My biggest gripe is that science is really fucking hard and we're unbelievably lucky to have made so many strides in knowledge and technology on the backs of generations of brilliant people lending their genius to the greater good. Flat-earth and other pseudo-sciences degrade the amount of pure brilliance, luck, and hard fucking work involved in getting to where we've gotten. I love the idea that some randos on the Internet could fundamentally turn science on it's head, and perhaps it's still possible. Science is much harder than most of these people even realize though.

Should we be skeptical of things in general--absolutely! Even if you truly believe you have a take that will change science at its core, you won't be taken seriously by the scientific community if you can't provide rock-solid proof that can be vetted and verified by other scientists. Is that unfair?

People are most certainly making their own choices -- remember how hot ivermectin was for a minute there? Completely unsupported evidence of efficacy and guess what -- it didn't work. Personally, i think they should take science in their own hands and figure out why they're wrong about so much. The problem here is what i think is a defining difference between a scientist and a pseudo-scientist: the scientist will pay attention to the results and will even change their hypothesis/theory when new evidence to the contrary is discovered. The pseudo-scientist already knows the answer they are looking for and will disregard any evidence to the contrary out of hand.

Remember the flat earther documentary where they set out to finally disprove modern science and failed spectacularly? Remember when confronted with hard evidence disproving their theory, they immediately started blaming the testing equipment and methodology, never yielding for a moment that they could be wrong. That is a problem, in my opinion. They regularly begin to reject real indisputable evidence in favor of 'vibes' or whatever leads them to believe hare-brained theories, and next thing you see people venturing further out into Lala Land where everything magically fits into their set of "theories" and they are further disconnected from reality.

I really think we've let down generation after generation with degrading educational standards. Pet theories are one thing but outright rejecting science because you can't understand it or do it yourself is counterproductive. Pseudo science doesn't help anyone and deserves to be relegated to the tabloids like they used to be (of course I'm sure that people believed some of that shit whole-heartedly back then too, again despite lacking any credible evidence)