> It’s that you understand that before something is believed it goes through a rigorous system of fact checking / experimental confirmation To be honest, the w

> It’s that you understand that before something is believed it goes through a rigorous system of fact checking / experimental confirmation To be honest, the way you’ve phrased this makes it sound like you’ve totally bought in to state secular scientismic dogma. The entire concept of “fact checking” (outsourcing your rational facilities to journalists and e-celebs) is diametrically opposed to actual scientific thought. It’s also completely false that before “something is believed” (by which I think you mean is ensconced as scientismic dogma by the cathedral) it is subject to actual “experimental confirmation” (under any reasonable interpretation of that term). How many times has the FDA changed the official “nutrition science” dietary recommendations over the last 50 years? The entire time, they’ve claimed their approach has been evidence-based, which may be true in some narrow sense, but the predictive confidence of their claims are so bad and noisy that they keep changing the official “scientific” beliefs. This is not unique to nutrition. Many politically relevant fields have very strong-sounding dogmatic claims made from on high with what is actually extremely weak evidence.