I just read this book from 1991, “The Fail-Safe Society: Community Defiance and the End of American Technological Optimism,” by science journalist Charles Piller.
The book is all about distrust of the government and scientific authority, as can be seen from the chapter titles:
1. Technological Optimism Gives Way to Fear and Suspicion of Modern Science and Industry
2. Control over Science and the Evolution of Public Fears
3. The Rocky Flats Radiation War
4. Ice-Nine to Ice-Minus–A Battle over the New Biology
5. Biomedical Research and the Nightmare in Laurel Heights
6. The Far-Reaching Impact of Nimby Activism
7. Toward Democratic Decision Making about Science and Technology
The book concludes:
“A failure of trust courts chaos,” [EPA director] William Ruckelshaus has said. To a degree, Nimbyism represents a chaotic backlash to a system that has been allowed to go on too long without a democratic rudder. Without trust, people withdraw consent.
In a complex technological society, the definition of community must ultimately expand beyond one’s backyard. No magic will convert local obstructionism into creative participation in decisions about science and technology . . .
People have a responsibility to learn to distinguish between what is important and what is trivial; to balance danger and necessity. But to do this, the general public must be treated as a resource for solving complex problems, rather than shunned as an obstacle to expedient solutions. The public must be valued as a key actor in a social process, rather than despised as an inconvenience or labeled “Luddite.” People may be fearful, but they do not want a fail-safe society. They want to feel secure, in control of their lives, and they want to see that their influence amounts to more than a cipher. . . .
American youths are profoundly alienated and nihilistic. They see figures of authority as liars and hypocrites; politics, international affairs, and public involvement of all kinds as irrelevant to their lives, which are increasingly caught up in the pursuit of personal fortune. Their fears of nuclear war, of environmental collapse, and of violence and drugs in the streets mirror their cynicism about the ability of our political culture to solve those problems . . .
The most hopeful aspect of Nimbyism–a determination to be part of the process; in effect, to end alienation–can help build a healthier and more robust democracy.
So, very relevant to today. Nothing about vaccines, though—that particular conspiracy theory hadn’t taken hold yet.
But a lack of trust, sure. For decades after the Second World War, we’d been fed a bunch of hype about the mighty Soviet empire, polluters had been allowed to dump their crap pretty much wherever they wanted, and this all had the imprimatur of most of the government and corporate leaders. The government, business, and scientific establishment was spending down the reputational credit they’d earned from arming the Allies during the war and then winning the peace.
My point in discussing this book from 1991 is not to say that it’s always been this way, or to minimize the problems and opportunities associated with distrust of authority. Rather, I think these issues are real, and I also think it’s important to look at them with more historical perspective, rather than attributing this distrust to a recent mixture of the 2008 recession, the covid epidemic, and battles over masks and lockdowns.
I see two big differences between organized defiance of science in 1991 and organized defiance of science today:
1. Politicization. As in so much of our modern life, public attitudes on science have become politically polarized.
2. A newly ambiguous role of business elites. I get the impression that in 1991 that business was on the side of science and technological development; Nimbys were anti-business as well as anti-technology (even if at the individual level many of them may have worked for big business and benefited from technology). Nowadays, though, the anti-vax movement has been taken up by some prominent politically conservative business figures, also there’s a general sense that science, and academia more generally, is a liberal bastion, which leads to enemy-of-my-enemy sort of attitudes on both sides.
P.S. This isn’t the main point of the post, but I just wanted to say I appreciate how cleanly this book is written. It’s direct, to the point, and it has a lot of material for its length (205 pages + endnotes). In recent years, so many nonfiction books seem to be written to the airport-book template: 10 chapters, each starting with some personal anecdote, tons of repetition, almost nothing there. Even books with high-quality information provide very little of it, perhaps because the expectation is that no one will read these books from beginning to end anyway. I’m not saying that every popular nonfiction book is written in that airport style—Bad Blood, for example, was told very well, and with lots of detail, in the author’s own style—; I guess where I’ve really seen this problem is in books about science.
Back then distrust of government and science were more of an issue of the left. Now it’s more of an issue of the right, albeit with higher levels of distrust across the board.
No one distrusts astronomers when they predict an eclipse. For that reason, I’d expect predictions of an impending asteroid impact to be widely trusted as well.
That is way different from stuff like these mRNA vaccines. Eg, what I wrote here:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/03/19/speaking-of-government-waste/#comment-2394342
@Phil
Btw, I did see your response, but vowed not to respond in that thread:
There were no RCTs in the link, there was a metanalysis of observational studies (that did not conclude reduced all-cause mortality from the vaccines). And the repeated claim is that the vaccines saved millions of lives, which is contrary to all the published evidence.
Anyway, these are the type of beliefs we are dealing with today. They are not based on the same thing as in the astronomer case (a track record of obvious success).
