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Mars & The Teachable Moment
Gallenod writes "In this article at space.com, Edna DeVore, Director of Education and Public Outreach for SETI, states that people are being continually exposed to pseudo-science from watching television and reading tabloids. Her examples include the "face" on Mars (which she discusses in detail in the article), alien autopsies, Area 51 in the Nevada desert as alien storage quarters, the "non-landings" on the Moon, UFO's, and alien kidnappings. DeVore describes the current Mars missions as a "teachable moment," an opportunity to teach factual science and astronomy in the context of sensationalistic psuedo-science and the legion of money-grubbing opportunists who make their living churning it out."
But if I said we found evidence of Martian civilization that killed themselves because of high-carb diets? I might end up on Oprah.
The problem is the American public wants exciting news so much, they'll believe anything. I mean, look at your local news. Then look at BBC. BBC would put most people to sleep in America. Our news quality is done in Europe, but there they call it "The Sun."
What science needs is more Page 3 girls.
...it was actually pseudo-science that got me interested in the real thing. Books from the elementary school library about UFOs, Bigfoot, and ghosts scared the hell out of my teachers, I'm sure, but they got me interested in peeking into life's mysteries on my own.
I'm not sure what flipped the switch from credulity to skepticism, but those early things got me interested. Maybe it was like the old myths of our ancient ancestors: wrong, but they still showed some drive towards explanation and understanding, however over-simplified.
I'm not saying we should have classes on UFOs, but I wouldn't be too alarmed to see my kid reading about them.
Unless he started growing strange mushrooms in the basement or wearing a tin-foil hat...
I think pseudoscience meshes better with many people's worldview than actual science does. It's hard for laypeople to understand the terminology and goals of real science, and the language is often couched in ambiguity and qualification (because scientists don't want to make unsupported statements). "Pseudoscientists" on the other hand, can say whatever they want, because their only concern is attracting eyeballs and therefore either religious converts (in the case of "Creation Science") or people's dollars (in many other cases). And there are a huge number of people out there who are PROFOUNDLY uneducated about science, and either distrust REAL scientists because they can't understand them, or because they've been taught that nonsense feel-good alternative theories etc. are being "suppressed" by the scientific community.
The scientific community shares some blame as well - "popularizing" science is seen as a vulgar activity by many, when in fact it should be seen as essential as long as the truth is not distorted along the way.
Freedom: "I won't!"
This is certainy not an issue limited to pseudo-science.
It seems to me that schools don't do a very good job of teaching critical thinking.
Does what I am reading/seeing make sense ?
How do I verify that what I'm someone is telling me is reasonably true and accurate ?
I think the author does a very nice job of pointing out that something like the face on mars is a great way to teach those skills with very specific examples.
It certainly should not be limited to science.
The ability to reason and think critically is also being severely hurt by the increasingly abusive marketing aimed at children, IMNSHO.
I'll even go out on a limb and say that this is in large part the cause of the political polarization in the US. Critical thinking includes taking in opposing views and trying to understand if they are valid or not.
Absolute statements are never true
Here is the key part of the article.
"Now, imagine being a science teacher with a classroom full of 15-year old students who believe the television accounts of the face on Mars, cities on the Moon, alien autopsies, etc., and you are teaching your unit on space and astronomy. A careful excursion through the characteristics of the planets and their moons interests your students; the red spot on Jupiter would hold at least 3 Earths, a cool factoid, but it doesn't grab them. The face on Mars does. And this was what I discussed with the science teacher at NSTA. "
Have you've ever thought it is the failing of teachers, not of the students or tv producers? If these shows are wrong, prove it to them. Show the students how to questions these things. You could talk about media motivation, about what other scientists points of view are. You can talk about past things which were thought that were wrong. There are a lot of things that a teacher can do. Don't blame the student for being a weak teacher.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Yes, that makes complete sense. Transmit a radio play where the aliens are destroying cities and slaughtering the masses and then conclude from the adverse reaction that earthinglings aren't ready for contact. I like my conspiracy theories a bit better baked than that.
Laptop computers, over a modem connection, have the capability to do full 1024x768 resolution video conferencing with sound. (sometimes you don't even need the modem...)
