Oh their viewpoints should be taken into account, certainly. But
when it comes to movements of social structures, such as
subcultures vs subcultures, regions vs regions and the like,
there are statisticians from other fields that are better suited
than physicists for assessing human factors.
They all have access to the same mathematics to create models
from if that is their focus.
There are other factors than physics as well; the social
sciences, the psychologists, the historians, the regional
specialists, sociologists, conflict theory, theologians who
understand the finer points of unspoken cultural norms and
expectations...
.. these things are out of the realm of the physics community.
it's not that they can't comment - of course they can.
But it's like a biologist giving their biological opinion of the
Big Bang - interesting - perhaps useful, but it's not their
forte unless they're well studied in multiple disciplines. Oh
absolutely. Hawking though as well as others who are not only
acting as futurists but even as modern prophets of sorts, have a
strong responsibility, imo, for interdisciplinary accuracy.
But, like you said, that is the power of democracy - and perhaps
the cure already exists; Specialists advise and it is up to a
democratic process (in theory) to come up with what is a
reasonable response.
