We have an experts crisis in the US right now.
Ever since COVID, people have become incredibly distrustful of anything "experts" claim, if the issue is controversial. This is despite the fact that these experts really do have substantial education and experience in their respective fields, and would seemingly be voices you can trust.
The problem? The experts have been corrupted by their own ideology. Many experts -- especially scientists -- are hesitant to publish any study which would empower the narrative from the other side.
We saw this a ton with COVID. The right quickly took the position that masking didn't work, distancing didn't work, it was likely caused by a lab leak in Wuhan, and COVID's danger was overblown. The left quickly took the position that masking was super important, shutdowns were essential, the lab leak theory was racist nonsense, and COVID was a severe crisis threatening the lives of the entire population. Then, a year later when the vaccines came out, the left took the position that they were incredibly safe and incredibly effective, while the right believed that they were harmful and mostly useless.
Without debating the merits of the above COVID positions, the important takeaway here is that there was tremendous pressure upon scientists NOT to publish studies/data which would undermine the left's positions on COVID. This was especially true because 2020 was "the most important election of our lifetime", according to left wingers, due to Trump being up for reelection.
Thus, any COVID study which backed ANY right-wing assertions could be seen as helping Trump, and therefore could not be published. Therefore, nearly every study we saw out of the US regarding COVID ended up with some sort of left-supporting conclusion, even if some of these conclusions fell apart over time (and not necessarily from newly learned data!)
This, in turn, caused the right to completely distrust all of the experts regarding COVID, often at their own peril. You had a lot of middle-aged and older people refusing to take the vaccine in 2021, despite original/Delta COVID's legitimate danger to them. However, you cannot completely blame these people, as indeed the experts had lied to them many times before, and even with the vaccine the "experts" did somewhat cover up its shortcomings and harsh side effect profile.
Why am I bringing all of this up?
I have seen many left-supporting COVID studies -- but they have a tremendous flaw. Nearly every one of these studies was authored entirely by left-wing scientists! Simply put, I could not trust an unbiased and accurate study about a political hot button issue, if only one political side produced the study.
This angered a lot of left wingers, as they'd bark at me, "Where's your degree in epidemiology?" or the even more arrogant "Well, the truth is left-biased!"
But my point stands. If we are studying the IQ of German Shepherds compared to other dogs, I don't care about the researcher's politics, because it's not a politically charged topic. But it's an absolute mistake for a serious study with political ramifications to be done by a highly biased group of scientists. You simply can't trust what they put forth, even if it's peer-reviewed.
I feel the same way about the right. I would not trust a right-wing study on a political issue, either. I would again feel like I'm likely being manipulated, and not getting the whole story.
A true study about a political issue should either be conducted by a group of authors with mixed political affiliations, or ones who are entirely apolitical.
Somehow relatively few people seem to agree with me on this. I find that people either trust the experts too much in general, or they only trust experts they agree with politically. Very few seem to distrust studies from BOTH sides. (I should point out that the vast majority of studies have all left-wing authors, as the scientific community leans heavily left.)
What do you think?
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