"Who (or what) would you suggest as an intermediary between the public and the scientists?"
It's not a matter of having an intermediary, it's a matter of listening to scientists who are trying to educate rather than promote their own theories to a public that doesn't have any hope of understanding them. It's like if you saw Steve Jobs stand in front of an audience of eight-year-olds and tell them they should grow up to learn Obj-C instead of Flash.
The public has an absurd fetish for shiny, new science while the theories of a hundred years ago would keep them scratching their heads for years. Older science is better not only because it's a necessary foundation for understanding modern science, but because it's more likely to be true. Somehow we've turned the reliability of our sources into an embarrassing flaw, and we get all our information from the dark corners that science isn't sure about yet.
cousin_it doesn't like the "sold directly". So, I'm asking about how he/she would like to do it indirectly, or how you would suppress reports of new theories from reaching the public until they are proven.
Whether you like the role the media play or not (and here it is definitely the scientific media), it is not a new phenomena. News == news.
It's not a matter of having an intermediary, it's a matter of listening to scientists who are trying to educate rather than promote their own theories to a public that doesn't have any hope of understanding them. It's like if you saw Steve Jobs stand in front of an audience of eight-year-olds and tell them they should grow up to learn Obj-C instead of Flash.
The public has an absurd fetish for shiny, new science while the theories of a hundred years ago would keep them scratching their heads for years. Older science is better not only because it's a necessary foundation for understanding modern science, but because it's more likely to be true. Somehow we've turned the reliability of our sources into an embarrassing flaw, and we get all our information from the dark corners that science isn't sure about yet.