I think there's a big difference between scientists and what I call science enthusiasts.

Prior to actually trying to do science (or any other of the adjacent disciplines) you're exposed to a grossly simplified version. This simplified version is a combination of uncontroversial facts presented as obvious and propaganda about the correctness and virtue of the cartoon scientific method from whence those facts are alledges to have solely come from.

The propaganda is a result of how our institutions derive much of their authority from this notion of being ascendent by their obvious correctness according to the impartial and objective methods of cartoon science.

So if you believe that science is this magical set of practices that deliver solely objective truth, and those practices are clearly defined, and it feels to you like you are doing them: well it must be that you've arrived at objective truth. If anyone else is doing something different they, the poor fools, must simply be unenlightened.

If you actually practice science you realise that it's deeply political, stupidly time consuming and difficult, limited by cultural values, frequently full of bullshit, and largely composed of stuff that looks much more like obsessive measurement with intuition than the scientific method.

It makes you much more sympathetic to the idea that maybe you're wrong and other people know what they're doing. Even if often none of us can precisely articulate why we're doing it.

edit: this might come across too negative on science so to be clear it's awesome and way more useful than pulling things out your arse. It's just not the only way to know stuff and it is a human, and thus flawed, thing in practice.

Obviously lots of awesome stuff like antibiotics and vibrators owe their existence to science so yaaay. But also chemical weapons, terrible past abusive child rearing advice, and rapey prescriptions of vibrators so booo.

Problematic when treated dogmatically or when used by horrible people.

When you actually work in STEM things you often get to work and spend time with people outside STEM as well and often end up realizing their work is challenging, valuable and not something you can do better than them just because you still remember the quadratic formula long after high school.

because it's a source of authority and power