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Are US Voters Informed Enough About Science?
Naturalist writes "For decades, educators and employers have worried that too few Americans are preparing for careers in science. But there's evidence to support a new, broader concern in this election year: Ordinary Americans may not know enough about science to make informed decisions on key questions."
What is it, 95% believe in a supreme being? Not that believing in a supreme being is compromised by understanding the results of science. Oh no.
Whew.. I thought that question would be harder!
Remember, the collective ignorance of the people is wiser than the educated and specialised few!
Also, the market determines the merit of everything!
Conclusion: don't listen to scientists, just buy the cheaper one at Wal-Mart.
What is this "science" you speak of? Does it have something to do with making nucyalar bombs?
I thought it was general knowledge that ordinary people (not just Americans) don't know enough to make informed decisions. Not just science based issues, but all issues.
That's the beauty of democracy. You don't have to be qualified to have an opinion.
"Most people"probably aren't qualified to have a meaningful opinion on economics, agricultural policy, foreign policy, military strategy, etc., etc.
That's the price you pay for giving everyone a vote.
By around age 5 I learned most (if not all) of these facts from watching TLC or Discovery. It also helped that my parents read to me and encouraged me to do the same. It sends chills down my spine knowing there are people out there without this knowledge. I don't know if we should blame schools or simply conclude a number of people just don't care...
my mom posts on slashdot.
a lot of things, see current administration....
Monstar L
Not enough science in the Election? Just make voters name the periodic table to vote.
Though, I fail to see how knowing science makes you able to make rational decisions.
Knows everything about nothing and nothing about everything.
I suspect that most of the reaction is about those who believe in creation (or even God for that matter); I could list several more:
1. Global climate change
2. Viability of alternate energy sources
3. Carbon credits
4. "Scary" parts of nuclear power.
5. Where the power from the electric car will come from.
I'm certain there's more. Disclaimer: I'm a conservative, which probably gives you some sort of impression of my views on the above.
Four out of three ordinary Americans agree they don't know enough about math and science. :)
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How about economics? Psychology? Current events? Foreign relations?
People don't know enough about anything to make an informed decision when it comes to the actual issues. Campaign managers know how to spin anything to make their guy look good and the other guy look bad. I consider myself a fairly smart guy and there have been times where I've accepted a candidate's not-quite-straightforward answer until someone calls them on the facts.
No.
Long answer: Meh... There's really just the consolation that maybe Americans at least were never all that science savvy to begin with so the current state is nothing new. A more rigorous science education would probably be better.
I'd say a good start on that is to get the fucking religious dogma masquerading as science out of the schools. You know what I mean: intelligent design.
A good second step would be to hire more teachers who are actually good at science and math, but that would mean increasing the salaries and that probably won't happen. It used to be that intelligent women would do fulfill this need because of few career options but nowadays women can go on to science based careers not just in education. I've taught earth science to elementary education majors, very few of them found math and science to be enjoyable, but instead feared it. I can only presume they would transfer this to their students.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
That's the thing about voting. You get to vote regardless of whether someone thinks you have The Right Information about whatever topic. It's representative democracy. There are other forms of government that only let you decide in certain selected circumstances.
Almost every election we hear some variation on: "Americans are stupid. We hate them, their religion, their culture, and the things they like. Why won't they vote for us? Don't they know we're better than them and can lead them from their benighted ways?"
Yeah, we know. That's why you keep losing.
You can't even vote on relevant topics. All you get to vote for is a selection of people who can then do anything they want for a couple of years, including u-turns on their stated positions. What you know about science matters jack shit.
If the general public had a BASIC understanding of economics & business, we wouldn't be in debt to the tune of trillions of dollars, and the numbnuts wouldn't be "thankful" that the government is using its power to give us "rebates" (or whatever they call it) to buy votes.
It's not just the yanks suffering from this.
Here in the UK we've had a bunch of morons sitting around outside a power station protesting about it burning coal. Fair enough, thats only mildly moronic but when they are also rabidly against any nuclear power alternatives it becomes stupidly moronic and when they suggest that everyone currently working in the power industry should be forced to move to the Shetlands and build wind farms it's unbelivably moronic.
