Definitely seeing a trend in decreased literacy in science. Voters are more easily manipulated, and proposed legislation increasingly has a misleading title an

Definitely seeing a trend in decreased literacy in science. Voters are more easily manipulated, and proposed legislation increasingly has a misleading title and not enough voters can understand the details. Things like the Florida governor banning state use of the term "Global Warming", as if that's going to fix the problems Florida faces. Or maybe the view that the USA government shouldn't back 30 year mortgages for places expected to be unusable in 30 years. I had a little taste of this when my city's schools decided to kill off a major academic program based on a "peer reviewed publication". Parents were shocked, layoffs were made, the decision was made after normal meeting hours when the video recording was off. People asked for more clarification. Turns out a parent wrote up an opinion piece that boiled down to, if their kid didn't get in, they wanted the program gone. They showed it to a friend (the peer) who liked it. They thought that counted a "peer reviewed publication" and thought it was justification for killing off AIM/Gate, despite the success of the program and minimal cost (the AIM/Gate classes had the same teacher/student ratios). Another sad case was a new development that set aside some land to make room for burrowing owls, after a year or two that land was sold to developers. The reason? They didn't think any owls actually lived there, it didn't occur to them that you'd only see the owls at night. I walked the perimeter every night with my dog and would often see the owls on fence posts.