Sabine Hossenfelder: Why do people hate scientists?

Sabine Hossenfelder is a German theoretical physicist, author of two books about physics, and a long-standing science popularizer via her blog & youtube channel. Whatever she happens to be talking about she somehow manages to maintain her wry sense of humor, which can be very entertaining. But she’s always totally honest about the issues she discusses, and brooks no BS. Most of her videos are quite technical and address specific scientific questions. But in the video below she asks this more general/sociological question: Why do people hate scientists?

The video can be streamed from her youtube channel Science with Sabine or her blog site Backreaction (it’s only ~8 minutes long):

https://www.youtube.com/@SabineHossenfelder/videos - search for the title under videos

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/ - you'll need to scroll down to the post on June 23\, 2024

In the video Sabine gives a number of possible reasons for this phenomenon, which we can discuss. And they suggest other tangential but related questions that are worth discussing, such as why, at various times, there are people who dislike and/or distrust ‘experts’ of any kind. And why this might be happening more today in our current cultural/political climate? What are the societal conditions that predispose individuals and groups to these attitudes, in any era? Throughout history, what types of mind-sets and belief-systems tend to oppose scientific (empirical, rational, evidence-based) thinking? Why would this be, and are there valid reasons for it?

~Michael