STEMfags, a question. How do you explain to a layperson who reads "informative articles" and listens to "scientific podcasts" that their view on something is quite possibly wrong when the explanation for why it's wrong is at least somewhat technical? I keep finding myself in this situation. A while back I brought up energy density in a conversation with someone when we were talking about fuel sources and energy grids. They asserted that something didn't have any energy density because it is "stable". Today it was someone trying to say that a certain kind of radioactivity isn't potentially dangerous at any level of concentration because it's "just beta decay", and it wasn't some kind of weird joke.

Do you just have to write most people off as a bad investment of your time and energy or what?