1) Exciting new science is a big draw for science popularization, and science popularization is how you get people interested in becoming scientists, which are big plus to civilization (but adjust for my obvious bias here).
Are there better ways to do this? I think there are probably better ways to do this.
Is that an either/or proposition? We use multiple ways to acheive the same goal, if they aren't mutually exclusive.
In any case, the moralistic, nerdier-than-thou ethic proposed by the pro-sexism side of this "debate" is counter-productive. You make science interesting to children by making it interesting, not by demanding human nature change and abusing children for acting like people have always acted when faced by something fairly boring (like a science experiment, if you don't do it right).
In short, if children don't find some scientific discovery cool, that's your fault, not theirs. Shouting at them will make it worse. This is probably why it is done.
I'm afraid you lost me here. Which side is in favour of shouting at children?
2) People having at least some knowledge of what scientists are working on helps bridge the gap between academia and society. The more approachable science seems, the more likely people are to take it into account.
I agree with this, to a degree. I definitely agree that the academia/layperson divide is destructive. This is an issue individual scientists have made a lot of headway into fixing. Sites like the Conversation routinely explain major scientific discovery in an easily digestible way. So the problem is no longer the way scientists present information. This is just shit journalism, the primary problem behind perhaps 50% of what is wrong with humanity.
There is a lot of shit science journalism, and I'm all for fixing that. I don't think that requires scrapping the whole thing.
3) Some science has direct relevance to decision-making, e.g. global climate change. Some science has indirect relevance, e.g. knowing what NASA is doing can help you evaluate whether we might want to cut or increase its budget.
This is true. The instrumental effects of gee-whiz science are useful. It's difficult for Republicans to cut funding from something really cool. Again, I think the easier solution is to remove the Republican rather than make everything cool. Human nature isn't going to change.
My point was not "make science cool so it's politically costly to cut its funding". My point was "let people know what science funding is actually buying, so they can better evaluate how much of the budget we should give it". Among others things.
Also, isn't "remove the Republican" also trying to change human nature? Republicans and their voters are more or less an emergent property of human nature.
4) It would be pretty fucking sad for the average person in a technologically advanced society to have no idea what their society is capable of, be it genetic engineering or space travel or analysing brains with an fMRI. I admit "it would be sad" is not an argument, but going with instinct here, I suspect there are relevant effects from the average non-scientist knowing at least where the cutting edge of science is roughly located. Even if it is just to be able to tell at a glance whether some proposal is currently impossible or not.
Would it though? How much do you know about, say, medical science? I know roughly nothing. I don't think this is unusual.
To use something that I can guarantee I heard from science journalism and not other sources, I know there are experimental procedures to actually cure HIV using bone marrow transplants from naturally immune people. I also know that so far they have only been confirmed to work on one person. This is immediately relevant to me; I know people who are HIV-positive. If someone offers them a reliable cure, I can tell them it's a scam and to be wary of anyone who offers anything other than a long-shot experimental treatment.
A convoluted hypothetical, maybe. Nobody has actually come to me offering cures for HIV. But the general principle stands; people being offered technological solutions to their problems should have some basic awareness of what is and isn't possible. This could go from the average person being offered a cure for cancer to the investor being sold a cold fusion reactor to the society being offered a space colonization program.