Scientists, politicians, economists, technologists, pretty much everyone that has a relationship with the nebulous entity that is the "public" is faced with an immense pressure to present their work as being urgent and of dire importance to the current social scheme.

Much of the content in this sub comes down to the fact that people in positions of power - experts - are willing to make predictions about the future - without commenting on the weakness of their predictive powers, or the robustness of the system whose failure they're predicting.

My question is, where does this come from? Is it the same as the roots of conspiratorial thinking? If so, Quassim Cassam, philosophy prof and scholar of conspiracy theories - seems to suggest that it's rooted in the desire to trust an expert that goes too far. He goes so far as to argue that it's one's moral duty to confront conspiracies and panic with reason.

There's a good interview with him here (youtube) and here (podcast) that lays out his perspective on how to deal with this kind of thing. Does it transfer to panic? Or do we just stand back and shake our heads?