You can get by password security by simply typing "OVERRIDE SECURITY"
If the system you're using doesn't support the "OVERRIDE SECURITY" feature, you can either A) defeat the cryptography in less than a minute or B) guess the password in less than a minute.
Computer viruses and worms are so fast-spreading and technically advanced that they can turn machines against their owners, such as making the robots in a factory will begin ripping the factory workers to pieces.
Every program ever written runs on any computer regardless of architecture or operating system.
Desktop workstations and laptops have the 3D rendering capabilities of an SGI Origin cluster.
The list goes on...so many things are done for dramatic effect, and so that Joe Blow can follow the "high-tech" plot line. Sigh. Well, back I go to explaining to my mother that the computer is running slow because it's bogged down with spyware, not because the government has taken control of it and is reading all her documents.
But I agree in general, pseudoscience is everywhere and quality science is scarce. Science Fantasy tends to dominate, whereas Speculative Fiction is very thin on the ground, and pure science is almost extinct.
Part of the blame is with the scientists. Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan managed to combine science with art. So did Isaac Newton (pianist) and Steven Hawking. If the rest can't be bothered to reach the unwashed masses, then they can't object too hard when the unwashed masses try to figure out the world for themselves.
The other part of the blame is with politicians. Science and arts get next to no budget, whereas the military gets a fortune. Guess the mindset of the next generation - it's not going to be on physics or painting!
The arts and the sciences need EQUAL time and EQUAL budget, and the artists and scientists have to do whatever it takes to get that, or their discipline will die out, to be replaced with re-runs of Scooby Doo. If that's not what you want, then show the world why it should care.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The trouble with psuedo-science is that it sounds good to the untrained mind. But the thing I love the most is when a purveyor of psuedo science says the me something like, "You need to be more open minded to understand this". I have a relative that was trying to sell me a "Ozone Generator" and air purifier ( filter ) for my home. I had one of these units in my home as a trial ( I paid no money ). I checked out the supposed "science" behind the device and found that there was ample evidence that high concentrations of ozone are actually dangerous to people especially asthmatics. Since my wife has had asthma in the past, I became very concerned. I called my relative and told him I would be returning the device and that he should think twice about making outrageous unsubstatiated claims of scientific evidence where none existed. He had the gall to tell me I would understand the "science" if I were more "open minded".
It is muddy headed thinking like that that results in most of the worlds troubles.
"Teachable science" is a cool concept and a good practice, but most science will always look like magic to some people simply because of their I.Q.s and/or mindset.
They'll continue to be unable to differentiate between genuine discoveries and pseudo-science, no matter what. But we have to try to explain these things, because they'll also continue be able to breed and to vote. However, I could be wrong, I often am.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
I mean, I see where you are going with it, and the theory is an interesting one, but does it have any factual basis? Where did those "persistant rumors" originate from? Who is running the "education program"? A special secret department in the government? What event or "truth" would the government be preparing us for? Who has access to that information? The president? Wouldn't there have been leaks by now?
To me, this post is exactly why people don't find science interesting any more. The lines between fantasy and reality have been blurred so much that pure reality pieces just seem boring. So rather than publish just reality, why not spice it up with some baseless conspiracy theory?
I think the underlying problem is a lack of diversified sources for information. People overwhelmingly go to the major networks for their news and entertainment. The major networks realize that news doesn't sell as well as news+entertainment. The public, therefore, overwhelmingly gets news + entertainment, which they mistake for news.
Taft
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." - Stephen Hawking
since the advent of the movement of enlightenment, science has more and more become a replacement for religion. but instead of making every one of us enlightened, rational persons this process has led to a situation in which we no longer question our "scientific" believes. instead we just assume that somebody else will have proven it, and that things couldn't be different from our expectation and our world view.
in fact, we are little better off today than the population before the enlightenment, who had serious problems with superstition, general fear of the unknown, etc. superstition is still a non-negligible factor in the lives of many today, even if outwardly sniggered at.
but most of all we tend to cling to a set of believes without ever questioning them! as my prime example I often use the phases of the moon, which nicely demonstrated my own "illusion of knowledge" which I had acquired during my childhood and never questioned.
ask yourself how the shadow on the moon is produced while it goes through one "monthly" cycle and how the sun and the earth are involved.
