Here's the thing about science.

Most people can't be bothered to remember the very basics of it, and I don't mean the factual underpinnings – I mean the philosophy, the process, the way of thinking that is essentially scientific. Instead, they default to an authoritarian acceptance; any claim must be true, it's only arguments against that claim that need to provide support. They believe this even if two weeks later the exact opposite claim is made by someone else whom they would have required actual support from to counter the previous claim!

I can't blame this on education. The information is there. The history is there. I can't blame this on the media, or even social media. This is the result enculturation to prioritize feelings, particularly immediate feelings, over reason. To respond to emotion with sympathy before critical facility kicks in.

This is why "a study says" is the worst possible thing for one of these people to run into. A study says it? It must be true! Even though, scientifically, we know that any study can be false, and that any study has a pretty good chance of being faults, and that truth is discovered by multiple studies, reproduced in multiple places, by multiple groups of scientists – and anything less is not truth, it's just lower on the spectrum than pure lie.

Try to communicate that to the True Believers and you're going to get blank, glassy stares, and the persistent belief that you are probably some sort of hideous agent of evil sent to corrupt their minds with doubt.

I cannot help having trouble shaking the idea that most people want a God and they don't know how to function in the absence of one. So instead of doing the work to figure out how the world really works, or doing the work to put together a concept of God that actually functions in the context of the scientific philosophy (hint: that's not going to happen, but the effort might educate them in something), they began to worship the academic outputs of the process without understanding or having the tools to interpret those outputs.

Dr. Oz? He's a doctor! Whatever he says about medicine must be true. Dr. Phil? He's a doctor! Oprah loves them! Whatever he says about minds must be true. Climate change? Settled science! Whatever our chosen Messiah of the moment says about climate change must be true.

It is a means of belief which is all about science but is not penetrated by science.

My personal preference for solving the problem would be to throw people off of roofs until a few learn to fly, and then sell them to the highest bidder. Some may have called that a little excessive.

Short of that, the only thing I can think of is to keep plodding onward, keep trying to get a deeper understanding of how science works in front of people, show them that it works, show them why it works, show them that the continuous chain of it working has led to lives which are neither nasty, brutish nor short compared to our forbearers.

It will be difficult. People love a crisis. People love a panic. People of both of those things went secretly, in their hearts, the they know they're not real – the crisis will never come to a crisis; the panic will never come to a panic, and freed of the responsibility of the results, those that wish to indulge can be as histrionic as they like.

And that brings us right back to the top where the modern media enterprises start.