Chapter 4. The expert you are (not). Citizens, experts and the limits of science communication

Considering any democratic government, it goes without saying that the more knowledgeable the citizens are, the better the democratic process will work. Therefore, leveraging scientific information among laypeople is intuitively linked to the growth of an educated population; some factors, though, taint this positivist account. Amateurization as an explicit stance on the one hand, “edutainment” matched with the ever-growing complexity of scientific matters on the other. In this paper we argue that while encouraging the diffusion of a general “love for science” should inspire an appetite for more robust scientific knowledge, it also foster the emergence of problematic cognitive situations, as the propagation of the so-called epistemic bubbles or the progressive belittlement of the role of experts in society.