Also people like Prince Charles speaking out about GM crops sets everyone a bad example.
This isn't a job interview. At least it shouldn't be. We can't possibly have enough information to determine who would do the best job of running the country. If we could judge that objectively, then there would be virtually no political decisions, instead just some skilled advisors in each subject.
Democracy is all about the subjective factors. Is a public health service better than lower taxes? Should we invest more in education? How much more? Is it better to have extra perks for minorities or should everything be equal? Is the level of immigration too high, too low or just right?
None of these have a right and a wrong answer. You pick the answers that seem right to you and pick the candidate that most closely represents your views.
doesn't seem to be qualified to if they want fries with their order let alone anything based on science. Products of the AES*, they never had a chance. (*American Education System) Our only hope is that chaos and random chance in voting will let those few informed voters make a difference!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
This entire topic flame bait, plain and simple. There's nothing I can possibly post here that will not fan the flames.
Actually, if they otherwise put their faith in double-blind tests or whatever sound methodology, I couldn't care less if they also believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Invisible Pink Unicorn or whatever.
But the most worrisome phenomenon is the large mass of people believing in homeopathy, magic (as in, that you can actually change the universe by refusing to believe it's really like that), natural snake oils, conspiracy-theory science, and the like.
I mean, seriously, there are people buying wooden volume knobs and $500 ethernet cables, believing that it makes their MP3s sound better. (I mean, an MP3 is already digital and a network cable transmits digital information. A 1 is a 1 is a 1, and 0 is a 0 is a 0. It doesn't sound "warmer" or "more natural".) At least one on the Hardware Central forums believed he can hear differences in how MP3's sound, based on the hard drive brand. And not because of hard drive noise or interference, but because the magnetic coating somehow makes a difference, like in old cassettes.
There are people who believe that power lines cause brain cancer. Or that they can detect a turned on cell phone by getting a headache near one.
There are people who think that "natural" minerals are healthier, and that, say, salt processed industrially has mollecules that are unnaturally round and regular, and can't be processed as well by the body.
There are people who drink water with extra O2 in it and think it actually makes a difference in how well oxygenated their body is. As if would even make a difference. (No, seriously, calculate it.)
Etc.
And while I'd love to point fingers and laugh at the USA, trust me, it's no better in Europe.
And anyway, that should already tell anyone all they need to know about voters and science. The above mentioned people have a right to vote too, you know.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The issues are charged with disinformation from lobbyists, PACs, spin-meisters, and the just plain delusional. Separating truthful and rational sources from the BSers has become an art form-- because it's sure not science.
It's a wonder that John and Jane Q Voter are able to cut through the madness at all- then to attempt to pin the future on one political candidate or another (as they don't understand science well, either, most of them).
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You know its funny, I was watching President Bush during an interview in Beijing talk about how they are trying to cool over relations with China. One thing he said is that they need to convince China that religion isn't going to hurt them.
Let me see, let's say you're a sane person with all their faculties in place. Someone comes along and tells you something that is just crazy, like there is a big flying spaghetti monster in the sky that you need to believe in and give 5% of your money to or you are going to spend an eternity in damnation. Are you going to just take his word for it or are you going to label that person as confused an deluded?
He notes that nuclear waste controversies hinge on how much risk a community is willing to tolerate, which is not a matter decided by science. Likewise, debates on the use of embryonic stem cells in scientific research routinely boil down to moral beliefs about when life begins.
Risk? Moral beliefs? Irrationality is what got us into this mess. Pandering won't help.
You have a better chance of being killed by a drunk driver than a nuclear power plant. And, no, you won't go to a magical afterlife filled with clouds, cake and concubines after you die.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
A kind and benevolent dictator who makes all of our decisions for us. It has worked in the past.
Are US Politicians Informed Enough About Science?
I don't expect your average Joe to be knowledgeable about most scientific issues. But when we have politicians implementing policy related to scientific matters without understanding the issues, then we have a real problem. Of course, this extends beyond just science. For example, you would think that policy makers would have figured out (or tasked someone competent to figure out) that diverting agricultural resources to produce biofuels just might have an impact on food supplies & prices. It seems there are numerous disciplines where politicians don't bother to educate themselves adequately to make sound policy decisions.
