I agree, but I guess I'm both pushing a bit back on people to have some common sense when ascribing credibility to a source and also push some blame on deliberate bad actors (muddling what is true, and also reducing peoples' trust in the system overall).
I have bought lottery tickets, even though I know it's a "Stupid Tax." And apparently many other people do, too:
"Americans Spend More On Lottery Tickets Than On Movies, Video Games, Music, Sports Tix And Books Combined" [1]
Even though there's ample evidence that:
"Here’s How Winning the Lottery Makes You Miserable" [2]
A cynic could conclude that people are stupid. I'm not sure what an optimist would conclude, but I think I'd encourage them to consider their peers from the perspective of an anthropologist... View the culture as "different," not "wrong."
[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-12/2016-americans-spe...
[2] http://time.com/4176128/powerball-jackpot-lottery-winners/
Then difficulty in explaining to people these facts, or convincing people of them doesn’t imply some broader cultural relativism. The lottery is stupid, it’s just very challenging to get people to understand that consistently.
Can you name anything interesting which is concretely falsifiable?
Just to list a few things that I believe in, and they're very important to me, but which I assert are not "concretely falsifiable":
Anthropogenic Climate Change
Evolution as the origin of species
Reducing (not necessarily eliminating) access to guns is effective at reducing gun deaths
Bombing Nagasaki was the wrong thing to do
Torturing people is not an effective way to gather intelligence, and it's bad policy
Waterboarding is torture
The US has committed very many war crimes in the last thirty years
Abandoning the Gold Standard was a great decision
1, 2 are falsifiable and true. They are observed, modeled, and predictions have been demonstrated accurate. 3 is falsifiable and true, but I believe misses the point in the controversy there. 4 is not, ethics are not falsifiable. I lack the knowledge to say on 5 (people who I trust agree on both). 6 is just stupid, it tautologically is - not a question of falsifiable or not. I lack the knowledge to say on 7. I agree 8 but don't believe it's falsifiable (or I cannot prove it).
This whole argument you're making that things are "concretely falsifiable" is still entirely about trust, and faith, and "good enough" in practice. It's nowhere near as rock solid as you're portraying it.
With guns, if you can't even agree that reducing access would decrease gun violence, it's hard to then debate whether we should, and whether we would need to modify the Constitution in order to do so. We can't even start the conversation.
"Abandoning the gold standard was good" is theoretically falsifiable, but you'd need to explore the multi-verse, or you'd need to run grand experiments in other countries. (Other countries DID do that for us, and it was bad for them.)