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The Center for American Progress reports:
A new study finds that scientists are seen as highly competent, and climate scientists in particular have the trust of Americans.
Unfortunately, that isn't seen as a very clickworthy finding—at least in our modern cynical age—so the authors of the study and the news release chose to spin the results as "Scientists Seen as Competent But Not Trusted by Americans." If you search that headline, you'll find thousands of results for articles on and links to this Princeton study.
You'd never guess from the headline or the news release, that when the researchers surveyed "public attitudes toward climate scientists" on a "seven-item scale of distrust," they found "distrust is low."
Frankly, the communication of the actual results of this entire study are abysmal, which is especially ironic since the title of the study is "Gaining trust as well as respect in communicating to motivated audiences about science topics." I'm afraid Princeton has gained neither here.
Related: Scientists Seen as Competent but Not Trusted by Americans
(Score: 1) by dpp on Friday September 26 2014, @10:00PM
In this context, you'd assume the judgement of competency is based upon the job/role.
Since CEO does not equate to - "competent thief", that judgement would be relevant. However, I suppose there's a decent argument to be made that frequently CEO = thief.
Think of it this way. If someone asks, "Is he a competent race car driver?"
Knowing he never shows up at the track and when he does he crashes the car, I'd not answer - "Sure, he plays the flute very well."
The competency judgement is for the expected job/role.
However, I agree completely (per my previous comment) that many of them (CEOs, not race car drivers) are "quite competent thieves". :)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday September 27 2014, @05:29PM
Indeed, if the question were phrased "Is x a competent CEO?", (assume x is a CEO from the above context) I'd answer "There's good reason to doubt it." My actual judgement would be that he seems to place his self interest above that of the company, and there's no reason to believe that he'd do the job if assigned it. OTOH, one often doesn't know what the actual instructions of the Board to the CEO are. Only what they say they are. There's reasonable evidence of enough corruption in various high places that I don't take the "official assigned role" to be a guaranteed description of the actual assigned role. And there's enough passing around of CEOs that have demonstrably failed in their ostensible role that I have strong doubts that it's their actual role.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.