It's difficult to be a sport star, but it's easy to recognize a sport star. Doesn't work the same with science. At least we have the Nobel price to tell us who the cool scientists are, otherwise most people wouldn't know. But being told is not the same as seeing. People enjoy watching sport. (Actually, it's only easy to recognize the sport stars in a specific environment. If no one ever organized golf championships, we wouldn't know who the best golf players are.)
If we could perhaps make the scientists somehow... compete with each other in a few-minutes sessions... doing something that the audience could understand at least on the "who is winning now" level. (This understanding should be supported by expert commenters.) Okay, this is another big problem: science is slow, and people want quick closures. You could make a competition in something science-related, but it would be the true science; the best scientists would not necessarily win. -- Even so, I think it would be nice to have some science-correlated role models. So, inventing a science-ish TV competition is one possible way.
The sport stars are well-compartmentalized. I am using this as on opposite of "political" you mentioned. It's not necessarily politics in the usual sense of the word, but the truly awesome intelligent people do something significant; and when you do something significant, you are almost guaranteed to be hated by a lot of people, because you disagree with them or even prove them wrong. The sport stars are safe: they stay at their place and usually don't move outside. So in some sense the sport stars are popular because they are at the same time awesome and completely useless. Admirable, but not threatening.
If the idea of smart people to be cool is about firing arrows with a bow, why should anyone consider smart people to be cool and high status?
Perhaps it's not about what you do, but how you do it, and who you are. As an example, imagine that a movie star would buy an ultra-expensive arrow-firing range; would invite there dozen celebrities and a television, and they would chat, drink and eat, and fire from the bows. It would be cool and high-status, and it could even start a new fashion wave. However, if you do this with a small group of geeks, it will not have the same effect.
The way to be cool is to optimize directly for coolness. Just like in the Paul Graham's essay. Although he says that this stops when you are out of high school. I'd say that when you are out of the high school, the punishments for not being cool enough simply stop being so severe, so you are allowed to just live your life. But if you want to be cool, it's stil tough, and it won't happen accidentally. Firing arrows with a bow per se is not optimized for coolness. It could be upgraded to be a cool project, but that would require lot of resources. Yes, being cool is also expensive.
The only way to be cool is to optimize for the coolness explicitly. Preferably without other people realizing that. I believe this is actually what most people perceived to be cool do, although they would probably deny it. (This creates a problem of how to falsify my hypothesis.)
Firing arrows with a bow per se is not optimized for coolness. It could be upgraded to be a cool project, but that would require lot of resources. Yes, being cool is also expensive.
Cool can mean expensive but it might very well mean that you are simply willing to break some silly convention that other people take for granted but that nobody really cares about.
Let's say I wanted to be a music star in the 21st century. What do I need? A good scenery for Youtube videos. Song texts that have some message, maybe about the value of Bayes Rule. I don't need to...
Paper by the Cultural Cognition Project: The culturally polarizing effect of the "anti-science trope" on vaccine risk perceptions
This is a great paper (indeed, I think many at LW would find the whole site enjoyable). I'll try to summarize it here.
Background: The pro/anti vaccine debate has been hot recently. Many pro-vaccine people often say, "The science is strong, the benefits are obvious, the risks are negligible; if you're anti-vaccine then you're anti-science".
Methods: They showed experimental subjects an article basically saying the above.
Results: When reading such an article, a large number of people did not trust vaccines more, but rather, trusted the American Academy of Pediatrics less.
My thoughts: I will strive to avoid labeling anybody as being "anti-science" or "simply or willfully ignorant of current research", etc., even when speaking of hypothetical 3rd parties on my facebook wall. This holds for evolution, global warming, vaccines, etc.
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Also included in the article: references to other research that shows that evolution and global warming debates have already polarized people into distrusting scientists, and evidence that people are not yet polarized over the vaccine issue.
If you intend to read the article yourself: I found it difficult to understand how the authors divided participants into the 4 quadrants (α, ß, etc.) I will quote my friend, who explained it for me:
I was helped by following the link to where they first introduce that model.
The people in the top left (α) worry about risks to public safety, such as global warming. The people in the bottom right (δ) worry about socially deviant behaviors, such as could be caused by the legalization of marijuana.
People in the top right (β) worry about both public safety risks and deviant behaviors, and people in the bottom left (γ) don't really worry about either.