Not long ago, I engaged in a discussion on a social media platform about whether electric cars have a high probability to catch fire. I tried to explain that, yes, it is possible, but it is about 20 times less likely to happen than with a car with a thermal engine and a fuel tank. It seemed obvious to me, but not to the other people participating in the discussion. A lady answered me with, "then you admit that electric cars are dangerous because they can catch fire, right?"
It was one of these occasions when you have a flash of the ways of the universe, a small satori in the Zen sense. I had the sensation of speaking with an alien coming from another star system. This person just lacked the capability to understand the concept of "risk" in the probabilistic sense. For her, having seen images of electric cars catching fire was sufficient to class them in the category of "dangerous things."
Paradoxically, when a conventional car catches fire, the event is considered ordinary and it is rarely reported in the media. The opposite occurs for electric cars: the event is considered special because EVs are still rare, and the images appear on the media. People reason on the basis of what they see and conclude that electric cars are dangerous.
Mind you, I am not saying that the lady I was discussing with was stupid. Not at all. It is a language problem. If you only speak Italian, you have no chance to carry out a conversation with someone who only speaks Chinese. Neither you nor the other person are stupid; you just don't have the right communication tools. This lady just couldn’t speak the language called “risk management.”
Languages other than your native one must be learned, and that takes a considerable effort. The fact that almost everyone around us can read and write is the result of a titanic effort carried out by governments over more than a century. But literacy is a relatively simple skill. Today, you need to understand much more complex matters than deciphering written marks on paper. And each one is a form of language in its own.
Consider vaccinations. The media and the socials will expose you to opposite "cases." On one side, you'll read of people who had refused to be inoculated and who died an atrocious death attributed to COVID, sometimes repenting at the last moment in a sort of religious conversion. On the other side, you'll read of perfectly sane people who were inoculated and who later dropped dead all of a sudden -- and that is attributed to the vaccine.
How to judge who is right? To do so, you should be versed in an arcane language called "Randomized Control Trials" (RCTs) that can give you a statistical estimate of whether the mRNA vaccine is safe and effective or not. However, only a tiny minority of specialists can speak this language fluently enough to provide an informed evaluation. And if you are not one of them? Then, either you judge on the basis what you happen to have seen (misjudgement almost guaranteed) or you trust the specialists. It is what you are normally told to do: "trust the Science." But trust is not the same thing as "faith" (the latter is reserved to God). Even if you write "Science" with a capital first letter, she is still not a Goddess, but an ensemble of normal human beings who can make mistakes. Worse, they may be corrupted by those who make money on vaccines or on whatever concoction they can impose on us "for our own good."
It is not a new problem. When most people were illiterate, they hired specialists to turn the spoken word into written symbols and back. They were called scribes, scriveners, notaries, and the like. Translators did the same job, but they turned words from one language to another. Of course, the people who used their services had no way to check what their hired specialists doing and there were ample margins for hoaxes and scams. You may remember the story of how Cyrano de Bergerac wrote letters for a friend to help him woo a girl who was also Cyrano's love target, and that led to a series of misadventures.
But, on the whole, this kind of scam has been rare. It was because the skill of scribes and translators was relatively simple and their work was easy to check. Even for more complex, modern skills, experts and specialists are subjected to all kinds of rules, laws, and checks to avoid that they take advantage of their expertise to cheat or overcharge their customers. Just as an example, in most countries of the world, judges are limited in the kind of consulting jobs they can take or even forbidden to take any. It makes plenty of sense: If you are the defendant, would you like the judge who decides on your case to have a consulting job with the plaintiff? That's why the law forbids that. No law works perfectly, but at least there are laws!
And here we come to the surprising point. Scientists are perhaps the most specialized among modern specialists; they speak a variety of abstruse, complex, and mysterious languages. How do we detect scientific scams, malpractice, and corruption? And here comes a surprise. The rules that are applied to most professionals do not apply to scientists. No law forbids them to take money from companies for their research, nor to take consultancy jobs with those same companies. We have arrived at the point that being rich in terms of research funds managed is considered to be a mark of success for a scientist.
Given this situation, it is not surprising that corruption is rampant in those areas of science where there is money to be made by peddling some products. It would be excessive to say that all scientists are corrupt, but in some fields, medicine for instance, corruption is said to be rampant -- and it probably is.
It is a problem that won't fix itself, not in the short run, at least. It would take decisive action on the part of governments to clamp down on the conflicts of interest that plague universities and research centers. At the very minimum, it would imply that scientists should not be allowed to receive money from companies for testing products on which companies make a lot of money. How impartial do you think they could be in such a situation? At least, there should exist a class of scientists whose prestige and resources are not the result of getting money from companies. They could act like the "fair witnesses" described by Robert A. Heinlein in his "Stranger in a Strange Land."
