I am generally very pro-science, meaning true peer-reviewed research in mainstream journals. Earlier, you brought up the case of smoking and tobacco companies earlier -- but I think you're drawing different conclusions from that example.
I haven't read the book you're citing, so I can't speak to anything specific that it says. However the perspective you're painting with regard to academic work seems rosy. While you're free to put as much faith in the academic credentials & institutions as you like, how scientifically-evidenced is that belief? This is actually an interesting question worth studying.
The larger point where I suspect the greatest difference of opinion occurs is on whether the institutions & academic literature are corruptible. I don't presume that academic institutions are uniquely resistant to corruption. Rather, the relationship between government & NGOs & academia is an inherent moral hazard. It's really impossible to even fully articulate the scope of the problem. I suspect it's hard for individual companies to exert considerable influence on academia. However, the people who own the money printers for the world's global fiat currency definitely can.
Of course scientific institutions and academic literature are corruptible and can be wrong. But *
so is everything else*, so that's not really a useful statement.
The big question is - how reliable are scientific results *
compared to other sources of information*?
There are plenty of anti-establishment figures like bloggers and Youtubers who claim the scientific establishment is lying about issue X. Now, the scientific establishment might be corrupt and/or wrong on this point. There are examples of this happening in the past. However, it is also possible that the anti-establishment bloggers and/or Youtubers are corrupt and/or wrong. Plenty of people have just been trying to make a buck by selling snake oil or just selling books or clicks they get from their audience. Overall, I think the track record of science critic bloggers and Youtubers is far worse than the scientific establishment. To make this concrete - if someone is self-educated by Youtube videos and other non-scientific sources as well as personal experience, would I want them handling my medical issues compared to someone who is a credentialed doctor from a medical school? Personally, I'd want the establishment-credentialed doctor.
Your link is a study saying "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False". First of all, that itself is a single paper with a single author, so it might itself be wrong. But in the bigger picture, I agree that plenty of individual peer-reviewed papers do turn out to be wrong in hindsight. But even if only 40% of individual peer-reviewed papers are right, the question is, what percentage of predictions from science critics are right?
The methodology of science has lots of safeguards against different forms of corruption - like peer review from widely scattered institutions, independent verification, open publication standards, and tenure. None of them work perfectly, but again - these has to be compared to what is done by other sources.
If the authors of the paper are going to invoke the Tobacco industry analogy, which they did, then it's worth taking the analogy they themselves used and seeing if the particular framing they presented is a good match to the phenomena they are discussing.
The only purpose of raising the point at all is that it's fairly self-evident that the people who are arguing for transparency in government reporting, want to conduct independent analysis of data, and argue for individual rights & freedoms to make informed medical choices doesn't map very well onto people who were being paid by BigTobacco so they could sell more product. However the authors of this paper are being paid to produce work which utilizes numerous nonscientific rhetorical tactics (highly colored language, appeal to authority, non-sequitur, biased framing, etc) to undermine the credibility of independent researchers without actually demonstrating flaws with the analyses they may have generated. This type of generalized endeavor is fundamentally rhetorical, not scientific.
OK, you're talking about the human-computer interaction paper linked below from Ghostmaker. I've now gone through a bunch of it, though I haven't read it completely. I'd prefer to stay on the general issues rather than get too far into just this one paper, but I'll give my two cents.
But muh science.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07993.pdf
I can't tell if I'm being punked, or if this is a cry for help akin to POWs blinking Morse Code, or they're actually serious.
This paper itself is a serious work of propaganda. From the language constructions it uses ("anti-maskers"), to the ludicrous injection of "white supremacy" or the "attempted coup." WTF.
It's kind of stunning to see that even ostensibly intelligent people at MIT have no self-reflection in a paper like this. They can invoke something like the Tobacco industry and how it obfuscated the harmful impact of its products for decades, failing to see they themselves are now the ones who acting as the tools of the big Money/Power interests and their work is directly targeted against the type people who eventually revealed that Tobacco industry had been cooking the books.
Overall, I agree with you. The qualitative side of this paper is clearly biased - especially in that there is an "Anti-Mask Discourse Analysis" section but no "Pro-Mask Discourse Analysis". Thus, there isn't any comparative reflection to show whether pro-mask people are any more rational than anti-mask people. That said, I don't see any reason to think the paper is propaganda or corrupt per se. It's hugely biased, but I suspect the authors genuinely believe in their view - i.e. they would say the same thing even if the government wasn't paying them.
I was a bit surprised at some of the overtly political asides in it, like the "coup" reference. Then again, this is a conference paper, which I think mean it's not peer-reviewed research but an adaptation of a talk.
I have pretty low expectations of non-peer-reviewed social science papers. Mainstream social sciences are a step above cultural studies and gender studies, but not by a lot.