment there is no single, settled science to trust."

"Science is not a body of dogmas to be trusted or deferred to. Rather, it is a process ... whose primary virtue is precisely that it disdains all authority save that of the rational mind."

"the very thing we claim to offer: impartial, high-quality information."

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"If, however, we want science to continue to have that authority, we must return to the slow, unglamorous, often tedious process that made the findings of science worthy of credibility in the first place."

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"The disciplines perceived as least politicized (including math, physics, chemistry, English, nursing, and computer science) are also the most trusted and provoke the least skepticism. In contrast, disciplines viewed as highly politicized (including religious studies, gender studies, ethnic studies, and political science [perhaps an unfortunate name choice]) tend to be the least trusted and elicit the most skepticism."


Mean Disciplinary Scepticism & Mean Disciplinary Politization