>>it's mind-boggling how removed from reality people can get, even people with a supposed science education.

There's an old adage that science advances one funeral at a time - The scientific community is far from immune to this problem. People who are trained and employed full time to apply critical thinking and empirical testing still fall for superstition. It's an unsolvable problem until we reach a point where we can replace human brains with cold, unfeeling robots.