...about trolls.
Nominations are a great idea. As is changing administrations regularly. The big problem with modern democracy is that political parties collude to water down their principles to pander to voters who are largely ignorant of everything. The stated goal of voting is thus subverted as the government no longer represents the people. So why have voting at all? The only reason we still do is because people consider it a "fair" way to choose which candidate gets power. Well there's nothing more fair than chance, and the modern understanding of statistics makes it just as verifiable as voting, if not more so.
Let's abolish the two party system. Let's have a lottery for every member of the cabinet.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Did anyone take the quiz? Holy carp! A 100% is considered 'Geek class knowledge?' Any middle schooler should be able to complete this correctly. Also, it's labeled as a 'True/False' quiz, where the last two answers are clearly NOT true/false. From the Article:
True/False Quiz:
1. The center of the Earth is very hot.
2. All radioactivity is man-made.
3. It is the fatherâ(TM)s gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl.
4. Lasers work by focusing sound waves.
5. Electrons are smaller than atoms.
6. Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria.
7. The universe began with a huge explosion.
8. The continents on which we live have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move in the future.
9. Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.
10. Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?
11. How long does it take for the Earth to go around the sun?
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There is a lot of philosophy which is passed of as science. The difference is that philosophy does not use the scientific method. It cannot be recreated, tested, etc. People just look at what they see and make up some explanation for it and call it science.
Duhhhh
Intelligence is no guarantee of wisdom
From: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html ... I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result. ... Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out for us."
"In the meantime, the real crisis that is coming has started to produce a number of symptoms, some alarming and some merely curious. One of these is what I like to call The Paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. The paradox is this: as a lingering result of the golden age, we still have the finest scientists in the world in the United States. But we also have the worst science education in the industrialized world. There seems to be little doubt that both of these seemingly contradictory observations are true. American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world; maybe more than the rest of the world combined. Yet, students in American schools consistently rank at the bottom of all those from advanced nations in tests of scientific knowledge, and furthermore, roughly 95% of the American public is consistently found to be scientifically illiterate by any rational standard. How can we possibly have arrived at such a result? How can our miserable system of education have produced such a brilliant community of scientists? That is what I mean by The Paradox of the Scientific Elites and the Scientific Illiterates.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
That's why we don't vote on stuff like global warming.
Global Warming: Religion, disguised as science.
Not that you don't have a right to believe in it.
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The whole voting process seems designed to obfuscate the issues. At least in the CA elections a ballot guide with outlines on issues and candidates were mailed to voters. I now live in KS where you have to go on a quest to find information of any depth on issues and candidates.
...
It's almost as if they're hiding something
No shit sherlock, plenty of movies with volcanoes and magma/lava in it. Fail to know this and you have a room temperature IQ.
No, there is lots around and of course radio-active materials are found in nature. We are exposed constantly to radiation but I suppose people might not know this OR mis-understand the question. You might have picked up that the sun is an exploding nuke or that uranium is mined or heard the term background radiation.
Father of course, basic biology, comes up often enough, but I suppose you might have forgotten. It ain't an issue most of the time and out of sight out of mind.
Seems pretty obvious to anyone who ever seen a laser LIGHT. I suppose the way the question is asked could confuse you. You might be swayed into thinking that by focussing sound you can create light. If anybody on slashdot fell for it, go kill yourself.
Duh, they are after all part of atoms, so they have to be smaller. If you know what an atom/electon is then you need to know this. If you do not, well there is nothing wrong with only having a swimming pre-school diploma.
Bacteria obviously but this is one of the questions people really might not know. Viruses and bacteria are often mixed up in the media.
Fact? We do not absolutely know this yet, yes there was a big bang, probably BUT was that the beginning. A loaded question. If you think it was created by god 6000 years ago, you are wrong.
Obviously, just ask anyone living near a fault. Millions of years might be debated by the insane but that the continents move can and has been measured.
True of course, the proof is getting stronger every year with more missing links being found. A deeply dividing question apparently in the US.
