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Evaluating all science is impossible for everybody, even the experts. Therefore everyone must use a heuristic on how much to trust scientific results as a default. This is not a binary, dogmatic "trust/not-trust" and is often specific to the field (I trust physics more than socialology, for example)

Right now, you are simply observing the whole population update their priors about the credibilty of science based on the COVID debacle. You complain your friend "doesn’t know the difference between climatology and epidemiology", but thats obviously untrue. What happened is you friend's heuristic for the credibilty of epidemiologists is linked to his heuristic for the crediblity of climatologists. And thats fair, honestly, especially if you can't evalute science for either.

They are very similar in terms of politization/polarization/dogma. The stakes are high. The subjects are both very difficulty for similar reasons (predicting the behavior of large complex systems). The failures of COVID gave non-zero information about climate science, and your friend is just integrating that (as he should).

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