1. The general public are not scientists, yet they distrust institutions so now they want to interpret data themselves but have no training.
2. Data can be sliced and diced to tell all kinds of stories.
3. Few can look at data and know what it doesn’t answer, or what questions should be asked but aren’t being.
4. Correlation is not causation, but that escapes almost all of us.
5. The people who generally know the field the best are poor communicators generally or at least to the general public. The people who can (or do) communicate with the public are subject to a game of telephone and don’t understand the science, and don’t know how to properly communicate uncertainty or the boundaries of knowledge.
6. Ordinary people will get ordinary answers, but due to cognitive biases will few exceptional in their ability to go against the grain.