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.