I will bet that more than half of you will actually have a wrong model of what is going on!
this in itself is not such a bad thing because the shadows on the moon are of such relevance for our daily lives, but it vividly demonstrates how little rationally we tend to be on topics which are not related to our "special field" of interest!
even more disturbingly it showed me with what fervor people will give blatantly wrong answers when asked about such problems. and this surely is a major problem of our para-scientific society today: applying scientific certainty and zeal to scientifically wrong statements!
jethr0
Earth is the only worthwhile real estate in the solar system. Mars and Luna are both essentially airless. Venus is way too hot. Everything else is worse. Even the places we've explored have boring geology. Space is boring.
Rocketry has hit a wall. After sixty years of rocketry, the things still barely work. In aviation, sixty years took us from the Wright Brothers to the Boeing 707. In rocketry, by 1970 we had the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle. In the 35 years since, there's been essentially no progress. (Even if the X-prize succeeds, it will have accomplished less than Yuri Gagarin did in 1961.)
If it weren't for psuedoscience and hype about space, NASA would be funded like ocean exploration. NASA would be on the Discovery Channel, like Jacques Costeau, asking for money. Psuedoscience keeps the funding flowing.
Wasn't the existence of water on Mars once thought to be Science Fiction? They used to think the canals held water until what, about the 1950's? Then that became out of favor. Now they found evidence again with the last probes that Mars DID have running water. I don't pay attention to scientists. Especially Biologists, Astronomers, and Physics. They change theories every few years and everything that was known is completely disproven. For instance, Quantium Mechanics would have made Scientists in the 1950's spin on their heads...
Learning is made easier with immediate results that make students wonder 'Why? How?' Otherwise, it's dry, boring, and students don't learn anything. They memorize what they'll need just long enough to pass the test and then forget it.
pseudo-science like the shit the FDA passes off as research? Oh, wait, that's just me trolling. The scientific media (if you don't think the media is largely insane, you haven't been paying enough attention to The SCO Group's antics) is the worst -- opinions of scientists who have never pursued the material in question are given as irrefutable fact. Where's the real science?
History just keeps repeating itself... Don't believe me? Galileo comes to mind, but I think Edison said it best: "The inventor tries to meet the demand of a crazy civilization. Society is never prepared to receive any invention. Every new thing is resisted, and it takes years for the inventor to get people to listen to him and years more before it can be introduced." (emphasis added) And this is for actual inventions -- ideas made into reality and easily demonstrated. Something more esoteric is orders of magnitude more difficult to convey.
Hell, "pseudo-science" is the kind of snide commentary that might have been applied to Semmelweis in his day. That's the doctor who tried in vain to get other doctors to realize the importance of washing their hands after working with cadavers and before assisting in labor and delivery. He was ridiculed and ignored, too, until the microscope was invented and finally made it blatantly obvious why washing hands was a good idea. But because he did not have that proof, his contemporaries dismissed him as a lunatic, and women continued to die due to easily preventable childbed fever.
There are charlatans out there, but that does not mean that every wild idea is the uttering of some nutball. The term "pseudo-science" is used by the closed-minded to justify their continued obsessions with The Way Things Are(TM). It's just as bad as the Church's refusal in Galileo's day to look through the frickin' telescope. No, actually, it's worse, because we have the advantage of historical perspective.
Well, students of history do, anyway.
Jason Ohler just gave a talk at NASA/Goddard, in which he discussed the problems with technology, and in teaching students about art as related to communication.
He also touched upon issues with manipulated information, and how most kids these days just think if it's on a website, it's got to be true. [which was the slogan of ScoopThis.com, since gone, but by the same person who did the Metallica Hoax].
