Personally, I think what is desired regarding the issues you raise needs to take place in the early education of our children. The key is critical thinking, wherein one takes an evidence-based approach to evaluating issues rather than the “gut” approach. We all know what guts are full of.

Besides being evidence-based, critical thinking is not unduly swayed by the status of those making the opposing arguments, and it emphasizes the identification of key assumptions that underlie the arguments, as well as assessing their reliability.

Another important feature of critical thinking is that it recognizes that there are no “final answers” in science or many other contexts. New evidence may require reassessment. Critical thinking is always on the alert for questionable conclusions that are based on limiting the considered evidence to a biased subset of all the available evidence.

These skills really needs to be learned early in life — at home and in school from the get-go. It would be desirable to have critical thinking treated as a core subject in education with lots of good real life examples so as to make the subject interesting and memorable, and with counter-examples of thinking that does not rise to the desired standards.

After doing research in science for decades, I have seen at first hand the problems discussed by Thomas Kuhn in his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Critical thinking would help in avoiding “group think” and the human tendency to divide up into competing camps that have dogmatic liturgies.

In a critical thinking, people would not be taught what to think, but rather how to think — and how to use critical thinking skills in any context.