> there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning I think the

> there's an awful lot of people on the pro-science bandwagon who don't actually support science, but simply don't tolerate dissent or questioning I think the problem is that its 10-100x as expensive to refute a misinformed statement than it is to make one. So the plea for the small pool of genuinely authoritative / informed people to invest two orders of magnitude more effort patiently and kindly explaining misinformation to people just isn't practical in any meaningful sense. We don't need to persuade them. They aren't persuadable, and in many cases they aren't there in good faith in the first place. We do need them to stop spreading lies and causing extreme harm to their communities. The most effective way to do that is to teach them that their actions - spreading obvious misinformation - are as offensive as they actually are (in that they actively harm people).