Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
A couple solid pieces of evidence is infinitely more reliable and useful than thousands of unreliable anecdotes. Having "so freaking much" of evidence if the evidence is crap. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. On the other hand, _every time_ any one of these claims is tested in a controlled, scientific matter, they _never_ work. I'd say that's enough to reject these claims outright.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
It's been a long time since I read deeply on the matter, but I believe this is incorrect. The accepted theory in Galileo's time - spheres within spheres with Earth at the centre - predicted positions of the planets visible to the naked eye quite well. However as the data improved the old model required more and more additions to explain small perturbations. Galileo did provide evidence extraordinary for his time, observations via the telescope.
Wow, you've researched every claim and every test of those claims?
Meaningless. I can lift the pen on my desk up six inches and release it, it will fall back to the desk. If I do this the rest of my waking hours until I die without it ever once falling up, it doesn't prove that when whoever pries it from my cold hands releases the pen it won't fall up, but at some point you have to move on.
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.
I'm sorry but that argument doesn't stand up to a moment's examination. First just because our current set of scientific theories don't explain everything says nothing about science's ability to explain everything, which seems to be your argument. Just because I don't know something today doesn't mean I can't learn something new tomorrow. Second, I don't see and you give no evidence at all to back up, the claim that the current holes in scientific theory are complemented by any alternative "theory" (presumably some form of religion). There are plenty of phenomena that are explained by neither science nor any alternative theory. Believing in lots of contradictory systems does not get you any closer to a "complete" understanding of the universe than believing in any one of them.
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.
I'm sorry but you are just plain wrong about this. Godel's theorem is about mathematics and mathematics alone. It cannot be applied to other fields of knowledge such as general philosophy. If your argument is based on the belief that Godel's theorem is applicable outside mathematics then you need to go back and try to understand Godel's theorem again. For example, Boyer states that: "Gödel showed that within a rigidly logical system such as Russell and Whitehead had developed for arithmetic, propositions can be formulated that are undecidable or undemonstrable within the axioms of the system." Clearly many philosophies are not "rigidly logical systems..." and so Godel's theorem does not apply to them.
if you want to be truly consistent in your beliefs, then it is impossible to stick with only one.
This is so preposterously not what Godel's theorem states that I am beginning to suspect you are a troll. Please go back to a good account of Godel's work and take another run at it.
Sailing over the event horizon
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?