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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."
The examples given are more like pseudo-reality than pseudo-science... I was thinking more along the lines of the show 24, where they can track a suspect from their cell-phone to the exact room they are in.
... I know that they have all been following the progress of both rovers on Mars. It has been an ongoing "project" for them since the rovers were launched and it has even driven a few parents to donate various bit of hardware to the school's computer room.
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I have a few friends that seem otherwise rational, but are fascinated with the pseudo-science. From what I can see this stuff is a new age religion for people who think they are too educated for classical religion. It provides a framework of an intelligence beyond understanding, that has a plan for us and provides a reason for our existence. Instead if God, you have Greys. Factual science is not going to convert people away from this.
if a lot of Sci-Fi on TV wasn't a big "public education" project.
This was covered, on a tangent, in a STNG episode. The short-version is Picard attempts to make first contact, but the political leaders decide that the populous isn't ready - and that a public education project will be started/expanded.
For example, there are the persistant rumors that Orson Welles radioplay was an experiment designed to gauge public response, and that shortly thereafter it was decided that *we* aren't ready.
Continuing rumors like that the original Star Trek didn't have enough advertising income to keep it on the air for a single season, and certainly not enough to carry it for three.
Now the government is getting publicly involved in the effort, with the 'life on Mars' possibilities that were thrown about in the last few years.
40 years ago, how would people have reacted to the government saying that there might actually be life on Mars? Today, it's no big deal - because we've been "educated".
...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!"
I'd be pleased if the US news put more people to sleep rather than into paranoid frenzies resulting in invasions and panicy removal of civil rights.
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
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.
But it's not what people think. NASA did actually get to the moon; the problem was that it was deemed too controversial to allow footage of what was actually found there to be released to the public. Thus, faked landing footage was created.
Silly rabbit.
My friend says, "The moon landings were faked, and I found a website with lots of evidence."
:)
I respond, "I am familiar with it, and have found equivalent websites that debunk their "evidence" as pseudoscience, with their own, solid, evidence."
He responds, "Oh no dude, you just GOTTA read it again, it was totally faked."
Though one example is not a representative sample, his actions seem consistent with those of the masses....people simply will not bother to consider true evidence objectively, nor to educate themselves to the point at which they can even discern good evidence from crap. They respond better to a good story, and good rhetoric, and that is just the way it is.
Oh well, its just one more way in which geeks are better than other people.
This article assumes teachers know the truth and ought to correct students misconceptions, but sadly back in 7th grade I had a social studies teacher who filled our naive young minds with such gems of truth as:
* Atari video games were funded and developed by the department of defense in order to improve our reflexes to prepare us for 21st century automated combat... the company name "Atari" was just an acronym for special black ops project.
* The United States could easily bring the Soviet Union to its knees at any moment simply by flying the space shuttle at supersonic speed back and forth high above Soviet cities, the barrage of sonic booms would cause mass confusion and panic that would cause the Soviet republic a catastrophic collapse... therefore we do not need nuclear weapons, we have the space shuttle.
There were many other examples of his wit but those two stood out in my mind. This teacher was highly regarded by students for many years because his insights, and also he would buy Chinese food for the entire class on Fridays, so we all listened to him intently... it wasn't until some years later that most of us figured out how far off base he was. I wonder how many of his students still to this day accept everything he said as fact.
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.
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.