relevant links

SciAM Biden endorsement scientificamerican.com/…

SciAM Harris endorsement scientificamerican.com/…

Zhang "Political endorsement by Nature and trust in scientific expertise during COVID-19"

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ar… and nature.com/articles/s41…

Thorp's 2020 editorial in Science science.org/doi/10.1126…

and a 2024 post on his substack that points to a plenary session presentation he made on the topic science-forever.com/p/w…?

Derek Lowe "Grow a Spine" article science.org/content/blo…

Commentary on Nature endorsement of Biden aei.org/op-eds/the-foll… citing Zhang study

Atul Gawande Commencement Speech "the Mistrust of Science at California Institute of Technolog (Fri-Jun-10-2016) newyorker.com/news/news… offers some early context (h/t henrymillermd.org/27747…)

" Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested."

[...]

"You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best when he said, 'The scientist explains the world by successive approximations.'"

[...]

"Science’s defenders have identified five hallmark moves of pseudoscientists. They argue that the scientific consensus emerges from a conspiracy to suppress dissenting views. They produce fake experts, who have views contrary to established knowledge but do not actually have a credible scientific track record. They cherry-pick the data and papers that challenge the dominant view as a means of discrediting an entire field. They deploy false analogies and other logical fallacies. And they set impossible expectations of research: when scientists produce one level of certainty, the pseudoscientists insist they achieve another."

[...]

"The mistake, then, is to believe that the educational credentials you get today give you any special authority on truth. What you have gained is far more important: an understanding of what real truth-seeking looks like. It is the effort not of a single person but of a group of people—the bigger the better—pursuing ideas with curiosity, inquisitiveness, openness, and discipline. As scientists, in other words."