One of Dr. Ohler's points about deception in communication was that it's best to make it seem plausible, but incorrect, rather than just ranting. [He cited a webpage about Martin Luther King, that was indirectly tied to a white supremicist group, that just slightly skewed the details] Unfortunately, kids don't understand that a website has no due diligence required in confirming their sources -- and newspapers and television news are trying so hard to scoop each other, that we end up with Jack Kelley, Jayson Blair, and the like.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Mistaking entertainment for news/sports/other is common these days. The human abilities that allow us to imagine wonderful, futuristic technologies are sadly housed in the same brains that often have difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy. Not to get all "Matrixy" on you, but have you ever dreamed something that you absolutely thought was real? I know I have had dreams that I _swore_ were real, only to eventually realize that they were in fact, dreams. This ease in confusing the real with the unreal is something that is persistent accross cultures and as another poster mentioned, is also what makes it so easy for humans to believe in religious dogma. Humans as a whole are easily duped.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
The problem is that our educational system doesn't teach basic critical thinking skills - those aren't developed until college (if then). The problem is that our educational system is a garbage-in, garbage-out system with a watered-down politically correct curriculum that warps context and is rife with inaccuracies and some outright lies. They're designed to increase "self-esteem" for some, at the expense of actually being able to be a productive and informed citizen.
There is an excellent article that was online a while back called Sesame Street, Epistemology, and Freedom that gives a good background into some of the problems, causes, and solutions in terms of our educational system's woeful lack of critical thinking skill-building. Thankfully the Internet Archive still has a copy since I've not been able to find it online. A sample:
If we can't teach children to think abstractly and learning how to quantify and qualify the streams of information that blast them every day, we can't expect to maintain an informed and reasonable democracy. Unfortunately we have an education system build by people like Horace Mann that were designed for the Industrial Age and are wholly inadequate for the intellectual demands of the Information Age.
Have you ever seen a phone conversation in a movie devolve into a fifteen minute discussion on a coworker's hair? Or seen a lead in a movie take a ten minute dump? Movies don't include the mundane details because they are boring and don't move the plot along.
Waiting for a PC to boot up, or seeing the real quality of video conferencing, or even watching people use the relatively user-unfriendly interfaces of real software would be boring.
What kills me is that we see computers used in a way that doesn't even make sense within the loopy rules established for them in the same danged story. Everything's dumbed down, that's to be expected, and okay, they exaggerate what today's machines can do. (You expected long moments while the characters wait for a good carrier signal?) But I at least want the rules to be consistent.
Good example: The Star Trek computers show radically different amounts of independent agency according to situation. They can make holodeck characters act according to their characters in a freely-branching story, but they can't, apparently, problem solve the task of looking for the meaning of alien symbols without specific verbal commands from a human. We're talking about a simple correlation between sounds and meanings, you know?
The quintessential pop culture computer would be Doogie Howser's. Enormous, colorful screen with GIANT letters being typed slowly enough for the camera to follow, at excruciatingly slow "silent film dialog card" pace, D-O-O-G-I-E-'-S T-R-I-T-E D-I-A-R-Y E-N-T-R-I-E-S. If Doogie was to ask for the meaning of life, and the computer was to whir and grind and maybe show an outsized Windows "progress" bar, you'd have the archetypal TV computer. (In the movies it'd maybe be more like "WOPR" from War Games.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
is due to the polarizing atmosphere in the US.
On the one hand, you have liberal relativists, for whom no fact is concrete, and who cheerfully will advance kids through schools whether they can read/write or not, simply to make sure their "self-esteem" is intact.
On the other, you have conservative absolutists who will not only excoriate dissent, but both deny obvious facts and assert such ridiculousities as truth (or, more likely, Truth) that all actual facts become valueless.
Yeah, THAT's an atmosphere that's really going to bring out the intellectual cream of a civilization.
Now, tell me that's not flamebait!
-Styopa
OK, the one that really gets me is the people who don't believe we went to the moon. It is so damn easy to prove.
We've got some fantastic optical telescopes on this planet. Why don't we point one at the moon and take pictures of the footprints?
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
I think it's much harder to deal with the kinds of issues in the article; issues that most people have little or no direct experience with (Who's been to the moon or Mars or even JPL? Who's actually been to Area 51?). I think it is much more productive addressing issues that either come up in everyday life, or that can be demonstrated directly (hands-on) in a classroom. Then use these to build a good scientific skepticism.