Oh come on. If you fail this one after 3rd rock from the Sun you don't need to go out and kill yourself, you are already legally braindead.
Tsk, giving the answer for the previous question in the next one? Sad to say, I know people that would fail this question and yes, they are indeed the type that you absolutely do NOT want to vote because they lack any capacity to make conclusions based on observations.
No, you have an average IQ. Welcome to the human race
You are retarded, you should have people taking care of you.
You are severely retarded
You are dead. Random guessing would have served you better.
That you are supposed to be a geek to know the answer to these questions says it all. Come on, they are general knowledge questions, but yet usatoday seems to think that knowing these makes you the top of the bill, a genius equall to Einstein.
No, not everyone needs to know everything but this is stuff like not knowing that we need air to breath, that water is wet and fire hot.
Our society has slipped into a state where is is considered normal to know every detail about Paris Hilton's life but not why a year is a year.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm not religious myself, but just to play the devil's advocate:
1. Belief that it's all a metaphor doesn't necessarily make one any less religious. Saint Augustine argued exactly that: that the whole genesis is a metaphor and only an idiot would take it literally. He got sanctified by the Catholic Church. So...
2. (A possible) God doesn't have to obey his own rules, or exist _inside_ the universe he created.
Think of (a possible) God in terms of, say, a game programmer. Let's say you're this uber genius nerd in a CS university, you're bored enough one week and write the uber-universe simulation. Sort of like a SimCity or Children Of The Nile or The Sims 2 or Spore. Except let's say you're really really smart and have an uber-computer and those little creatures on your screen actually go sentient.
Now think about your position in the universe you just created. You're entirely outside it. In fact, there's no way for you to ever be _in_ it. You could create a character in that world, but it won't be _you_.
Also realize that whatever rules you set there, don't apply to _you_. E.g., if you set those creatures to no longer need to eat, it doesn't mean _you_ also suddenly don't.
Now also realize that you didn't sign any contract or anything. You can change the program's rules or bypass them any time you feel like it. If you want to raise a mountain over there, or have a jolly good flood, who's to stop you? Conservation of mass and energy? You can just change a variable and create more mass and energy. And if a bunch of those simulated people nailed your avatar to a cross, pfft, who's to keep you from resurrecting that char? Laws of biology? Pfft. You wrote the laws of their biology, and can amend them. Or change a bit in the database and have that guy up and kicking like nothing ever happened to him.
Or if that's too hard to palate, think Blizzard and WoW. All Blizzard employees exist outside of the world of Azeroth. In fact, they can't ever really be _in_ that world. They can create characters there, but the real "gods" at Blizzard are and remain fundamentally outside the world they created, and are not subject to their own laws. If they want to do something as mysterious and supernatural as creating a whole new island, or indeed a whole new planet out of nowhere (see the Burning Crusade launch), who's to keep them? If they don't like their own rules, who's to keep them from changing those rules?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Most US Voters aren't informed at all, about anything.
Most folks don't have any idea what is going on in the world, what their government is doing in their name, how the economy works...
I'm constantly horrified at the number of people who vote for their representatives based solely on whether they seem folksy or friendly enough.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
One does not necessarily need a good grasp of the science as long as they have some common sense. However just looking at some of the stupid safety warnings we have to put on things makes me think a little natural selection might be a good thing.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
The US public is uninformed about Science? REALLY? The only thing that surprises me is that someone must've been paid actual money for bringing this Earth-shattering revelation to us.
The American public combines the apathy and lack of intellectual curiosity that you expect from ground down 9-5 consumer drones, with an aggressive nation-wide political lobby dedicated to making people MORE ignorant.
Who thought for a moment Americans could make informed decisions about science?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I have no mod points (and am not particularly religious), but your post deserves some.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Science is not alone as an area of expertise where most people have trouble discerning fact from fiction. And an extra science class in school isn't going to do the trick. People need a solid foundation for thinking and reasoning. Objectivism is a great introduction to the philosophy of rational thought. I recommend Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (a story about an architect that refuses to compromise his work or his life) as a great place to start.
>> The above mentioned people have a right to vote too, you know.
