A few days ago I attended a technical seminar, one of those where the audience is mostly specialists and the questions from the floor tend to be longer than the answers. In the middle of a panel discussion, a confusion arose that was as brief as it was revealing: two speakers, both recognized experts in their fields, were using the same acronym –PCR- to refer to different things. One was talking about the Polymerase Chain Reaction, a basic tool of molecular biology; the other about a Risk Continuity Plan (Plan de Continuidad de Riesgo), used in environmental management. For a few seconds, neither understood the other. The scene drew widespread laughter, but it left something more unsettling hanging in the air: if even among specialists scientific language forks to the point of preventing mutual understanding, what real chance do citizens have of feeling part of that universe?
It could have happened with acronyms like AI (artificial intelligence or isotopic analysis) or GIS (geographic information system or synthetic genetic index). The anecdote is just a symptom of a deeper phenomenon: the exponential growth of scientific knowledge, which is multiplying at a pace close to a new Moore’s law of human knowledge. If information-processing capacity doubles every 18 months, so too, it seems, does the distance between disciplines, technical vocabulary and our common understanding of the world. What was once an ocean of shared ideas has become an archipelago of specialized languages, where the islands look at each other through clouds of papers, protocols and mathematical models.
When that lack of understanding reaches the experts themselves, the rest of us can only do something akin to an act of faith. We believe in science, but we rarely understand it; we trust it the way one trusts a compass one doesn’t know how to build. For scientists, faith is placed in the method, in its ability to correct itself and weed out errors. For ordinary citizens, faith shifts to public institutions, which we assume have built scientific rationality into their decisions. When we stop at a traffic light, we believe -without knowing it- in the physics behind braking distances; when we buy food, we trust the toxicology and statistics that gave rise to its labeling; when we live in a building, we implicitly accept the engineering underpinning construction codes.
This invisible web of trust is, at bottom, one of the foundations of the modern social contract: the idea that science produces not only knowledge but also legitimacy for the rules that govern us. When that bond weakens, democratic institutions lose their rational bearings. Political will, stripped of the guidance that evidence provides, is left alone before the vertigo of circumstance, forced to decide on impulse, under pressure or by electoral calculation. At best, it governs in reaction to events; at worst, at the whim of the autocrat of the day.
Public disaffection with science -that mix of distrust, indifference or cognitive fatigue- is therefore not a minor cultural problem, but a process of institutional erosion. Wherever evidence ceases to be a meeting point, politics becomes a realm of pure faith, and faith without method ends up as the prelude to dogma. If we want to preserve democracy, we must rebuild trust in science not as a revealed truth, but as a common space for reasoning, a shared language that allows us to understand one another again, even when we use the same acronyms to talk about different things.
Javier Ramírez
Executive Director, Know Hub Chile
Read the original column at https://opinion.cooperativa.cl/opinion/ciencia-y-tecnologia/sin-ciencia-la-democracia-peligra/2025-10-16/073715.html