You sound like you are faulting medicine, epidemiology, social science, etc. for not meeting the standards of astronomy. I agree that their predictive success is inferior, but what do you expect? Do you really believe you will find the same “track record of obvious success” in these other fields? If so, then I think you are fantasizing. And, in the absence of that same degree of success, you can expect to see the many distortions, hypes, inflated claims, etc. that we see. These fields involve things that matter: vaccinations and mortality rates are important and will attract competing claims and shoddy practices. We can and should critique these – but it is not realistic to believe they can be avoided and that the astronomy model can be achieved.
Anoneuoid wrote:
“And the repeated claim is that the vaccines saved millions of lives, which is contrary to all the published evidence.”
Repeating it endlessly won’t make it true. In order to be able to make this claim you have to ignore the most salient facts about who died and how they died. And to do THAT, you have to pretend that the entire health care industry was involved in a conspiracy to make the vaccines look good in return for compensation.
I don’t know if you are a horrible person, but you are behaving horribly on this and you should just stop.
To Dale and Matt:
I’ll just repost what I said earlier:
There are ZERO publications disagreeing with that. It shouldn’t be hard to find one if millions of lives were saved. If you find one, share it.
Relying on evidence and science to support ones beliefs does not make one a horrible person.
I will bow out of this thread.
It looks like the author recently wrote another book (2025): “Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s.” Seems interesting, and you could see if the style has changed!
“I get the impression that in 1991 that business was on the side of science and technological development.” Not all businesses. For example, the efforts of oil companies back then to create doubt about climate change are well documented, for example in The Merchants of Doubt by Conway and Oreskes. Other businesses had the same attitude toward science that threatened their profits, e.g., the Council on Agricultural Science and Technology.
John:
Yes, good point. Neither business nor science is monolithic, and different business interests can support or reject various areas of science that help or harm their interests
1. Politicization. As in so much of our modern life, public attitudes on science have become politically polarized.
I find this to be a very interesting subject, as it shows so much about cognitive biases. :
<iThis study explores time trends in public trust in science in the United States from 1974 to 2010. More precisely, I test Mooney’s (2005) claim that conservatives in the United States have become increasingly distrustful of science. Using data from the 1974 to 2010 General Social Survey, I examine group differences in trust in science and group-specific change in these attitudes over time. Results show that group differences in trust in science are largely stable over the period, except for respondents identifying as conservative. Conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to liberals and moderates, and ended the period with the lowest. The patterns for science are also unique when compared to public trust in other secular institutions. Results show enduring differences in trust in science by social class, ethnicity, gender, church attendance, and region. I explore the implications of these findings, specifically, the potential for political divisions to emerge over the cultural authority of science and the social role of experts in the formation of public policy.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122412438225
This is amazing! As academic science been increasingly comandeered by the left to take down entire industries on various quack pretenses, the right has become less trusting of science. Whoa, shocker!! HTH did that happen? Next thing you’ll shock me with is that the right is increasingly oppposed to assassinations of its political and business leaders. Whoa, wierd. Why don’t they like getting killed? It’s just so hard to understand!
Anon:
When was “academic science been commandeered by the left to take down entire industries on various quack pretenses”?
Regarding assassinations: I don’t think this is a right or left thing. In general most people seem to oppose assassination unless it is framed as an act of war. This is an interesting question in its own right but has nothing to do with this thread.
Again, if you just want to get into political fights, I suggest some place like twitter or 4chan where others will respond in kind.
For what it’s worth, I downloaded the General Social Survey data on the question of trust in science (the question poses agreement with trusting too much in science compared with religion), political views (conservative/liberal), and educational background (from no formal schooling through 8+ years of college). There was data for these 3 questions from 1998, 2008, and 2018. There is a clear association with conservative/lack of trust in science/less education as well as a clear association with liberal/trust in science/more education. I couldn’t determine a noticeable trend over the 3 survey years (although the data was pretty scarce in those first 2 surveys).
So, I am willing to believe that conservatives don’t trust science as much as liberals, but that this coincides with a clear difference in educational background. Whether these relationships have changed over the past 20 years is less clear (and 2018 is the last survey year with this information).
I came across the following text in a grant-proposal concerning autism and work (or something like that). I was confused after reading the following, which I can’t quite interpret or understand perhaps. I am wondering whether the following text includes a practice that is common but perhaps rarely disclosed. The text was redacted, so I am putting (…) where a black box was in the text I came across. I am talking about the “reconstruct” part and the “available to researchers affiliated with Dutch universities” parts:
“(…) has an enormous amount of person-level linkable statistical data available. Labour market and education data of the total Dutch population are available to researchers affiliated with Dutch universities In the secure remote access environment hosted by (…). This information includes – among others – exam grades, highest diploma, labour market status and most important income source (e.g. employment status, sick leave, social benefit, entrepreneur), wage, and job sector. It is furthermore possible to reconstruct and retrieve this information for entire families. Linking the (…) and (…) data to the (…) creates the opportunity to compare persons with and without autism with otherwise similar background characteristics.”
This all seems a bit strange, and perhaps unethical in some way, to me for some reason, and I am wondering whether I am interpreting and sensing things correctly here.