Well, it's a flipping epistemological clusterfuck, isn't it - rigorous empiricism gets a lot less rigorous as its data are mediated. You end up saying "trust us, we're rigorous empiricists" to people who aren't ever going to get to book time on the accelerator or the array and who aren't ever going to be able to check your maths. People whose best (political) protection - freedom of expression and information and thought, also fills their minds with the white noise of the millions of energetic cranks and prolific fraudsters who hammer away at their keyboards night after night.. Not to mention plausible shills, lobbyists, etc., etc.

I can’t believe what some science contributors advocate; it looks like some kind of Simon Cowell extravaganza to communicate science - make it glitzy and we'll all be experts in quantum mechanics? Perhaps it would be more instructive if some effort was put into understanding the psychology of how the non-scientific amongst us process such information.

One of the fundamental problems facing those endeavouring to disseminate any form of factual data is one of cognitive dissonance. For example, the conflation of astrology with science and a belief in the equivalence of their methodology.

It is immensely tiresome to read that it is all the fault of scientists that the general public has a poor understanding of its various disciplines. It turns scientists into villains, and naysayers into victims fighting to defend their version of the "truth" against the deceitful and malign intelligence of the experts.

I find it hilarious that the deniers go on and on about "how consensus isn't science" and yet starting from the 90s the deniers were the ones complaining that "the verdict is still undecided". Hence the scientific community, in many independent, peer-reviewed, ways showed that climate scientists agree on one side of the climate change coin more than the other. So the term "consensus".

The deniers really want their cake and eat it too. ( )