This is the problem. If you get the masses making decisions, you get idiotic decisions, because none of us is as stupid as all of us. And you get manipulation of votes by mass media.
On the other hand, if you concentrate decision making in the hands of elite, you get corruption.
Any suggestions how to solve this?
I was thinking it would be nice to have something like a hive mind with error correction. Like we can build reliable systems out of flawed components. (using parity, checksums. etc) We could try to build a reliable decision making body out of flawed people.
--Coder
haha, this made my day!
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Isn't the answer for #11 actually 1 year and 1/4 days because of the leap year?
Name one science issue (short of gas) issue that has even been debated, let alone decisive as part of a major American Election. It's just not relevant because people aren't that smart. It's about fear mongering and 30-second sound bytes. that's it.
Only with the current gas prices have they even started addressing anything relevant to science, but watch the campaigns and debates and try and find anything related to science. "we need alternative fuel sources"; "we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil." Great geniuses but what do you propose we do about it.
We all know what they trot out there for election issues. Health care; Social Security; Crime (or more recently Terrorism); Jobs; and Gays, Abortion, and a general value assault of the children.
Don't you remember Hillary Clinton proposing a suspension of the Fed. Gas tax? She proposed reducing the income of the already heavily in debt government so American's could save less than $.25 on a more than $4 gallon of gas. Great idea. How about the actually implemented policy to stop stock piling the strategic national oil reserve so there would be less pressure on demand... by $.06 - less than 2%, and now we have less oil if a real supply disruption comes along. Its more surprising to me that we have been as successful as we are considering how appallingly retarded much of our population is.
that we have voter fraud so that informed politicians can make the right decisions for us!
No.
How about this for an idea? Only people who agree with a scientific theory are allowed to use things that were developed using that science. That should weed out those who don't believe in evolution pretty quickly, and provide more evidence for it at the same time.
Heh, I consider myself educated, and GM crops scare me shitless.
The thing is- I believe properly done GM modified crops would be very nice and productive and all that. But right now, we have asshole companies like Monsanto running GM modification. And these people can not be trusted. They would gladly poison millions of people or induce birth defects or do ANYTHING if it would increase their profits and if they could get away with it.
It's not the GM modification per se I have a problem with. It's the companies that do it. And that there is no real quality control of GM crops.
--Coder
The only thingn worse than democracy is everything else. No single person or even group of people is smart enough to know everything, and even very insightful people (Edward Gibbon, for example) make bad or inneffectual legislators. Even the ancient Greeks had problems with democracy, and Athens had what, about 10K people at the time? Problem is, every other system sucks worse. Democracy is the way it is because we are the way we are, and if people didn't suck, you wouldn't need government in the first place.
I've been watching the Olympics. Exxon apparently is worried there won't enough scientists in the future for them to be able to go from just mucking up the environment to complete planetary devastation.
--- What?
Are US Voters Informed Enough About Science?
No. The majority of voters (US or otherwise) are not informed enough about anything at all.
Next!
When I was in college in the 90's, every single science professor I spoke with said the field was saturated. From Physiology and Paleontology, to Ecology and Biochemistry, job prospects out of college paid horribly. So I went into IT, which paid better and was a lot less stressful. Maybe if the markets adjust and science actually offers careers that are rewarding after college it might attract more people. Last thing we need is doomsayers wringing their hands in anguish: "Oh noes, more people aren't throwing their futures away by joining an already oversaturated field". How about you put your money where your mouth is and put some well paying science jobs out there or STFU.
Evidence here: http://www.bythefault.com/2008/08/10/someone-missed-a-science-class/
-- 42 --
Never mind science. If the electorate as a whole had any reasonable intelligence, most of the candidates' election strategies and schemes wouldn't work. I mean these are the same voters who blindly forward every email without checking it out first, can't keep their VCR's from blinking 12:00, and need TV commercials to explain what's happening when analog TV goes away next year.
...are the candidates informed enough about science?
We are afraid to force people to "learn or fail." Somehow the idea that a kid might be dumber than his classmates has become a violation of civil liberties, like somehow I have an inalienable right to be wrong but still get full credit.
