Feynman's Cargo Cult Science

That can be fixed by raising the cost of lying, rather than accepting it as the norm with consequences.

Humans have a tool for this, it's called reputation.

The more we accept, say, that all politicians are liars, the more both the honest and the listener suffer.

We should be outraged when someone has been shown to lie. It should be a resigning matter.

The nature of mass-media is almost the exact opposite. Its incentives are to present a large volume of "fresh" information, even though 99.9% of it will be considered false or irrelevant in five years. From the reporter to the talk show guests, this information springs from a myriad of "authorities", and its veracity is wholly estimated by the reputation and rhetorical abilities of its sources.

Thus, the media understands and interacts much better with other systems based on authority. Even when scientists appear on talk shows, they are brought over as "experts" - and promptly fail in this capacity with the first self-doubt they express.

The good news is that, in the long run, all the authority-driven drivel evaporates as the "authorities" and their intellectual fashions change (even theology, with its scriptural basis, often differs significantly from one generation to the next). The hard scientific truths remain.

I think it is important for all scientists to understand the history of science and even spend some time thinking about the cultural/societal problems that hamper scientific progress currently.