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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."
I don't know how the questions were phrased, but if someone asked me "do you think it's possible psychic powers, alien abductions or esp exists?" I'd say yes. To say no discounts far too much evidence. Sure, it's all circumstational and mostly unsubstantiated, but there's _so freaking much of it_. However, if the question had been "do psychic powers etc exist" then to answer yes would have just been naiveity.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
Religion cannot be tested by science. After that little dustup with Copernicus, most religions are carefully designed to be untestable. ESP, psychic powers, and the such (i.e. superstition), CAN be tested by science, and routinely are tested and disproven by scienc. That people believe in them is a matter of grave concern.
For the vast majority of people, science is just another religion: taken on faith or rejected as heresy. It's sad, but true. The reason a lot of people probably get disillusioned with science is because science doesn't have all the answers, and isn't always right, and it makes no bones about it (at least the good scientists don't, anyway). I find that one quote I love is the one from a movie called Dangerous Beauty, "The people want answers. They don't care if they're wrong answers, they want them just the same." When someone comes across something not currently explained by science, and science cannot explain it immediately, they automatically assign a supernatural explanation to it.
Are people just so arrogant as to not be able to admit, or perhaps even afraid to admit, that there are just some things that have not been explained yet? Things that are just beyond our current grasp, but not necessarily beyond our potential grasp?
*sigh*
BlackGriffen
Either:
b) Americans think they know everything
c) All of the above
Yes.
Good thing they can vote and write letters to their congressmen, though. Otherwise our politicians might do something stupid, like ban new areas of medical research or make it hard to approve new reactor designs because "nukular" power is "like, totally scary and dangerous", especially when compared to buying oil from nations whose populations only want to kill us.
I'd go off here on a tangent about how we should have a Constitutional amendment requiring prospective voters to demonstrate at least third-grade science and literacy skills before you get to vote, and maybe, I dunno, maybe an eighth-grade science education before you can run for elected office.
But since that would require a vote... and since more than 50% of the people aren't even up to Copernicus and Galileo yet, oh, never mind...
The more I think of it, a "democracy" in which 50% of potential voters are unaware that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but they choose the leaders who control what research can and cannot be done... well, it just doesn't sound like that great a deal. (Neither does a "democracy" where 50% of the population pays 4% of the taxes and votes for the leaders who charge the other 50% of the population the other 96% of the taxes, for that matter.)
Bottom line, I think it's over for us. We jumped the shark in 1969 with the moon landings, and it's all been downhill from here. Maybe it's time we realized that for the US, democracy has finally become a bug, not a feature. A hobble against our progress, rather than our guarantor of freedom. (And a pretty lousy guarantor at that, if the Slashdot crowd's rantings about recent antiterrorism legislation is to be believed.)
Furthermore, the current US practice of importing skilled workers because the majority of its own citizens are, to put it gently, a bunch of drooling fucknozzles, is clearly only a stopgap measure. Maybe it'll keep the patient alive for another decade or two, but it's not going to solve the underlying problem.
Are there any Asia-Pacific nations that need high-tech folks with English skills, and have sane immigration policies that will give Westerners with the requisite skills and/or clue a shot at doing something useful with our lives? Democracy is not a requirement. Just give me a functioning capitalist economy (sorry, Japan, not until you get your banking system in order) and a high level (hell, even a basic level) of literacy.
Someone's scientists are gonna start the nanotech industrial revelotion, or get heavy into bioengineering, or lob some stuff up there and make a self-sustaining lunar colony, or something even cooler that none of us have imagined yet, and I don't want to miss out on either the excitement or the financial rewards.
"Why? Galileo claimed the Earth revolves around the Sun, which at the time was quite controversial and extraordinary. However, simply observing the planetary motions proved him right. Nothing extraordinary there"
It was indeed extraordinary. Observing the motions of the "wandering lights" with Galileo's "magic glass" was very extraordinary. Actually seeing the moons of jupiter revolve about the planet was a world shaking event for those that saw it and understood the Ptolemeic worldview that was official church dogma. It just *couldn't* be so. but you lool in the glass, and it *is* so.
Extraordinary.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Some of the questions are certainly a matter of grave concern. In particular, those which revolved around actual science.
Some of the others, however, such as the belief in pseudoscience, I'm not sure are as alarming. Is this really a disbelief in science, or simply a turning away from something I call "scientific exclusivism"?
Allow me to explain. Science, logic, empiricism, and the like are very good at explaining stuff. In fact, you can explain a whole lot of things with these. But you cannot explain everything with them; there are holes. And there are holes in every school of thought out there; the universe is just plain not simple enough to allow for a single set of principles to explain all things. So to fill in those gaps, something else is needed. And whatever this "something else" is, it has its own holes, ones filled in by science. They complement each other, rather than conflict.
