A pundit is not an expert is not a scientist. Quit claiming scientific knowledge when you can't afford the time to present it.

This tweet is a great example of an issue I have been noodling the past few days.

Certainly for the past decade, more intensely in the past four years, and painfully over the past four months, it seems like there is a mass unmooring of words among the prestige media and their ilk.

Specifically, the difference between experts and scientists.

Scientists is a specific term.  From Merriam Dictionary

Scientist: a person learned in science and especially natural science : a scientific investigator

The subtle implication is someone who practices science.  To be a scientist, one must practice science.

1: the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding
 
2a: a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study the science of theology
b: something (such as a sport or technique) that may be studied or learned like systematized knowledgehave it down to a science
b: such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena : NATURAL SCIENCE
 
3a: knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method

And the scientific method?  It is a constant iterative process of hypothesis, information gathering, testing, and re-hypothesizing.  We move closer and closer towards truth but never arrive because we never can be certain what might yet be discovered to change our understanding.  All knowledge is contingent.

There is no absolute truth except in religion.  

But as we search and get closer, even though we know it is only contingently true, we can certainly act on things which are usefully true.  

A scientist is different from an expert.  

Expert: one with the special skill or knowledge representing mastery of a particular subject

An expert focuses on knowing, not necessarily discovering.  And an expert is different from a pundit. Emphasis added as this is primarily what the mainstream media has been providing

1: PANDIT

2: a learned person : TEACHER

3: a person who gives opinions in an authoritative manner usually through the mass media : CRITIC

As Philip E. Tetlock demonstrated a long while ago, pundits and experts have their limits and in terms of complex problems do markedly worse than an informed and intelligent group of citizens in making forecasts of what will likely happen.  One of the most critical issues for useful forecasts is not the narrow modeling (though that is important) or even the quality of the data (exceptionally important), but the capacity to offset and contextualize narrow knowledge within a broader set of parameters and processes.  

The mainstream media, by intent or ignorance, keeps pushing pundits on us and positioning them as either experts or scientists.  A lot of times they present someone who is indeed a scientist and then corner them into being a pundit.

Any dues paying scientist in any subject will be, has to be, laden with humility.  It is the nature of the scientific method and the process of discovery.  You don't know what you don't know.  You may have excellent grounds for believing X to be true.  But it is always only contingently true.  New evidence might be around the corner.

Thus, anyone, even someone who is indeed professionally a scientist, who speaks declaratively or definitively (as do most on mainstream media) is necessarily not speaking as a scientist but as an advocate for an interpretation.  

Experts much the same.  They are even less bound to the process of science.  They know a body of  knowledge, perhaps reasonably comprehensively.  But it is never encompassing and usually scales badly when it encounters other domains of expertise in a complex problem.  Hence Tetlock's discovery that experts are usually wrong about most big picture complex issues.  Their narrow knowledge is not wrong per se but they fail to weight it appropriately and accommodate broader contextual issues.  Something that reasonably intelligent and broadly informed citizens are frequently able to do much more easily.

Listen to science?  Sure.  But science isn't a 30 second sound bite.  Which is all the mainstream media deals in.  So the call is to listen to the science but the science is never treated.  Ultimately it is a false call.  Get a general audience to spend time on the issue, all the evidence, all the pros and cons, all the tentative research conclusions etc. and you discover there is no science to follow.  There is tentative knowledge that may be useful and indicative but decisions have to be made with uncertainty, humility, and contingency.  

These issues are illustrated in this tweet.

No the very nature of science is conjectural and critical. Scientific truth can be discovered, but never established. https://t.co/MCGPSS6kYh https://t.co/pkMBpQAREI

— David Deutsch (@DavidDeutschOxf) November 17, 2020

The Royal Society, formed in 1660, is the oldest scientific institution of its kind, the very exemplar of Age of Enlightenment inquiry and discovery.  Now a shrunken vestige of its former glory.  Forsaking discovery for everyone and now playing around with prestige dalliances in authoritarian religions such as critical theory.  

Deutsch properly calls them out on their misdirection.  You discover truth through a social process of argument and evidence and balancing of studies and usually there emerges some acceptable common interpretation and/or useful interpretation of truth which is always awaiting disruption.  There is no established truth.  That is is simply an age old religious and authoritarian mindset. 

The Royal Society as it is too day is an evil doppelgänger.  Instead of a society of discovery and exploration, it is an enforcement wing of the prestige religion of critical theory, noted for intolerance and coercion.