I'm pretty happy Collins came to that conclusion and learned from it.

I don't expect public health officials to have a utilitarian function that maximizes global health considering second order effects. This should have been stated more clearly at the beginning of the epidemic.

While I agree with the fundamental point, I find that a kind of ironic choice of examples. I wonder what kind of person attaches so much value to keeping kids in school whether it's good for them or not.

I don't think anyone attached zero value to everything else. The legit question is how do you weigh all of the factors. How do you weigh making things slightly worse for a bunch of people and way worse for some, etc...

It reminds me of a comedian snippet I saw recently who was asking the crowd... "Has life gotten back to how it was before Covid", and one person in the audience yells out, "No"... and the comedian says, "OK, tell me one thing you had before Covid that you don't have now"? And the person says, "My family". The comedian goes -- "Oh yeah, I guess that was the point of it all wasn't it..."

I am taking a graduate level public health course and this trade off is literally covered in the first lecture its something they call prevention paradox. It's surprising to see that the head of the NIH would say something like this when it's literally part of the curriculum for public health. I'm so tired of political opinions masqueraded as we know better than the experts or we know better than the scientist.

"Trust the science" really came into its full form during the pandemic and was a veiled line in appealing to authority. The CDC, Dr. Fauci, NIH, or any governing body issuing mandates during the pandemic would tell you to trust the science, when in reality they just didn't want people to question their decisions. As it turns out, some of the people questioning school closures or masks were correct! Questioning vaccine safety for young men was and is correct, as long as there were not comorbidities. The people or institutions that were yelling "trust the science" the loudest were indeed saying that they had it all figured out and that anyone that questioned them was wrong.

"Trust the science" became a campaign slogan during the pandemic, and fell into the same realm as "defund the police" or "trust all women".

So yes, "trust the science" does mean what you said that it is a process that should take data new and old into account. However, the sad thing is it was co-opted by people who used it as a cudgel to silence anyone that didn't toe the line.

The other issue is that science has nothing to say about livelihoods and personal freedom - there's no "Lockdown Science". Those were political decisions, ie. opinions disguised as science to shutdown dissent.

> Saying 'Trust the science' might as well be saying 'Trust in God'

In the past, many cultures had priests doing most of the science as well.

Ultimately it all boils down to trust. The common man doesn’t have time nor intellect to evaluate “the science”. When scientists display obvious bias, they lose trust, since they claim to be impartial. It’d be better if they didn’t claim to be impartial.

> I trust that most research is done in good faith and at least some of it is useful. Saying 'Trust the science' might as well be saying 'Trust in God'

Hopefully this is hyperbole. Any faith I have is separate from, for example, if I cancer, I am going to trust the science on the next steps of treatment.

Generally you should trust science on matters of "is". But on matters of "ought" science only bears indirectly.

then you should just trust in God and forget about science

> The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom

The essence of science is the use of scientific method which have specific meaning and way of doing things. It relies on evidence based knowledge not on any distrust. It does not have to do with authority but you would question if your tools you are using is good (calibrated and not interfering with measurements in an unaccounted way ..etc) or if your methodology is flawed.

Somewhat disagree. Science requires trust. In fact, it's the process for building that trust up from nothing. Are you friend or foe? I'm going to assume one but watch you closely until I have enough evidence to trust you. Hurray, that's science!

I totally agree that the phrase is often misused to mean "trust my favorite authority figure" or "trust the status quo," which is distinctly unscientific. Good news though, if we're willing to actually do the work (the hard part) trust in science is what allows us to change the status quo!

The process involves collecting data or performing analysis. Simply saying "ugh, why should we listen to received wisdom" and declaring that the experts are idiots is not the scientific spirit.

Science is built on trust because in reality it’s not practical to check every single result in a paper. Often it’s literally impossible (e.g the result from a one of a kind, billion dollar machine).

If someone hand-waves away the conclusions of scientists without doing any science of their own I feel no obligation to take them seriously.

Is science authority? If science is not authority, then distrusting authority and trusting science are not in opposition.

> The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom.

This is not "the essence of science" by any means.

No, the antithesis of the scientific spirit is to believe anything joe nobody posts on facebook or twitter that fits your worldview, regardless of (or perhaps especially due to) the presence of contradictory facts.

The essence of science, and what is meant by "trust the science", is to accept theories that fit the existing data until such time as new data contradicts them, while encouraging people to ruthlessly search for just such data which would falsify them.

Sadly, there are a lot of people whose only standard of proof for conspiracy theories is that it contradicts what experts claim.

But that wouldn't capture how it tends to be meant -- an instruction to take things on faith without any questioning, even if it contradicts other known facts or your direct experience.