Also interesting to note is the conflicts you see in any exclusivist system. A religious fundamentalist will blithely ignore what he sees every day, in an attempt to justify his own beliefs. But a militant atheist will weave together a maze of logic which, in the end, contradicts itself, usually by an assumption that lack of proof positive equals proof negative. And then there's Objectivism, but going into the exclusivist errors in that one will take more time than I currently have. In the end, though, it all goes back to Goedel's theorem that no system of methematics can be both consistent and complete at the same time. It's true for schools of thought as well; if you want to be truly consistent in your beliefs, then it is impossible to stick with only one.
There has been a growing trend among academia for scientific exclusivism lately, that is, the idea that science can explain all things and anything else is ridiculous superstition. This bothers me; in its own way, it is as bad as any religion, and breeds the same sorts of intolerance (albeit with different targets). If this test shows a trend away from exclusivism -be it scientific, religious, philosophical, or whatever- then someone is doing something right for a change.
... can't reason their way out of a paper bag.
... ) but in no way what they are doing is scientific. The one thing that psuedo-science does not have that really sets them appart is they have NO peer revier of their findings.
One of the major problems with psuedo-science is..
Unexplained != Inexplicable
Just because we don't know why some things happed does not mean there is some supernatural reason behind it.
ESP has never been proven to be anything but statistical number games or fraud. Cold reading is a well documented skill that has been used for centuries.
Psuedo-science != Relegion
Religion takes things on faith. People believe in religion for many reasons. Psuedo-science attempts to prove something is true by using scientific ( language, tools,
To summerize what alot of people have said already...
"But too many people believe it not to be true"
This is a classic appeal to populatity. Common knoledge is often simplified or all together wrong.
"You cannot prove that it's NOT ESP"
I don't have to. That is an appeal to ignorance. By that reasoning I can prove and disprove anything I want. Basic critical reasoning says that I don't have to prove you wrong, you have to prove to me that you are RIGHT.
"ESP is a faith just like any other science"
Nope, see above. Science has the feature of being peer reviewed and have reproducable results. ESP has never been proven in any controled environment.
As most of the slashdot public has proven this article is quite right.
Let's look at these things.
While they are rebuffed by scientists - does that make these things "fake" or non-science?
Part of the Great Witch Hunt was physicians, along side of their Church counterparts, who killed off any "medicine men" or faith healers. Kind of ironic considering they [hunters] were advocates of prayer for healing and both sides treated illness with their limited knowledge of the human body.
We look back and assume that the medicine men were crazy shamans - but they were in fact scientists in every sense of the word. Be very careful not to get on either side of this debate because in the past the debate was based on politics and not based on science what so ever. [look into the real history of the American Medical Association]
"Science" is a mystery. We can only study what is before us.
I don't believe in these things - most of all the UFO portion. But look here for more. I do, however, think that there is too much that we don't know or don't understand about our own minds to say these ideas are all "fake".
Get your Unix fortune now!
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The US really has to improve their school education.
We have probably the best university education in the world, and one of the worst public education systems in the industrialized world.
It is a side of the great inequality ruling american society - just as we have a huge disparity between rich and poor, we have a great disparity between people with good and bad education.
I dont know if people realize how problematic this is. Having large numbers of badly educated people is just asking for civil unrest. And we can really do better in the richest and most powerful nation on earth.
Of course there are communities in the states that will strongly resist education. But that pressure will be getting very weak because the internet erode the power of local authority centers.
Unfortunately, our society works to stifle that creativity and questioning. At home you are told to obey your parents simply "because." In school you are taught to trust everything the teacher says as correct. By the time you get to your teens, you've been pressed into a nice little mold of conformity so as not to rock any boats.
Our society must change, but of course it's cyclical. Who if not these same conformists are going to change society?
This is why I am against universal standards. If you allow each school to try new techniques and teaching methods, you may run the risk of some children not being taught the "important" subjects. But of course that happens now anyway. More importantly, you enable the possibility that some students will escape the molding process, and everyone will learn from those schools.
Just as nature produces a variety of species to guard against the complete extinction of life, so too must we as humans explore multiple avenues of growth if we expect to remain strong.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
For instance, there are plenty of scientists who claim to be Christians (as opposed to Christian Scientists). Should those scientists be stripped of their professional accreditation because they believe in the eventual return to Earth of a 2,000-year-old dead Jewish guy?
If you think so, then be prepared to lose the benefits to society of a number of otherwise-intelligent, thoughtful people.
If you don't think so -- if you believe that one's religion should not disqualify one from being considered a "scientist" -- then what's the difference between a scientist who is a Christian and one who believes in other unprovable, irrational propositions such as clairvoyance or astrology?
A great many people, including some of history's most successful scientists, have their pet irrational beliefs. It probably doesn't make sense to use someone's New Age-y beliefs as the chief yardstick of their scientific literacy.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Ah, the theory of Proof by Instant Gratification: "If I don't immediately understand it, it must be false."
