Science a Mystery to U.S. Citizens

maddugan writes "CNN and probably others are posting their synopses of the National Science Foundation's biennial report on the state of science understanding in the US. Sixty percent of those surveyed believe in ESP, psychic power, and alien abduction."

Comments

Re:CNN survey

[scottp1296]

Take a look at Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments for an interesting look at why results like that are to be expected.

Scientists trust each other(peer review explained)

[No Such Agency]

Human scientific knowledge has grown to such staggering amount since the Renaissance (when, if one is willing to be generous, one person might hope to know the entire scientific body of knowledge in their society), that nobody can verify everything themselves. That's why we have peer review. The peer review publishing process ensures that any study has to be scrutinized by an editorial board of other scientists who ARE experts in the field of study. The well-conducted science with verifiable results gets published, the rest gets discarded or redone properly.

Sure, I suppose the reviewers for a journal could conspire to knowlingly let a fraudulent paper through, or suppress a valid one with interesting results that go against the accepted theories. In the first case, the bad science would inevitably be noticed by the journal's readers (other professional scientists, after all), and the editors would be disgraced. In the second case, some other journal's editors would accept and publish the paper, "scooping" journal #1 and claiming the glory of publishing the groundbreaking new research.

Like all self-policing systems, it has flaws, but by and large it works fantastically well, uncovering charlatans and incompetents, and allowing the dissemination of well-validated new information to the scientific world. It's not physically possible to verify everything in life yourself, which is why you sometimes have to trust others to properly verify things for you. But that trust cannot be blind, nor based on "faith". This holds as true for your doctor or auto mechanic as for the editors of a journal.

Only in America..?

[stereoroid]

For the past 2 years I've lived in Ireland, where the state TV broadcaster (RTÉ)can be seen doing the following:

• Every weekday, at 6PM, they have "The Angelus". I have never seen an official explanation of what this is, but it appears to be a Catholicism-inspired "minute of silence", featuring images of crosses and the "virgin mary", interspersed with shots of people oberdiantly stopping whatever they're doing, even crossing the street.
• This is followed by the News, after which they show commercials for "psychic" hotlines.
• Sometimes, not just on Sundays, they will have programs about some old catholic fart carrying some saint's jawbone around Ireland, or swanning off to Lourdes on a pilgrimage. Last night I saw about 10 seconds of some missionary dragging women out of Bangkok brothels and preaching at them, after which (I presume) they carried on as before - this guy is a hero worthy of endorsement by a state broadcaster!

You want my opinion? Three words: Education, Education, Education! The Irish Constitution, like the US Constitution, mandates freedom of religion, and I take that to mean that people are free to do without religion. So, why are schoolchildren taught to believe in unprovable assertions? From theistic religion to aliens and ESP is but a short step, if you do not have a grounding in scientific principles.

The Demon-Haunted World

[stereoroid]

This was one of Carl Sagan's last books, which IMHO does a very good job of educating the reader in the ways of "bullshit detection" (not his choice of words!). In response to some previous comments, he also uses some good examples to explain the difference between a) allowing that something is possible, and b) believing people who tell you it's actually happening, and who will enlighten you (for a few dollars more).

(I'm not going to post a link to one bookstore and thus give it more hits - your own favorite bookstore should have it.) Alternatively, if your attention span doesn't allow for the absorption of an entire book, at least go and rent "Contact". After all, if there weren't other civilizations out there, it would be an awful waste of space...

Re:Public Crap Versus Scientific Crap

[HiThere]

Actually, this is a reasonable request. The way you explain quicksort without math is to build a physical model, and then do a walk-through of hwo the code would execute. To you, with the way you think, that might be clumsy. But it would communicate in a way than an innumerate person could understand.

I have found that I need to accept that about 1/4 of all people are basically, rather than just functionally, innumerate. That the only way that they can handle numbers is with a sort of kinethetic muscle twitch reasoning. This can be more accurate than one would expect, remember our basic idea of how numbers work comes from babylonians who did arithemetic by juggling weights on a balance (which is what the "=" represents: a pair of scales). But it doesn't deal exactly with large numbers. OTOH, it's a lot quicker, which often more than repays for the loss of exactness.

Gyroscopes are a more difficult problem, I admit. OTOH, it's been so long since I worked out the exact way that a gyroscope stabilized itself, that I probably don't know any more. So that's probably why I can't imagine how to create a useful physical model.

N.B.: Models won't reach everyone. But they will reach almost all people who are innumerate. (The ones who are both innumerate and not reachable by models probably aren't interested in gyroscopes anyway. They would be more interested in motivating people to achieve goals. And it you wanted to explain gyroscopes to them it would need to be in terms of motivations and goals... I couldn't do that, as that an area where I am quite weak myself.)

Also: patterns of thought are independant of intelligence. Some innumerate folk are quite intelligent. And some quite intelligent people are totally incapable of motivating other people. People have a strong tendency to only notice the kinds of intelligence that are commensurate with their own, but there's always at least one variety that isn't. (It's the invisible bedrock on which ones own mind is built. Picture a hand trying to bandage itself, or an eye trying to see itself. Now imagine an axiom trying to justify itself... [no circular reasoning!]
The language depends on the compiler (or interpreter).
The compiler depends on the bootstrap compiler.
The bootstrap compiler depends on the assembler...
But at some point we must switch from logic to hardware.