" Scott Kravet, the instructor—a graduate student in philosophy—offered a dose of epistemology, and in so doing captured the essence of news literacy. "Life isn't just having things handed to you," he said. "You have to be active. There's no proof in life, there's no certainty. But knowing these questions is better than not knowing them." "

" But often, in the human sphere, there are what're called "wicked" problems. In 1973, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber defined a wicked problem this way: "

"No, Jim, the question is why morons like you and Jenny think your Google University education trumps science, epidemiology, and the accumulated knowledge based on mountains of epidemiological and scientific evidence, and why you think that a legal ruling on science means anything whatsoever."

"Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? ... We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine. (Thus the need for science with its self-correcting mechanisms of replication and peer review.)"