But that looks extremely difficult since government officials and scientists share the same economic interests (and sometimes share backhands). Besides, we have arrived at a condition in which proposing to change anything, for any reason, in any field, is automatically labeled as “subversive” and ignored. Forbidding scientists from competing for research grants and consultancies would change everything in the way science is done nowadays — impossible.
So, back to my discussion on electric cars catching fire, I and the worried lady were speaking two different languages: we couldn’t understand each other. And I couldn’t translate my knowledge into a language that the lady would understand (“Don’t worry, electric cars are safer than thermal ones”) because she had no reason to trust me as a scientist — such has been the loss of prestige of science in just a few years.
It may be that the problem will solve itself by a nice and sharp Seneca collapse (*) as it was the destiny of the original Babel Tower. It is the harsh law of the Seneca Cliff -- the way the universe renews itself.
(*) Or, maybe, AIs will just replace human scientists.
Medical science is in very sorry shape in part due to the things you mention. Since the advent of COVID, these issues have become much more obvious to anyone in the general public that is paying attention and is willing to perform a bit of due diligence.
Most people, myself included, would rather not be their own doctor, but speaking for myself, my trust in the medical establishment has plummeted due to COVID and the accompanying incessant propaganda, to the point that I now feel I need to do the best I can on my own. Sometimes it feels like I could hardly do worse.
This problem has been around for much longer than most suspect, and understandably is a much more complex issue than any blog entry can do proper justice so (your post is welcome nonetheless!). A book that does an excellent job explaining all the complexities of this issue (as part of its subject) is the 1996 book "Inventing the AIDS Virus" by Dr. Peter Duesberg, which I read not too long ago. Dr. Duesberg ends his book on a somewhat hopeful note, but I found that he is still vilified in Wikipedia as an "AIDS denier" (something I never knew existed before reading his entry). Conversely, one of his chief opponents, Dr. Robert Gallo, is still held up as some kind of hero, despite his demonstrated malfeasance. Now with COVID we have seen it all happen yet again, only worse.
Dr. Duesberg's book is out of print, but PDF copies can be found online.
BTW, although I don't know about the relative probabilities of ICE car fires and EV car fires (my guess would be that the latter are far less flammable than a tank of gas), I think another reason EV car fires get so much attention is that when they do happen, they are much harder to put out. Most fire departments are not properly equipped to handle that kind of fire. Putting out flammable liquid fires, on the other hand, is a common and well-established skill.
Regarding electric cars and fires (and yes, I know the post was not about that, of course), some searches do indeed give extremely low rate of fires for them, but on the other hand, it seems the seriousness of those fires is much bigger: take longer to extinguish, generate heat for a MUCH longer time, extremely dangerous and toxic gases, etc... And of course, because of all the problems you identified with "the science", it is hard to shake off the sensation that maybe, just maybe, the statistics may be skewed in favor of EVs, maybe there is a strong "propaganda" effect here also. So I am not surprised your interlocutor was skeptical.
On the one hand:
"A recent study by US insurer, AutoinsuranceEZ found that hybrid cars had the worst fire record, while EVs were the least likely type of car to catch fire. Hybrid cars had 3474.5 fires per 100,000 sale; petrol cars had 1,529.9 fires per 100,000 sales and EVs had just 25.1 fires per 100,000 sales."
On the other:
https://www.euronews.com/2022/03/01/massive-cargo-ship-carrying-electric-cars-sinks-in-atlantic-ocean-after-fire
With the added problem that the batteries continued burning under water.
https://theloadstar.com/lithium-battery-fires-require-different-firefighting-techniques-says-safety-oem/#
"Maritime safety equipment manufacturer Survitec is raising the alarm about the unique challenges of battery fires, which are distinct and often poorly understood.
Thanks to their chemical makeup, lithium-ion (Li-Ion) batteries release oxygen when they heat up and, should they catch fire, it is impossible to smother the flames with water or foam.
Worse, however, is that while some are taught to fight battery fires using CO2 foam, spraying CO2 onto a battery fire will make the situation far worse, warned Finn Lende-Harung, commercial director of Survitec Group
“A lot of the regulation says you can use CO2, but if you disperse CO2 into a lithium-based fire at a high temperature, it actually splits the CO2 atom and you end up with pure oxygen.”"
I think when people see this, there is a legitimate right to worry, LOL. And reversing a well-known saying, "quality may have a quantity of its own".