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Your post has triggered 2 disparate responses in me.
The first concerns the way you present your certainties of scientific certainties. It is so apposite that you would ask:
"What happens when dangerous fringe opinions become mainstream?"
Indeed!
Much has now been written about the non-Trump cauldron of ideas, the cloistered cocoon of Academia, ensconsed in an echo chamber of consensus, bolstered by cognitive of biases of all kinds.
I have a Martian friend who keeps telling me that Trump's election victory is exactly what happens when dangerous fringe opinions become mainstream. Another side finally looks at the Emperor's New Clothes and sees just how naked the Emperor is and he is called out as a blind, vain fool.
As an aging white male, I have had to endure endless exhortations to 'check my privilege'. It took a Trump victory to teach me what this exhortation really means and I have consequently since learned that the 'other side' has consistently failed to check its privilege, living as they have, in the echo chamber of somehow self-evident 'knowing' that their ideas are the correct ideas. Like stunned mullets, all I hear are sighs of incredulous stupification, of a plethora of 'buts', of rationalisation and rage, as they grapple with their own cognitive dissonance, fleeing to yet further cognitive distortion and a range of defence mechanisms in an attempt to explain what poured water should flow upwards instead of down to earth under the influence of gravity.
Well, science is what intelligent people look to for finality, and you give the famous example of Mbeki's views being so tragically misguided, leading as it did to so many tragic deaths.
You write: "Although the scientific community has proven beyond any doubt that HIV is indeed the cause of AIDS and that antiretroviral drugs control the infection to the point ... "
There is controversy around whether HIV is indeed the cause of AIDS and the scientific community has not proven beyond any doubt that HIV is indeed the cause of AIDS. All that has scientifically been shown is that in the absence of any other explanation, there is overwhelming evidence to show that the presence of the HIV virus in the blood of an infected person will inevitably mean the progression of the deterioration of the immune system as the person converts. Except that they don't all convert. So, another hypothesis, etc. Now, I am not a climate change denier and I strongly believe that HIV causes AIDS but there is yet to be found a direct causal link such as is established between the polio virus, rabies virus etc and the well documented certain courses of the development of illness in these cases.
This is not a response arguing whether or not HIV causes AIDS. It is a questioning of your assertions.
You write that Mbeki convinced an entire generation of South Africans to be suspicious of treatments that could save their lives.
The idiot, foolish, naive, ignorant, stupid Trump supporters (me included) are not convinced that an entire dogma of received wisdoms so current in left-wingers thought and Academia, is so self-evidently correct.
Trump was voted in because people were tired of being ignored and tired of being made to feel like rabid outcasts if they dared to express opinions contrary to the Politburo.
You write: "The Mbeki case of science denial tells us that if we ignore our leaders’ attitudes about science and elect politicians who claim climate change is a hoax or that evolution is an unproven theory, we place ourselves and our children in serious peril".
Well, American voters no longer ignored what their previous leaders told them.
Scientific certainty?
Hhhmmm. DSM 2 or 3 told me scientifically that homosexuality was a mental disorder and my father excoriated me and thought me deviant for bringing a homosexual into his house. Fast forward 50 years and the DSM 5 tells me that homosexuality us perfectly normal and my children excoriate me and think me deviant for questioning gay marriage (and, no, I don't oppose it).
Newtonian science was the apogee of scientism (still is), but Einstein (the fool) dared to show something different. Two of his 3 theories in 1905 revolutionary in nature - total paradigm shifts.
There is of course much more to write about science and uncertainty - there are any number of wonderful books on the subject but this is not the forum.
I come from a scientific background - engineers, scientists, lawyers and I believe myself to be a man of science and scientific enquiry and I am thrilled Trump came in. I look forward to a dramatically altered paradigm, so new and fresh as to admit of open debate and enquiry and not be stifled by ossified dogma catalysed by confirmation bias, filtering and the like.
I could, of course, be talking precisely about my own ossified ideas and cognitive biases but at least I am open to this possibility.
See. I have learned to check my privilege.
