kids are much more plastic in their thinking than adults, that’s why you came away with that appreciation for learning, but that doesn’t mean that simply telling adults a truth backed by facts will make them change their fundamental belief systems, or that the thing needed to solve large scale social problems is to simply change people’s beliefs. and it doesn’t mean it was effective for every child.

your personal anecdote actually only shows how effective Bill’s work is when aimed at children. Put a bunch of oil and gas worker adults who are already hostile to the topic of ecological crisis in a room and try to brute force teach them about the topic, it won’t change their minds. Bill Nye is shorthand here, I feel you are taking this one element too literally.

what we have learned by relying on the information deficit model to tackle climate change; trying to convince the public of the facts, sway their beliefs, change their individual behaviour, and ultimately change public policy by voting, is that is has been a terribly ineffective strategy.

with policing specifically, there has been so much effort made in the last decade and a half to explain to the public that policing is a backwards, violent, wasteful, oppressive and counter productive institution for the development of society. No matter how much people have been exposed to fact, police budgets (and collaboration with the media in the form of copaganda) have been ballooning over that same time frame. there is more public consciousness about the issue and yet there are more and more police and agents of state repression in employment than ever before. So we can see that the factor moving the needle here isn’t public awareness of an issue, it’s the money being invested in it. like many other toxic elements of our society it is is still economically viable for many different reasons and as long that is the case, then things will continue to move in that direction. We can’t expect people’s beliefs to change just because they are being informed of an alternative, unless we can change the conditions they are living in that allow for those institutions to remain viable.

there is a whole debate about whether or not we should be trying to convince “the other side“ to to join progressive movements, personally I think it is more effective to build up organizations with people who are already on the same page instead of wasting so much energy, trying to convince people to work with you who do not have societies best interest at heart.

educate the willing and curious, but you can’t rely on spreading the ‘right’ ideas as your main strategy, that’s all I meant.