One strange phenomenon of our post-truth world is that it overflows with facts. Facts which, as their number and complexity grow, lose their explanatory power, causing a wave of skepticism particularly fatal for public trust in science. Despite some evidence showing trust in science remains at a high level globally, and may even have been bolstered during the pandemic, fear of skepticism’s persuasive strength is on the rise — and with it, suggestions for how to counter denialism and assert the value of science.

Where just a year ago, discussions of science skepticism focused on climate change denial, the gaze has now swung to vaccine hesitancy. As the risks of our climate emergency grow ever more ominous, and the death toll of a zoonotic pandemic races ever upward, a culture of denial of the results of scientific processes that might explain the causal links between our dilemmas flourishes, especially online. But the dominant internet tone of ironic distance, combined with a plethora of seemingly comparable yet contradictory facts, makes engagement with this widespread denialism feel futile. Don’t feed the trolls remains the received wisdom, or, as Fichte (possibly) put it, “So much the worse for the facts.”

Despite the recent shift in the content of concerns, the approach to “curing” skepticism remains broadly the same whether discussing vaccines or climate change: dispute the skeptical position through the presentation of further evidence, demonstrate logical fallacies, point to interested actors propagating untruths. But is understanding resistance to individual scientific issues as part of a category of larger denialism a helpful strategy?