system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why should laypeople trust scientists?

Perhaps one reason to trust scientists is that the institution of science is self-correcting, according to its ideals. In other words, if a scientist publishes incorrect information, another one will come along and correct it, because correcting wrong information is just one of the things science does. Let us see if that sort of reason is still a good reason when applied to another social role.

According to employers, wage discrepancies are self-correcting. If one employer sets wages which are unfair, another employer will come along and offer fair wages to attract all the good employees. So we should trust employers to set wages, because setting fair wages is just one of the things that employers do.

I do not want to get into a protracted argument about economics, socialism, and the like. I would however note that a large number of people definitely do not trust employers to make all wage decisions unilaterally, and that is part of the reason labor unions exist. And yet there is no corresponding laypeople’s union to collectively defend the public against possible abuses by scientists. Why is that?

Perhaps another reason to trust scientists is that they do not claim any inherent authority, and insist that if you do not believe them you can always see for yourself. Let us set aside whether “you can see for yourself” is really true. There are some reasons to doubt it, such as the fact that often scientific publications are not readily available to the general public, research data is not always published with findings, scientific writing often uses highly specialized terminology and statistical techniques that require a great deal of specialized training to understand, and of course some scientific investigation requires access to special equipment not available to the general public.

Again though, let’s set all of that aside and focus on “seeing for yourself.” Suppose a politician says, “In order to reduce traffic congestion, we are going to raise taxes to fund public transportation. You do not have to trust me on this, because everyone can see for themselves whether it really works. If it doesn’t work, you can vote me out of office and reduce the taxes again.”

This is a similar sort of claim to the scientist’s claim. This politician isn’t claiming to be the ultimate authority on traffic, they are just pointing toward evidence which everyone can judge for themselves, namely whether the increased transit funding really reduces traffic congestion, and whether it is worth the cost. But there is an important difference between this case and the case of the scientist. In this case, I can vote. Perhaps my vote doesn’t have a great deal of influence, but the system does offer me the chance to vote.

In the case of the scientist, I do not have any sort of vote. If I “see for myself” and disagree with what a scientist says, my only option is to become a scientist myself and publish a rebuttal. But that could take years of effort. I think it is fair to say that politicians are afraid that if they do something really wrong, the public will vote them out of office. But are scientists afraid that if they publish incorrect research, the lay public will train as scientists in order to refute them? I do not think so. I think the truth is that they are concerned almost exclusively about the reactions of their peers -- other scientists.

But then we are back to where we were before. Why should laypeople trust scientists to self-correct, if employees do not trust employers to self-correct? Let’s try one more possibility. Suppose we consider the fact that the whole purpose of science is to find out the truth, so success in science is defined by how much truth the scientist can find. In other words, we should trust scientists because they have an incentive to find the truth. This contrasts with employers, whose incentive is to make money for themselves.

Again by analogy let us consider the case of professional baseball players. The whole point of baseball is to score more runs than the other team, so we can trust players to play their best. Let us set aside the scenario in which a player is paid by a gambler to lose, just as we will set aside the scenario of a scientist being paid by a company to publish incorrect or misleading information. Both things have definitely happened, without any doubt. But let us charitably assume that such things are rare.

So we are going to assume that our baseball player and scientist are going to try to do well, according to the standards of their profession. But do we trust them not to cheat? Well in the case of the baseball player, there is a whole separate profession who judges the game. For example, we do not trust the catcher to decide whether the pitcher threw a ball or a strike. Neither do we trust the batter. That judgement is made by an umpire, who is not a baseball player, not on either team, won’t be playing against any of the players in any upcoming games, etc.

Returning to the case of scientists, a scientist could cheat by p-hacking for example. Who is the umpire? Well there isn’t one. The institution of science relies on peers to judge how much credence should be given to anyone’s work. There is not any separate profession of people who only judge scientific work and do not do their own research.

We keep returning to the same point. No matter what reason we give for trusting scientists, it seems to amount to the fact that we trust other scientists. That isn’t a very good reason, because it is circular. So if laypeople should trust scientists, what is the reason?
gpt
You make valid criticisms of the "industry" that has arisen around science, and in a way you are right that we should not "trust" scientists without some form of skepticism, but that is only an extension of the skepticism we should all have for all things.

 But you are also right that we cannot take it upon ourselves to test *everything*. It's simply not possible. 

So we have no choice but to trust some form of authority. And so we are forced to decide whom to trust, and we do that by looking at the historical trustworthiness of the authority. 

That is the main reason people don't trust either employers or politicians. Their groups have simply not shown themselves to be worthy of that trust in the general case. The accepted theories in science, in contrast and despite your criticism, are still largely verifiably correct to the best of our collective knowledge and technology. 

And, perhaps more important, when new information becomes available the theories will change to accommodate it. Not immediately to be sure, but at a speed that far outstrips any other philosophy or religion.