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Scientists trusted less than businessmen when discussing social issues, study finds
(www.manchester.ac.uk)
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this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
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This is difficult for me to believe, honestly.
At least here in the US, there is outright hostility to Big Business, and in particular, Big Tech. We are collectively very sick of the price gouging that's been rampant for the last five years and also the egregious treatment of local communities by companies trying to build data centers. We're reaching a point where they can't even gaslight us into supporting it by promising tax breaks to homeowners anymore.
Also, we're increasingly learning that the engagement of people who are anti-science is astroturfed, and that was put on display in a big way last week when Russian bots were silenced temporarily. There's still a chunk of people who are anti-science, and they happen to be very loud, but their opinions are amplified artificially, not representative of the whole.
Maybe it's different in the UK and Sweden, but I'm skeptical.
Zero surprise for me. Capitalist media constantly promotes rich people as honest sources of information... and these are the same people constantly attacking science.
It's that but not just that.
Notice people paying attention to actors and musicians on social subjects, even though the domain expertise of those people is acting and music respectivelly, not sociology.
(You can even see it here in Lemmy: some actor or other says something on a social subject somebody agrees with and they make a post here about it, under which tons of people write about how they totally agree and it's so good that said person talked about it. If anybody points out "they're an actor, not a domain expert" they're assumed to be of an opposite opinion, even of an opposite political side)
I think there is a broader problem of people's trust on certain subjects being far more highly positivelly correlated with the fame of the advice/opinion giver than with domain expertise.
Your point about rich people does dovetail with this - rich people are often treated as celebrities by the media.
PS: Also there are a bunch of interesting effects around this - for example the more somebody's opinion on something is talked about on the media, even negativelly, the more they are perceived as having a relevant opinion on that subject (the so-called "Halo Effect").