Anthony Fauci Shows Us the Right Way to Be an Expert

Anthony Fauci Shows Us the Right Way to Be an Expert

4 years ago
Anonymous $9CO2RSACsf

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/anthony-fauci-shows-us-the-right-way-to-be-an-expert/

Anthony Fauci has been an extraordinary presence during the COVID-19 crisis: calm yet urgent, informative yet plain-spoken. Along the way, he’s doing something even more difficult than explaining COVID-19. He’s providing insight about the role of the scientific expert in a liberal democracy.

Scientific experts are considerably diminished from what they were some decades ago, as our debates about climate change, vaccinations, genetically modified organisms and many other topics reveal. Archon Fung, a scholar of democratic governance at Harvard’s Kennedy School, describes our state of affairs as “wide aperture, low deference democracy”: almost everything is now up for public debate, even climate science, and those who have traditionally led such debates are losing their influence.