My take on this is that those people lack fundamental understanding of science and how it works [1]. Their math is of the level of a sixth grader. If you do not

My take on this is that those people lack fundamental understanding of science and how it works [1]. Their math is of the level of a sixth grader. If you do not understand something, it is easier to mistrust it and they are easier manipulated. > Is there anything we (as in people who believe in science and still have some institutional belief) should be doing to help science/media/institutions get their shit together? Help in Education. There are levels to this. Start with your children. Encourage and foster their curiosity. Help them to become critical thinkers. Be involved in their educational institutions. Asks if the kids could have a field trip to the local museum of science / natural history or the planetarium or astronomy observatory. Offer yourself to be a reading/literacy mentor and pick interesting books. If you really got a nack for it, get involved in the institutions themselves: Become a science educator, be it a school teacher, in a community college, or elsewhere. This is the long game. Will take at least 18 years. Change politics. Again there are levels. Become interested at first. Then become more involved. Bring your expertise to the table. Etc. It is a very very difficult path where we will often fail to succeed, but I think we should try. In politics we would have access to the biggest levers to enact changes. A big problem is that science becomes politicized and corrupted to serve a certain agenda, see COVID response [2]. Or how big corporations can sponsor fake science (tabacco, oil, sugar industry) and use it to deter political decision. === [1] on a very basic level, like looking for patterns in empiric observations, of formulating a falsifiable theory, test it with experiments. That level. [2] in the beginning the response was science based, but then an agenda kicked in and the measurements did not change when the science/dynamics of the pandemic changed. (Vaccines do prevent hospitalization, but not infection. They do not lead to herd immunity. They became ever less effective with newer variants. The variants became less lethal. Still the government was hell bent on vaccine mandates, when it was clear that it would really just only protect you and not others. There was never a study on the effect on long COVID. Children's response is overwhelmingly mild, ect.