I didn’t suggest people should be manipulated, you ignored my qualifying clause in order to interpret what I said negatively. What I said is that trust is required in order to fix the funding problem. Our funding process by and large does not fund things that have no public support. I did not say or even imply that we should attempt to manufacture trust. If anything, the whole problem is that right now the distrust is being actively manufactured, and we need to stop that.

I agree completely we should fix the problems, and I have no problem openly discussing what those problems are. In order to do that there needs to be hope that fixing the problems is a viable and likely-to-succeed activity. Summarizing all of science activity as broken is neither accurate nor helpful in terms of fixing the problems, right? That really is a framing problem because it is not broadly true, the parent poster implied that the practice of science is the problem, when it isn’t the problem. The problem is that people are involved, and science is actually one of the least problematic things we do. It’s incorrect to call out science as broken without comparing it to all other fields.

If everyone is convinced that science is a complete and total waste, and people are opposed to spending tax money to fund it, we will not be able to fix the existing problems. If we believe something about science specifically is broken, and not with the rest of the world, then we will come to the wrong conclusion about what is broken and be unable to fix the existing problems.