It is worse. If you mention that you are not trusting every scientific results per se, you're being labeled as stupid and uneducated. This sort of absolute reasoning is making the distrust even worse. How can you have trust in a in a system that is unwilling to publicly admit its shortcomings? Trust and honesty come in pairs.
This science-bro movement scares me too. "But SCIENCE said so! You're a SCIENCE denier!"
It feels like a religion, with its own T-shirts and all. Appeals to authority, intellectual posturing… often from people with little understanding of the actual science. Honest insiders are way more careful with any absolute statements.
No wonder there's a (also scary) rise of conspiracy theories.
How do people not observe those as two sides of the same coin?
I think people have to get more serious about separating science as a procedure from scientism (that is, philosophical issues that are often discussed in tandem). When one uses the phrase, “science denier”, it often means, “you don’t agree with my philosophy/metaphysics/economic policy” rather than “you deny these particular facts”, which causes people to be rightly concerned. I’m not optimistic that this is going to change anytime soon, but this, I think, accounts for many of the issues in current discourse.
In the UK we've seen a fascinating evolution from skeptic societies to science denial conspiracy theorists. To _massively_ simplify what's a relatively complex piece of sociological weirdness: using your intuition about how the world works is a good heuristic for spotting charlatans, but it fails you badly when the science tells you something that doesn't accord with your intuition.
I tend to limit my use of "science denier" when an organization or its followers systematically deny scientific knowledge on multiple unrelated fronts.
Interestingly, I have read that in the 1920s and 30s, there was actually an organized relativity denialist movement, that wrote articles and held public protests.
Relativity was a huge philosophical shift from the comparative simplicity of Newton's laws. It's not surprising that there was resistance to it.
Tesla was famously against relativity, telling the New York Times, "Einstein’s relativity work is a magnificent mathematical garb which fascinates, dazzles and makes people blind to the underlying errors. The theory is like a beggar clothed in purple whom ignorant people take for a king".
Indeed, and the anti-relativity movement also had a very strong undercurrent of antisemitism.
Chances are, most of the people marching against relativity had no clue about Newtonian mechanics, and were told stuff such as relativity leading to moral relativism.
Since I read Seeing Like a State, I've started to think "charlatan" whenever I hear the word "science". As in "scientific forestry", "climate science" (scientists who study Earth's climate call themselves meteorologists), "scientific racism". Is "computer science" an exception? I'm not game to speculate.
Which actual scientists describe themselves that way? We're physicists, geologists, botanists, psychologists or whatever. When someone says they're a scientist, it suggests that they're not part of any actual scientific discipline, but making a false appeal to authority.
>scientists who study Earth's climate call themselves meteorologists
This is just incorrect. Meteorologists don't study Earth's climate, they study weather. Meteorologists don't use ice cores or tree rings for their research, they study much shorter-term fluid dynamics. Climate scientists do study climate, and not weather. The disciplines are related (specifically, they're under atmospheric sciences), but to dismiss either one as being less scientific is picking favorites despite all evidence to the contrary. I suppose you could use the synonym "climatology" if you want a word without "science" in it, but it seems like a pretty silly heuristic regardless.
I don't like the science-bro movement, but I also think they might fill an important niche. The anti-science movement has too many people and too much time and too high of a (answer time / question time) gish-gallop ratio for scientists to possibly engage with. If scientists try to fight the anti-science crowd, they will lose.
Science bros, for all their faults, can trade blows on more even footing, and that's something. Perhaps even a vitally important something. Even if science bros aren't great at science proper, their contribution to societal consensus formation might be as important as the underlying science itself!
Science bros often misuse "anti-science" to try to shutdown opinions they disagree with. Hence people worried about the unlikely event of being killed by a nuclear power plant are anti-science, but people worried about the even more unlikely event of being killed by a super intelligent AI aren't. Misusing the word "science" (particularly by people who don't seem to have a good grasp on it) and turning it into a rhetorical cudgel is harmful, and pushes the idea that science is ideological.
I found that the movement you talk about is more about putting your faith in the "scientist" as opposed to the actual "science".
It seems much easier to find scientists who will tow your political viewpoint and then people can use them as a resource to prove that unless you take this person's "expertise" as gospel, then it proves you are a science "denier".