Plenty of pseudo-science can be debunked by properly teaching probability. There are plenty of fun, hands-on demonstrations related to false coincidences. But these are all too rare. I remember a middle school math class argument among several of the top students in the class in a top district. They spent much of the class arguing over whether the probability of getting 2 heads from independently flipping two coins is 1/4 or 1/3, and never came to a resolution. It would have been simple enough for the teacher to run the experiment. My point is that if it's this difficult to get across even a simple result among bright students, then the lesson plan is wrong to begin with, and it certainly doesn't scale up to the more interesting fallacies related to coincidence.
There are plenty more demonstrations that can debunk ESP. Imagine a teacher giving a mind reading demonstration, then showing how it was done, and afterward explaining how the pros do it.
As for the "face" on Mars, the article starts to suggest some of this by bringing in examples closer to "home": local clouds and mountains that look like objects but are much more clearly coincidence.
And another avenue would be to critically examine in class some commercials or other easily accessible and refutable examples of TV propaganda. The goal would be to break down the idea that any media source is unconditionally reliable.
But as long as the gambling industry continues to grow, and particularly those games with fixed odds against the players like the slots and lotteries, I see little hope of wide success.
"The lines between fantasy and reality have been blurred so much that pure reality pieces just seem boring."
No, the lines are as clearly distinct as they ever were. And, the general population is just as ill-educated as they ever were.
The only way to prevent nincompoops from believing fantasy is to never publish fantasy. I personally object. I can tell the difference and enjoy the fantasy. Don't restrict *me* because of an idiot.
My wife loves this old movie (starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn). She loves to watch it whenever it comes onto AMC.
I for one hate the movie because of the butchering they do to the IBM computers back then. To some extent, it's a byproduct of our education and experience, we can recognise the major inaccuracies in a movie or TV show, and want to fix it.
On the other hand, when a show comes on that utilizes speech pathology or audiology (what my wife has a masters degree in) she cringes and tries to explain what they've done wrong.
In short, it depends on your level of knowledge about the props or plotpoints in the movie.
Well, uh, I don't mean to be an apologist, but I guess I'll point out that that scene happens while they're in the Matrix. Neo can obviously mess with the rules, so I'm guessing that he could change the bit about whacking into someone at high speed.
That said, I think I'm the last person on earth who enjoyed the latter two Matrix movies (well, maybe about two-thirds of Revolutions).
No, a hell of a lot of people believe in the "face on Mars" and all this other pseudoscientific claptrap. Polls consistently show remarkably high levels of absolute belief in alien abduction, psychics, astrology, the literal truth of ancient collections of oral folktales, faked lunar landings, etc. If you haven't been taken in by all this, good for you, but you can't pretend that it's a small minority of people who have.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Capitalism: Taking advantage of impressionable people since time immemorable.
I don't believe these "pseudoscientists" are the problem. Hell, they are just making an honest buck selling their stories to the masses. If the masses choose to believe them, why are they to blame?
(Its not like they're spammers).
No. The problem is with the educational system that allows these people to finish high-school without even having the ability to critically think about what they are being fed.
However, smart consumers are bad business.* Given the current non-separation between big-business and state, there is too much short-term gain to be made by keeping the population stupid.
*As an IT management book I was reading on the weekend stated, IT people don't care why the Marketting people believe that consumers want an intimate, emotional relationship with their hand soap, we just implement the web-page.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
If you are writing a script for a spy thriller, hacking into a computer system becomes identical to a safe-cracking: A specialist does arcane tech stuff while the hero brandishes a gun and stands guard. This should never take more than a minute or so, unless you have a "B" story to cut away to, in which case it can take hours.
Crucial data must exist on only one copy of portable media, which can't be duplicated (more than maybe once), erased, or even remain on the computer it came from. Otherwise, the file in question fails to work as a "McGuffin", and lazy writers can't make use of it.
People who understand computers are like good mechanics. If a grease monkey can make a working airplane out of two broken ones of completely different designs, then a good hacker can log onto the alien computer systems with his Powerbook.
