MD doctors poll at extraordinarily high levels of trust, over almost any other professional group in the United States. So it really isn't correct to directly link this article's topic to "distrust". The effect you're talking about may exist in science, but this article is essentially a counter example to the effect you propose: clinicians publishing bullshit, but retain a high level of public trust.
Especially because the article is basically entirely quoting practicing scientists who identified this problem in the first place! More real scientific training or collaborating for clinicians who want to (or have to) do research could potentially improve the situation.
"1966–2012: Historical Harris Polls show a steady long-term erosion, with "great confidence" in the leaders of medicine dropping from 73% to 34% over these decades."
"2021–2024: According to Gallup data, the perceived "honesty and ethics" of doctors fell 14 points, dropping to 53%—the lowest seen since the mid-1990s."
"2024–Present: Major Johns Hopkins University / JAMA Network Open research highlights an overall institutional drop from 71.5% in April 2020 down to 40.1% across socioeconomic groups"
Science is a process of discovering new knowledge through experiments.
An MD is much more akin to an engineer that applies scientific knowledge (and yes, some proportion of both MDs and engineers do create new knowledge through experiments and thus do science, but it's not the baseline expectation).
By your definition, every human endeavor is dismal and always has been - all are corrupted and flawed to some degree. Is there evidence that current science is more dismal than others or than before? You can look at any day in history and see people saying the same things about how it's so dismal and not like the good old days.
> No wonder the general public distrusts "the intelectual elite", we deserved it.
The general public has no idea about scientific publishing, publish or perish, or the distorted incentives it creates. Science has delivered at an incredible level for centuries, arguably more than any other human enterprise. Covid-19 vaccines were available in record time - it wasn't the science that caused it to go somewhat off the rails.
The fact that Covid vaccines worked so well is precisely an endorsement of a hands-on, results-driven approach.
You know better than I do about academia, but speaking generally about management that sounds like an issue not of complexity but of bias and corruption, which are prevelant enough in academia as I understand it: Faculty advisors have so much power they can crush careers, leading to abuse (including sexual harassment and abuse) and corruption.
For a manager to do it effectively, they need objective, quantified metrics as a major input. 'I can't manage what I can't measure.' And to manage managers based on performance, we need to measure their performance. Which would seem to bring us back to publishing, impact factor, etc.
> management layer that's aligned with the institution
Why do we care about alignment with the institution (you mean the university?)? Very broadly, institutional interests are often quite corrupt and cruel to people and society. It would seem to pervert research, encourage corruption, and harm scientists personally.
> The fact that Covid vaccines worked so well is precisely an endorsement of a hands-on, results-driven approach
What do you mean here? I don't know how the Covid vaccine research was managed, other than non-tenure-track faculty earned a Nobel!
> the simplified system of publish-or-perish doesn't work
The point is, maybe there's no better solution. That's often the case in practice. The way I think of it is that theory prioritizes truth over having a solution - no 'truth', no theory; that's science. Practice prioritizes having a solution - no 'truth', do the best you can; that's engineering, management, clinical healthcare, etc.
People are people.
