How can scientists get through to a public that's seemingly indifferent to objective facts?

First, my personal opinion is that there is something in human nature, given billions of different people, that will always result in a few who disagree with any fact or statement, no matter how proven, concrete, or obvious. (Flat Earthers anyone?) It doesn't matter what it is, someone somewhere will disagree. That needs to be recognized as a part of our makeup, similar to an allergy. Pick any kind of food, someone somewhere will be allergic to it, for reasons.

Second, given the power of the internet, people with similar and outlandish beliefs can find each other more easily than ever. People who are attracted to the idea of belonging to a counter-group can also be swayed more easily. This reinforces the process, and can sometimes cause ridiculous ideas and beliefs to grow in popularity. There there's the tendency for such groups to create and propagate false news and information either out of ignorance, spite, personal agendas, or for amusement and attention.

Media has made this much worse by emphasizing ratings over responsibility, and regularly spin the results of scientific studies, findings, and papers into something more exciting or controversial, often resulting in outright false claims that are not stated in the original research. This adds confusion to the information, which further divides the beliefs of the public. Media is quick to hype fantastical headlines, but when they get it wrong, don't give the same kind of attention to correcting and informing the public of their mistakes, if at all. Then you have the problem of the media given opinions from the uninformed equal weight and airtime as evidence from an expert. The public hears both sides with equal authority and are left to make their own conclusions.

Finally, it is a natural part of the scientific process to dispute or modify previous claims and discoveries when new evidence is discovered, and that process is critical. Unfortunately, the uninformed public can see that as an indication that scientists don't know what they are doing, or the research can't be trusted. Yesterday they said X, but today they're saying Y. One group of researchers say A, the other says B. Obviously, they don't know what they're talking about. Most research papers are hidden behind paywalls making it difficult for the average person to even investigate claims for themselves objectively. In most cases, the information in those papers would be too complex for the general public to make sense of anyways.

So together, you have a perfect storm of organized and uninformed counter-believers, contradicting claims from experts, confusion in the media, mistrust in the motivations of government and corporate funded research, and no easy way for the average person to sort it all out.

We are in desperate need of new information tools to help provide clarity and context to scientific claims and discoveries. I think this is a very similar challenge for how to prevent false political and world news from propagating. Because it is difficult or unreliable to expect the people who publish sources of such knowledge to actively apply information controls and verification, I believe this needs to be an automated function of the internet. A combination of a central fact and knowledge database and claim linking system, as well as functions built directly into web browsers that automatically detect headlines, statements of facts, and claims of truth using natural language processing, and provide easy to access summaries of the found sources that support or contradict the information. I'm imagining something like a variation of hyperlinking that is automatically assigned to headlines and statements in comments for each web page, which inserts a clickable token and maybe a confidence-of-accuracy indicator.
Clicking on the icon opens a knowledge summary of the information and sources that supports or contradicts the information, along with a comment section that people can post further insights. For example, two different headlines that state: “Eggs are good for you”, and “Eggs are bad for you”. Both should provide a confidence indicator which is injected by the web browser with a link, and both should link to the same collection of studies, papers, and expert opinions. For such a knowledgebase to be scalable and maintainable, it would need to be automated by Google or other companies that have extensive access to the internet as a whole.

Ideally, a fact linking and weighting system should be able to automatically detect source references, such as scientific papers, and follow secondary claims from other sites and documents. A blockchain of facts comes to mind, similar to Bitcoin. With the Bitcoin blockchain, you can follow and verify every traction of every account through history to the creation of the very first bitcoin. In theory, you could create a blockchain of raw facts and claims that links source to source to source, and calculates the confidence of each link based on the citations of references to that source, and what the confidence scores are for each of those. For a political statement, such as “Barack Obama was sworn into office on the Quran”, the system should be able to back link this statement to its origin though the blockchain of references, to the original post, and determine from it and other sources that contradict it, that the statement has a low confidence score ( say 1.2% ), and here is where the statement was first made on the internet, and the sources that dispute it. Anywhere that the statement shows up on the internet, the browser can inject the low confidence score and at a glance, inform the use that the statement is likely false. Same goes for a statement like “The EM Drive proven to violate the laws of physics.” Where did that claim come from ? What is the supporting evidence ? What is the contradicting evidence ? The system could sort through the blizzard of claims and provide a reality check for the public. (Confidence score of 4.7% - click for more information…)

This would be a huge challenge to create, but would have huge implications. BS that circulates the internet, either as conflicting scientific claims, or false news, could be tagged as such for everyone to see and help provide a sense of trust and clarity to the endless barrage of news and claims that we digest every day.

/r/EverythingScience Thread Link - nature.com