Film directors tend to be old guys who don't really understand how computers work, so they frame them in contexts which they grok. This is also why sci-fi directors almost never get deep-space physics right. Ships on Star Trek move like naval vessels because directors know how to do that. When there's no "up," no gravity, no friction to slow your inertia, and no objects close enough for your movement to be observed by the naked eye, the typical director is utterly lost. Hense, when Kirk outwits Khan's "two-dimensional" thinking patterns, he does so by moving the Enterprise "down" while retaining the same Y axis. It's essentially a submarine attack, rather than a battle between free-moving objects with no fixed reference apart from the nebula they are drifting through. Film directors get submarines. They don't get the void of space.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Or maybe it's because NORMAL people really don't give a fuck about the correct physics of outer space travel, they just want to watch a movie that doesn't suck.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
"What the thinker thinks, the prover proves"
--Robert Anton Wilson
This quote sums up your post quite nicely. First, what it means is that there is this really small part of the human mind which we can label the thinker. Once the thinker thinks something is true, the prover (the rest of the brain) goes about seeking evidence to support the belief of the thinker.
People will hop over good evidence to read something that will support what they already believe, and ignore even the best sources of information if they contradict those closely held beliefs.
I do have a different opinion about people than you do when it comes to this. I think that EVERYONE has this problem, regardless of their intillectual disposition. In fact, educated people suffer from this in a far worse manner. Their "facts" have support, and they feel justified in their beliefs because of their intillectual superiority and their education.
This makes it doubly hard to present them with contradictory information. Not only is their experience and knowledge in the way, but now you also have to contend with their ego. Knowledge and experience can be mitigated with new facts and information, but the ego is unbelievebly stubborn, resisting and rejecting the truth, sometimes even until death.
One has only to read about the history of scientific development to see that those most educated are also those most likely to hold on to false information. Stupid people will believe whatever new thing comes along that is more outlandish or spectacular than the last thing they believed.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
That said, I think I'm the last person on earth who enjoyed the latter two Matrix movies...
/. to complain about Matrix 2 and 3. The reason is I think because they didn't follow the good-better-best rule. So when the first Matrix came out, it was revolutionary enough to shock people. People were expecting similar shocks in the follow-ups, but since they weren't, they started complaining instead. Matrix 2 and 3 followed the plot nicely with lots of special effects as a bonus.
No, you're not the last one. It has become a very popular activity here @
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.
...was when the previous lander crashed because of a unit conversion problem. It shows the importance of units and unit conversion.
/. and me.
I use this in lecture and lab as an example of why we just can't assume the next person will kind of know what we are doing, even if we don't completely specify it. Ironically, I just mentioned it today before reading this story - but maybe I shouldn't mention that. Maybe someone will take it as evidence of a psychic connection between
_____________________________________
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
The suckiness of movie physics is directly proportional to the audience's knowledge of physics. If NORMAL people understood more physics, the bad-physics movie would suck more.
You don't see many flying pigs in movies, and when you do, the filmmakers will usually go out of their way to explain how the pigs are able to fly. This is because most NORMAL people understand that pigs, on average, don't normally fly. An unexplained flying pig in a movie would increase the suckiness of the movie.
If most people understood the correct physics of space travel, they would be less likely to accept the bad physics and the filmmakers would make sure it was correct.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
Erm, no offense intended, but... do you have any information as to the validity of the statistical process and sampling used in those polls, or are you simply believing what you read?
~UP
Eat the Path.
I doubt it. They still wouldn't give a fuck. I KNOW the REAL physics, and sometimes it just doesn't matter. Reality isn't fun. It isn't interesting. I live here, it's fucking boring. I don't want to watch movies filled with people acting like everyone I know doing the usual things I do. I want to see something INTERESTING.
It never ceases to amaze me how people can complain about physics in a movie, but be able to completely buy into the fact that they're in OUTER FUCKING SPACE surrounded by MIDGET BEARS and massive turd-shaped monsters. It's called "Suspension of Disbelief". At some point you have to give up your pedantic whiny-assing and just say "Fuck it. It's cool."
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
Like the bible?
Anyone who does not question their beliefs on a daily basis is far from "intellectually superior". The best scientists are the ones that have no ego (or don't let it get in the way of research).
The moral of the story? Question everything, including yourself and your beliefs.
Nathan's blog
The same could be said of religion, correct? Just because the story is on paper doesn't make it any more truthful.