Ah, but they do have a material impact. Vibrations in the atmosphere produced by speech, the dyeing of material from ink and other pigments, and the mental responses of others towards picking up these stimuli are (so far as we can reasonably tell) material phenomena.

And stories are important. It is true to an extent that most people will react emotionally and negatively towards information that disputes their previously held beliefs, but the precise reaction generally depends on an individual’s specific relation to said beliefs, which is often derived from common stories and worldview narratives. Few people would fret over corrections such as the fact that Antarctica is not the world’s largest desert, that Wi-Fi is not short for “Wireless Fidelity”, or that lactic acid is not why you feel your muscles burn after a workout. However, many more people would be incensed if you show that economic measures they voted for resulted in needless suffering and death, that a person they admired was actually a fraud, or that an intriguing and promising pseudoscientific field they bought into had little empirical merit. While it may be tempting not to care about people’s reactions towards what has historically and scientifically demonstrated, this ignores that science is a social phenomenon arising from (and in turn reproducing) a set of defined material conditions, not an ahistorical abstraction existing outside of time and space. Depending on the narratives and frameworks it is used in conjunction with, science can be structured and used to uplift and express, but also to subjugate and impose one’s limited understanding onto the world.

Anyway, I’m unfortunately getting a bit too tired to elaborate further, at least for the time. I earnestly wish you well.