The people fighting to get through to anti-science Americans

As someone who cares deeply about science education, here are some hard truths that many people flinch away from:

“Anti-science” Americans are not less intelligent on average than “pro-science” Americans. It’s simply a difference of who they trust to give them the facts. One group trusts and believes the public health organizations; the other group treats those same organizations with extreme skepticism. No solution to this problem will be effective until trust in the system is rebuilt.

The core problem that no amount of trying to “get through” to people will solve is that America’s public health and science institutions actually are deeply problematic organizations that are politicized and do not always act honestly and in the best interest of the people. The media, meanwhile, has lost all trust with a significant segment of the population who rightly recognize it as a propaganda machine for the ruling elites.

Why should my parents, who are quite intelligent but never received any significant science education, believe what they are told about science by experts that they can clearly recognize as untrustworthy?

You have to recognize and address this before any progress can be made.

Denying the moon landing has also become popular recently, I've noticed. I personally have had to explain the evidence to multiple family members. The occasional coworker as well. It's always some tweet with tons of interactions from people with the USA flag in their profile name complaining about how the govt lies about everything. There seems to be a huge market on social media for selling people the idea that they are being lied to. The article is right that the people making multi-hour documentaries that explain something like the moon landing aren't reaching people the same way a 12 second "look at this clip of a guy on the moon. jk its a soundstage. what else are they lying about???" video is. I really don't like where any of this is going.

This is a paid propaganda article.

There are people that are "anti science." These are people that say the earth is flat, that say the earth is 6000 years old or whatever else. Trying to paint all the rest of people with the same brush, use guilt by association, the CIA came up with the term "conspiracy theorist" to discredit people saying things we all take for granted as true today. Of course, this is the old game and it's effectiveness is waning. Fail to see this at your peril.

The truth is, people asking you to accept the word of others because they have a credential are anti science. The rest of us just want to understand rather than just be told. I'll leave with a quote from the father of modern optics, Ibn al-Hathayam:

> The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them," the first scientist wrote, "but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.

> “People feel that science is this powerful source that is jerking them around and telling them what to do and making them feel stupid.”

> More than half of Americans get their health information from social media, with Facebook especially popular in rural communities.

> “If you take those same topics and you try to be straight about it, you’re going to immediately turn off a lot of people,” Flanary said. Truth is often more boring than misinformation

My take on this: most americans actually are stupid.

I mean, how else can trailpark denizens think that a billionaire brat child slum lord is going to improve their economic situation?

This is why we had a thing called "public education", and it's why that thing has been under siege, pretty much ever since it was instituted.

It seems that emo, irrational content is largely attributed to the woke-nuts, but I would argue that emo manipulation has been the power of the wing-nuts for decades (since the southern strategy at least).

NOTE: woke-nut-ism is NOT left politics, and wing-nut-ism is NOT right wing. These are both misinformation echo chambers guided by invoking a sense of "identity" among the participants.

This is why the power brokers of the right have always attacked public education. Their power primarily derives from an uninformed populous, incapable of rational analysis.

No one anywhere sees that situation improving anytime soon. This is only going to get worse as more people consider some meme illiterate influenza as an authority figurine.