[jfengel]

Yeah, it sure ought to be.

But the same people who believe that evolution and climate change are hoaxes are also convinced that COVID is a hoax. (The disease is a hoax, the vaccine is a hoax, the hoax disease that doesn't need to be cured by the hoax vaccine is an attack by China -- and the coverup is a hoax.)

And those people are ~40% of the US population, with an outsized thumb on the scale of elections due to accidents of geography and history. So instead of talking cogently about tradeoffs, we're barely fending off turning conspiracy theories into policy. And by "barely" I mean "succeeding slightly more often than we fail".

Yeah, we ought to be able to discuss things cogently. That ship sailed a long time ago.