The beginning of your post is so insightful, and I've rarely seen it expressed so well. The anti-science Americans are not dumber, and treating them as dummies is part of the problem. (One that I'm guilty of on occasion)
This is the internet, though, so here comes the part where I disagree with something. This is where you lost me:
Why should my parents, who are quite intelligent
but never received any significant science education,
believe what they are told about science by experts
that they can clearly recognize as untrustworthy?
How are they "clearly recognizing" these "experts" as "untrustworthy" without the expertise to recognize which so-called experts are bogus and which ones aren't?
If you said they simply don't know who to trust, because there is a lot of conflicting information (much of it deep domain knowledge) and the government is not always trustworthy or effective, I'd agree, but it seems like you're saying something a bit different?
If public health experts are caught being deceptive in one case, or the media publishes as truth something that ends up being political propaganda- even once - they lose trust and people will correctly choose to treat future information from that source with skepticism.
This isn't realistic in the slightest, and is the diametric opposite of "correct." What information source is one hundred percent accurate?
By this standard, people can't trust literally any source at all. This is an absolutely sick and objectively poor way of thinking and wind up just sort of believing whatever they want to believe. Whatever feels good, or, is the least bad. Or feels bad, but gives them a sort of predictable sort of bad feeling -- rage and an ill defined sort of aggreivement about some sort of ill defined state of affairs that has been denied to them by ill defined people for ill defined reasons -- that is at least preferable to the work of actually knowing things and understanding how anything works.
So are they Fox News people, or have they moved on to the harder stuff?
This is the internet, though, so here comes the part where I disagree with something. This is where you lost me:
How are they "clearly recognizing" these "experts" as "untrustworthy" without the expertise to recognize which so-called experts are bogus and which ones aren't?If you said they simply don't know who to trust, because there is a lot of conflicting information (much of it deep domain knowledge) and the government is not always trustworthy or effective, I'd agree, but it seems like you're saying something a bit different?