If you don’t mind, I’m going to weigh in as an ecologist who works in research.

It does get frustrating when laymen think that their half-baked hunches are equal to a conclusion that was reached through the scientific process. I felt this way when I was working on a project involving coyotes because a lot of people refuse to believe that spending a lot of money on killing them won’t work. Their reproductive rate depends on the amount of food available, so killing coyotes indiscriminately just frees up food (which increases reproduction) and in the end does not decrease the population. I had a livestock owner accuse me of “not knowing how the real world works” and “you can’t learn ranching from a book” because I believe the conclusions of wildlife scientists who actually collected data and analyzed it over the nebulous ideas of some rancher with an ego problem.

It’s impossible to avoid everyone like that but staying off Facebook helps.