Seeing scientists disagree, debate and use repeatable experiments to settle disagreements could help bring the rational argument back, instead of the current "my science is stronger than your science" style of debate. My 2c.
People LARP as scientists, but they only use that skepticism to avoid expert wisdom. Science is messy, scientists are fallible, and yet it’s better than any other process we’ve got. But people think that fallibility is therefore evidence that the fake certainty of chiropractic alternative medicine or conspiracy theories or woo is better.
I’m not sure it has been a net good at all to teach about skepticism but not going all the way to instill self-skepticism.
What I do see as a critical failure of the current state is the lack of a scientific method to resolve disagreements: the clearly explained methodology, reproducible results, etc. And in the lack of it, the only way to resolve disagreements is to shut down opponents, which also gives rise to a cottage industry of consensus forming and discrediting minority opinions.
Push back to this and return to debating topics on merits would be a great help. My 2c.
In order to do that, there has to be a framework. The framework currently used is a peer reviewed publications. Currently, the disagreements are being settled not based on experiments in but on opinions in mass media, Twitter threads and Facebook posts. That's not the agreed upon framework.
I know that "peer review is fallible" but that's the current agreed upon framework. None of the others are ideal, it's the best we have at the moment unless we come up with another one.
Focusing on reproducibility helps a lot: when one can do an experiment with fruit flies one can see if genetics or lysenkoism better explains the results.
Last but not least, I agree completely with your view that disagreements are solved today on Twitter and FB and this is not good. While somewhat tangential to my main point (focus reproducibility and scientific methodology can remove most other obstacles): given their impact on society and the active role they decided to play means that they should be regulated the same way as other mass media, both for monopoly checks and for responsibility for publishing materials.
Scientific consensus is "when almost all scientists in this speciality believe this" and takes a lot of time to reach.
Scientific consensus also happens via peer reviewed summaries of research in a particular domain.
The popularization of science I see as a problem but I guess I see it happening anyway because of dynamics in the scientific community itself. My sense increasingly is that shining a light on things, opening it up to as much transparent scrutiny as possible at this point might be the only way to get out of the problems eventually.
The instinct has always been to hush up any disagreements and present a united front on all matters that the public are interested in, even if this means that the "front" then has to change later as better evidence emerges. But that instinct doesn't actually help - the change in position is seen as "not knowing what they're doing", or "can't get it right". The question is asked "why should we believe you now when this is different from what you said last time?".
Actually having the fight in public would at least show that science is an ongoing discussion and exploration, rather than a fixed set of answers. Of course people will pick sides and favour one argument over another, but they do that anyway. I think the age of allowing scientists to quietly conduct research in academic journals or conferences is over.
My view on this is kind of pessimistic. The mindset of science, based on curiosity, feels to me like a small boat which can only sail when seas are relatively calm. But politics is a storm. The waves are too tall. Maybe the boat just cannot sail in this storm.
Make the news media more accountable.
People are only given binary options.
People think well for themselves when given the information.
This kind of thinking, that the average person is a moron that shouldn't be allowed to think for themselves, is arrogant and ignorant in itself.
This is a big flaw in human psychology
Emotion is where cults live, and we have science worshipers that attach themselves to an "Expert" like one would attach themselves to a Cult Leader, instead of being rational actors looking at the data the experts are presenting and using their own rationality and logic to understand the situation