Is saying "...so I know how science works." likely to convince people?

[FlatAssembler]

I would say, “so tell me, how does science work?”

I agree that's a very reasonable response, however, in my experience, people won't bother to sensibly reply to such a question. They will most likely respond with something like "I am not obliged to prove well-known things to you, kid!". Socratic Method doesn't quite work on the Internet.

I think that misconceptions people show about how science works fall into three categories, sorted from the easiest to fight to the hardest to fight:

1. Science is based on absolute proofs which are unscientific to doubt.
Sometimes, as in mathematics, it's possible to do that. Otherwise, it simply isn't and that's why science has to be based on the principle of falsifiability, rather than absolute certainty. That's, I think, the misconception behind "Science has proven God is real." (and perhaps also behind some instances of "Science has proven we need to eat meat." and "Science has proven we need a government."). That misconception is reinforced by the way science is taught in schools and the TV-shows like NCIS where forensics is shown as 100% reliable.

2. That science is based on rejecting any authority as "dogmatism" and trying to research everything by yourself.
That's the logic behind Flat-Earthism, it's very hard to fight. It's also behind some instances of Creationism.

3. If people behave like all the scientists agree on something, that means they actually agree on that. In other words, that what journalists write about science and what our textbooks write about science is true to a very high degree.
And that's where we get most of the instances of "Science has proven we need to eat meat.", "Science has proven we need a government." and "Science has proven animals don't feel pain/that plants feel pain." from. That misconception is the hardest to fight because, when you show people evidence against their beliefs, they end up not even listening to you and your sources and saying you are being unscientific or even anti-scientific.
Politicized issues are very hard to properly study, so it's quite unlikely that scientists actually agree on that. What's obvious is that politicians usually try to justify their policies with reasons that are contrary to what scientists generally believe, but politicians are more widely heard than scientists are.
As for eating meat, scientists agree we don't need to do that to be healthy, for the obvious reason that there are tens of millions of vegetarians in the world who are doing just fine. Scientists believe many things that might seem counter-intuitive to us, but animals not feeling pain is not one of them. You can show people proofs that most scientists, who have studied those issues, believe very strong statements contrary to those, but that won't help much with people who are convinced they already know what scientists believe.

One dead giveaway is the statement "science proves . . ." followed by pretty much any positive assertion.

Yeah, you get the point.

As you know, it can by significantly more difficult to set up properly controlled, blinded experiments in the social sciences than the "hard" sciences.

Well, yes, but think of what the physicists are currently studying. Studying subatomic particles is incredibly hard, both because they don't behave (as far as we know) completely predictably (the only laws we have about them talk about probabilities) and because of the complicated machinery needed to study them.
Also, not all natural sciences rely on experiments. Doing experiments in astronomy or in meteorology is obviously either completely impossible or impractical, yet their conclusions are quite certain.

Whether that's productive or not, is another question, and probably depends on context.

I mean, like, is it likely to convince people that I understand how science works better than they do? Because many people on the Internet seem to have this idea that social scientists don't really know how science works.

Flat....got a link to your peer reviewed work?

I suppose the abstract of the "Toponimija Baranje u Svjetlu Novih Promisljanja" may be available on-line, but I can't find it on a quick search (I can only find a few web-pages mentioning it).
That's why I've made a detailed web-page about my work and asked about it on various Internet forums about linguistics, people can easily get to it just by typing "Croatian Toponyms" in Google or Bing or almost any search engine. It's in English (apart from the responses by Dubravka Ivsic which I posted there), so you don't need to know Croatian to understand it.
So, yeah, if you are interested in what the Croatian names of places mean, that web-page is probably a good place to start. I've been researching that for years.

Anyway, what do you guys here think about the hierarchy of sciences? Most of you haven't said anything about it. Do you think that idea has any merit today?