Readers Respond: Trust in Science, addiction treatment, judges and cursive

Letters published in The New York Times on Jan. 30, 2026 respond to Elay Shech’s Jan. 7 opinion essay about whether to trust science. Writers include Robert A. Phillips and Dirk Sostman of Weill Cornell Medicine, Stephen A. Silver of San Francisco, Deborah Moran of Houston and other readers from New York and Florida.

Phillips and Sostman urge a position of "disciplined trust" and say regaining public confidence depends as much on how science is communicated as on how it is conducted. They write that public mistrust accelerated during the Covid pandemic when changing guidance was seen by many as deceptive, and they argue those changes reflected science responding to new evidence.

To rebuild trust, they say, explanations should begin with "new evidence now shows" rather than "we were wrong," and open communication of revision is a mark of integrity. Stephen A. Silver writes that it is inaccurate to say science "changes," calling it instead a process of intermittent, independent testing that may reveal earlier hypotheses to be incorrect as testing and technology improve.

He cites historical paradigm shifts — Ptolemy to Copernicus, Newton to Einstein — to argue that science’s willingness to subject theories to scrutiny is why it merits trust, even though certainty is unattainable. Deborah Moran says our ability to measure is far better now and that some scientific theories have held up through decades of observation.

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