I don't expect the average person to be fully appreciative of every Science! thing that I find interesting. But I do think that an important goal of education and of a polity is to communicate and inculcate the value of intellectual inquiry for the common good.
That gets lost when we treat private gain as the only valid goal. It's not just a matter of getting people interested in something they might otherwise not care much about, but of overcoming the BS and outright lies put out by people who set out to attack institutional infrastructure and deliberately mislead the public.
We just had an example with the big freeze in Texas where various news commentators and political figures chose to lie to the public about why the electricity had catastrophically failed. And we've been seeing for the last year in less obvious form with people deliberately downplaying and misrepresenting the risk factors around coronavirus. Fraudsters and propagandists are literally willing to kill other people for political and fiscal gain by creating negative information externalities.
We need a better response to this than just shrugging and saying 'oh well, that's just how things are.'The Way Things Are is serving us poorly as a society.
That gets lost when we treat private gain as the only valid goal. It's not just a matter of getting people interested in something they might otherwise not care much about, but of overcoming the BS and outright lies put out by people who set out to attack institutional infrastructure and deliberately mislead the public.
We just had an example with the big freeze in Texas where various news commentators and political figures chose to lie to the public about why the electricity had catastrophically failed. And we've been seeing for the last year in less obvious form with people deliberately downplaying and misrepresenting the risk factors around coronavirus. Fraudsters and propagandists are literally willing to kill other people for political and fiscal gain by creating negative information externalities.
We need a better response to this than just shrugging and saying 'oh well, that's just how things are.'The Way Things Are is serving us poorly as a society.