Some knowledge takes a lot of work to understand. If that were not true, then the Greeks would have killed themselves off with laser-guided nuclear warheads dropped from a solar-powered orbiting platform built from superconducting nano-tubes.
Education is the silver bullet.
Wow, please tell me that's a troll. Please.
Explain quicksort without math. Explain the behavior of gyroscopes. Explain TV.
Wow, man, if you happen to be math challenged, that's OK. But when virtually all of our modern advances require math to explain, your lack of understanding of it doesn't mean that it doesn't work.
And I agree with the other reply... the distinction between science and esp is that I can write down what I observed, explain it with math, and send it to someone across the world who can duplicate my experiments, and get the same answers from that math. If you could do that with ESP, we would use it instead of telecommunications satellites. Oh yeah, explain orbits without math. Details matter.
> If you don't like the idea of the non-provable parts of religion, at least accept the rules. Catholicism teaches you to be happy in what you do and do what makes others happy.
I think most of us can accomplish these tasks without 1) going to church and 2) paying the church. If you remove the supernatural crap, all you have is morals and a positive attitude. I don't need some priest telling me that I sin all the time. I get enough of that at work.
Note: I was raised a Catholic and now consider myself an atheist.
"When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness - then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream!"
-William James, The Will to Believe
We're on the road to Tycho.
We've been reading for decades now about our lagging public educational institutions. They were sub-standard in the 80's, and now they're to that point past crisis where as a parent in all but the most affluent suburbs (and even there) I would have a serious problem sending my child to them. In New York City the high school dropout rate remains over 50%, and the facilities are so poor that classes are taught in closets, and falling masonry is literally killing students. We pay teachers here less than garbagemen; it's not just an urban problem, either, as primary school educators generally can expect to earn a fraction of what other graduate degree holders make (think attorneys, engineers, or doctors). The system's funding has been at best maintained year after year despite a burgeoning, malthusian population explosion. By now we've entered a death spiral of "reforms" and "reorganizations"; vouchers and charters (catholic school subsidy and union busting, respectively) are a perfect example, and as the conservative-liberal polemic has adopted education as one of its battlegrounds, you can't talk to anyone about it without hearing one ignorant catechism or another.
Only your teachers know the real story, which is that there aren't nearly enough of them, and getting more is tough, since as it stands right now only martyrs and discipline enthusiasts want the job.
These things have consequences.
All that separates the 1st world from the 3rd world is the schools. Without education, there's no such thing as democracy.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Let's say you're a scientist. You can five of your prestigious scientist buddies go out on a camping trip and witness a strange flying object doing crazy aerobatics that defy the laws of physics. Who exactly do you tell?
The trouble with all this stuff is that somewhat fringe ideas that might be worthy of further study (what if there are really alien visitors?) are lumped together with complete idiocy.
I've got a strong engineering background, and enough college physics to understand the basics of relativity, but I question some beliefs of the scientific establishment. The sad fact is that there are likely a lot of scientists who really would like to take a serious, open-minded look at the UFO phenomenon, but the only way to examine it and keep the respect of one's peers is the weather-balloons-full-of-swamp-gas approach.
At the moment, modern science isn't capable of giving serious attention to things like the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. Why should it be trusted to be the final word?
Quantum phenomena are MICROSCOPIC (actually sub-nanoscopic) phenomena
Superconductivity, to name but one, is a macroscopic quantum phenomenon. So are superfluidity of liquid helium, lasers, Josephson junctions, Bose-Einstein condensates, the photo-electon effect, and numerous others (such as all of chemistry).
Maybe I've got my history wrong, but it seems like the Romans and the British fell out of power mainly from internal problems. Both Empires were very concerned with events outside of their empire.
You points about America are true about some Americans and untrue about others. Polititions which are strong isolationists don't do well in elections in most of the US, because the US is a nation of immigrants. The US gives out Billions in aid to other nations each year. Many Americans do feel that we should take care of our domestic problems before we stick our noses in other countries problems. But many others, especially those with greater knowledge of world events, realize that we can't just ignore the outside world and need to work with other nations to our mutual benefit.
ethnocentrism Pronunciation Key (thn-sntrzm)
n.
Belief in the superiority of one's own ethnic group.
Overriding concern with race.
Racism is still a problem in the US, and it's definatley worse in some areas of the country than others, but I do believe that progress is being made.
I believe that you weren't trolling, but I don't think you're right. The US is a place where everyone has a right to voice their opinions. If you're looking for examples of ethnocentric people in the US I'm sure you will find them. It's this freedom of speech which allows not only the ethnocentrics to voice their opinions, but also the immigrants, and people from other nations. Freedom of expression allows people to put forth their views, and keeps the US engaged with the world around US.
I'm not saying that I think the US will be the most powerful nation in the world forever, but I think we're more likely to crumble from moral decay like our predecessors did, than from ethnocentrism.