[rnk]

I disagree with that attitude. I think most scientific information that comes to us through the media is reliable. If people stop trusting science (or they continue to stop trusting science), we are just left with superstition and religion. It was really hard for people to cope with the fact that during covid we started with the best explanations and then as we learned we improved on it and some ideas or expected safety practices changed. Good example is that many viruses spread through touch and covid spread through the air and that was a surprise.

People take that in and say I just don't trust anything. That is a problem with America because people stop believing in objective facts, saying that it goes against their beliefs. This is a major problem why America doesn't have enough engineers and scientists and mathematicians, because people haven't learned that your intuition can be wrong and you can overcome your strong expectation about something by studying something, debugging a program or whatever.

[jeegsy]

> I think most scientific information that comes to us through the media is reliable

Your general point is well taken but is severely and gravely undermined by the belief expressed in above.

[magarnicle]

Yes. Even if the original information is correct it tends to be quite distorted by the media (the headlines are almost always hyperbolic), let alone when it gets picked up by the public and repeated.