It seems one of the biggest problems in discussions of Science vs The-Rest-Of-The-World is in getting people to realize that they don't necessarily know what they think they know. It seems many people drastically overestimate their own knowledge and underestimate the knowledge of acknowledged experts in a field. ("experts" does not necessarily mean PhD's)

Justin Kruger and David Dunning did work on this back in the late 90's to describe this, which has since been called the Dunning-Kruger effect, or as they describe it in their paper "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments", metacognitive ability. [1]

In their work, they did experiments with people on various skills test, and asked the subjects to rate their ability and scores. In a comparison of self-perceived ability/score and actual ability/score, subjects who did poorly rated themselves as better than they really were, and subjects who did well rated themselves as worse than they really were. [2]

What this translates into is that those who don't have a well founded knowledge in a subject have a "dual burden". Not only do they not know what they are talking about but they don't realize it! Their lack of knowledge prevents them from realizing what they don't know.

A general way this manifests itself in online debates on controversial subjects is the way those making the extraordinary claims dismiss people who have knowledge of the subject, claiming the expert needs to "open their minds" or "consider all the evidence" as the claimant has done.

This is not always the case as there are always exceptions.

Unfortunately, due to egos on both sides of the fence, such situations often tend to degenerate toward ad hominem attack/counter-attack fests. This does neither side any good. From the point of view of the scientist, the claimant is already wrong and now is acting like a crank doing a bunch of name calling. From the point of view of the claimant, the scientist looks like a holier-than-thou dogmatic close-minded fool bashing down the little guy and playing their part in the conspiracy.

Right or wrong, it does neither side any good.

Yes, it can be hard to not belittle the other guy, but we should heed the words of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them."[3, 4]

What we, as those who have been graced with a little knowledge and thinking skills, should endeavor to do is to try to understand those whom we argue with, understand their point of view even if we disagree, and to understand the thought processes of how they reach the conclusions they have. If we do this, I feel we will have better luck in spreading a little knowledge to those who lack it and earning a little respect as educators sharing what we know.

references:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
[2] http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf
[3] Michael Shermer - "Why People Believe Weird Things" - http://www.michaelshermer.com/
[4] http://www.skywise711.com/Skeptic/WPBWT/...ml#spinoza