One of the author's points is that it's a fallacy to believe people can be explained / lead purely by rational thinking or facts. Emotions play a huge part in human life and realities like this will always need to be taken into consideration when deciding on policy.

I agree, proper research needs to be done and unbiased facts need to be found, but thinking once you have this you will get everybody on board with your new idea because it's "scientific" is unrealistic.

EDIT: to clarify, by "the author" I meant the author of the book, not the Nautilus-article