As the Salon piece points out, real science is, well, boring, and doesn’t make a good movie. Science isn’t there to tell a story, and often the narratives that people find attractive don’t conform to scientific discovery.

Minus the (boring) method at the heart of science, science is represented in popular culture as a body of beliefs, i.e. scientists say this or that. Stripped of the justification for those beliefs, though, pop culture reduces them to biases- science has its opinion, but i have mine, and they’re all equally valid, or at least there’s no reason for me to change mine.

Leaving out how science acquires its beliefs, then, makes it seem that any given person can leave out how they got their beliefs, which results in pseudo-justifications such as ‘it’s just what i believe’, as if that was immune to argument. Pop culture, in this way, diminishes the authority science should have by dint of its superior methods of discovery. From here, lacking any epistemological authority, it is easy to paint the power of science as an evil force, out there to undermine our beliefs.

Good science education, then, involves teaching respect for method- for how we acquire our beliefs, not just what science believes.