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passive_fist comments on Open Thread, September 23-29, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's impractical for every single person to understand every single scientific theory. Even the domain of 'settled science' is far larger than anyone could hope to cover in their lifetime.
It's true that scientific authority is no substitute for evidence and experiment, but as Elezier pointed out in one of the streams (I can't find the link right now), it's not like scientific authority is useless for updating beliefs. If you have to make a decision, and are stuck in choosing between the scientific consensus opinion and a random coin toss, the scientific consensus opinion is a far far better choice, obviously.
'Trust', in this context, doesn't mean 100% infallible trust in scientific authority. If you take the alternative route and demand that everyone be knowledgeable in everything they make choices in, you wind up in situations like the current one we're having with climate change, where scientists are pretty much screaming at the top of their lungs that something has to be done, but it's falling on deaf political ears partly because of the FUD spreaded by anti-science groups casting doubt on scientific consensus opinion.
Funny that you mention that.
I consider myself a reasonably well educated layman with a few functioning brain cells. I've taken an interest in the global warming claims and did a fair amount of digging (which involved reading original papers and other relevant stuff like Climategate materials). I'll skip through all the bits not relevant to this thread but I'll point out that the end result is that my respect for "climate science" dropped considerably and I became what you'd probably describe as a "climate sceptic".
Given the rather sorry state of medical science (see Ioannidis, etc.), another area I have some interest in, I must say that nowadays when people tell me I must blindly trust "science" because I cannot possibly understand the gnostic knowledge of these high priests, well, let's just say I'm not very receptive to this idea.
Regardless of whether you personally agree with the consensus on climate change, the fact is that most politicians in office are not scientists and do not have the requisite background to even begin reading climate change papers and materials. Yet they must often make decisions on climate change issues. I'd much prefer that they took the consensus scientific opinion rather than making up their own ill-formed beliefs. If the scientific opinion turns out to be wrong, I will pin the full blame on the scientists, not the decision makers.
And, as I'm saying, this generalizes to all sorts of other issues. I feel like I'm repeating myself here, but ultimately a lot of people find themselves in situations where they must make a decision based on limited information and intelligence. In such a scenario, often the best choice is to 'trust' scientists. The option to 'figure it out for yourself' is not available.
In general I would agree with you. However, as usual, real life is complicated.
The debate about climate has been greatly politicized and commercialized. Many people participating in this debate had and have huge incentives, (political, monetary, professional, etc.) to bend the perceptions in their favor. Many scientists behaved... less than admirably. The cause has been picked up (I might even say "hijacked") by the environmental movement which desperately needed a new bogeyman, a new fear to keep the money flowing. There has been much confusion -- some natural and some deliberately created -- over which questions exactly are being asked and answered. Some climate scientists decided they're experts on economics and public policy and their policy recommendations are "science".
All in all it was and is a huge and ugly mess. Given this reality, "just follow the scientific consensus" might have been a good prior, but after updating on all the evidence it doesn't look like a good posterior recommendation in this particular case.