A good point, but experts can review the algorithms and report on them to laypeople. Almost everything in the world that we understand is a result of that process, other than some things (not all) in the field we have expertise in. Nobody has time to review the source material in more than a tiny fraction of the things they know.

Just look at the "Science Must Fall" movement in South Africa.

The problem with this is simply, that if some people don't understand the science, other that ALSO don't understand it can tell them they DO understand it. Who should tell the differens, besides the people wo really understand it?

Excellent example!

There are three groups or movements in question:

Rhodes Must Fall: protestors unhappy with having a large statue of Cecil Rhodes (founder of De Beers, "architect of apartheid", extreme white supremacist) on their campus.

Fees Must Fall: Large protests against university fee increases that used the naming convention

Shackville-TRC: advocates for alternative dispute resolution for those students who were expelled for participating in the protests.

"Science Must Fall": a hashtag made to mock one single student who said very crazy stuff in a video on youtube.

There is no "science must fall" movement documented, there was one viral story about one single person saying one single dumb thing. It went viral on Reddit in the /r/videos and /r/rage sub-reddits (those bastions of coherent discourse). It was picked up by click-bait sites who implied the existence of a movement because the angrier you are the more likely you are to click "share".

This is an excellent example of the exact problem being discussed, although I'm not convinced transparency into the algorithms is the solution here. We already know exactly why these stories were pushed out to people's feeds: this type of disinformation makes money.

Off topic: The interesting thing about that video to me was how closely it mirrored the rhetoric from the opening of the 'Three Body Problem' as the Chinese revolutionaries tried to force a college physics professor to revoke science.

Yeah, as I recall when I watched that video the other students struggled to remain respectful but eventually started to openly laugh at her.

You wouldn't necessarily know it from the framing text search engine bots would have scanned.

So, perhaps the issue here is not that average people can't comprehend high science (or politics, or economics, etc).

The issue is really one of trust.

Yeah but most of the time laypeople disregard the scientists and substitute their own logic anyways.. People are incredibly stubborn and set in their opinions.

The issue is there that an uneducated person cannot know if an 'expert' is actually an 'expert'.

In my experience true experts win sooner or later. Almost no one today believes that Earth is flat.

Except sometimes later is too late. See climate change.

I think Assimov's "A cult of ignorance" is a good analysis of where this approach falls short.

I'm really hoping that yours isn't a popular viewpoint. Having access to this type of information encourages people who have the curiousity to learn about it. If I didn't have access to PubMed or arXiv or pretty much every text book ever written, I'd probably be spending my evenings playing solitaire. Instead, I get to learn about stuff I should have been learning in 8th grade.

Also, 'orders of magnitude'? I'm guessing that's hyperbole, but if not, what does that even mean?