I wonder if "learn or fail" would result in school overcrowding instead of prison overcrowding...
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Are US Voters Informed Enough About Science?
Why yes, of course they are. Damn silly question. Next!
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
A couple of years ago, I stood on the corner of a street and offered passers-by the opportunity to win $5 if they could accurately explain the workings of a household microwave oven. Many tried, none succeeded.
That's the day I decided that the average person has no clue.
The problem isn't just the voters, though... the policy makers have no clue, either.
You had best not be suggesting that people who do not understand scientific principles be denied the right to vote.
If there is a gap in comprehension, it's up to the scientific community to explain things in terms they can relate to.
Given this (californian?) womens grasp of science, I'd certainly have to say that some aren't.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c6HsiixFS8
Government putting rainbows in the water indeed.
Hell, most voters aren't informed enough about Liberty to vote issues properly. Science is secondary.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
"until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer"
Bullshit. In the US education system, most people who will be scientists decided to be scientists when they were excited by what their middle and high school science teachers thought was "a dreary business, a burden".
And if you believe the "white male" elitist bit, look at what percentage of graduating scientists from US universities are foreigners.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Even "knowing enough about science", how is that any more important than "knowing enough about economics, politics, world history/geography/religions, crisis management, military strategy, yada-yada-yada...."
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
For instance, take the standard far-right (USian) position on climate change (unproven and if it does exist not made by man). They aren't making a decision where the transitional costs of moving away from fossil fuels is greater than the potential harm from climate change. This position is fundamentally ignorant.
The same type of issue exists across the spectrum where facts are denied because political ideology wills them to not be true. Many of these issues are scientific - Intelligent Design, AIDs in the past, the relative utility of embryonic stem cells vs adult stem cells, whether people are homosexual by nature or by choice - but not all of them (the Founding Fathers were evangelical fundamentalists for instance).
These politicians are worse than someone who might make a different choice than you even if their non-choice defaults to your preferred position because they are fundamentally ignorant, incompetent and/or lying. Better to have someone with whom you can have an honest and civil disagreement than someone who refuses to even acknowledge reality.
Religion & spirituality are distinctly different from superstition, "wishing things", or adding psuedo-science to thoughts and beliefs.
I find a lot of atheistic scientists condemning religion, but in fact what they are condemning is sloppy or illogical thinking. It is up to religionists to realize that critical analysis strengthens, instead of weakens religious faith. Sigh.
Unity in Diversity
[Note: I recognize that religious fundamentalists are not necessarily the best representatives of their religions. Unfortunately, they are the most vocal.]
In the US, Christian fundamentalism has a great track record for dismissing science that it disagrees with. It started with evolution in the 19th century, and has now progressed to other topics.
Evolution?
"God sez the earth is less than 10,000 years old, so science is wrong!"
Biological basis of homosexuality?
"God sez that homosexuality is a sinful choice!"
Global warming?
"God sez he's coming soon, so we don't have to worry about that!"
Of course, when fundamentalists say "God sez..." they really mean "My personal interpretation is..." And don't even get me started on how un-literal "Biblical literalism" is.
Voters aren't informed enough about anything. They can't be, and never will be. Voters will always make their choices based on irrelevant factors and misinformation. That's the way it is. No amount of education will ever change that.
No matter how foolish any particular individual might seem, with their prejudices and their ignorance and their oddball beliefs, the choices made by large groups of the unwashed tend in the main to be good choices. So far, this approach (representative democracy) seems to work better than anything else that we've tried. There are structural problems (campaign rules, party politics, jerrymandering)... but these have not yet canceled out the benefits of the Big Idea: let people choose their leader.
As an atheist, I am all too aware of the excessive cultural importance placed on religion in this demon-ridden country. As far as I'm concerned, it wouldn't have killed the British to sic a few privateers on the Puritans to sink the Mayflower before it reached North America. They would have done the whole world a favor in the long run.
As an anarchist, I don't consider myself qualified to vote anyway. Nor do I consider anybody else qualified to vote. You can't be an anarchist if you're telling other people what to do -- or picking a proxy who will give the orders in your name.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I think the plan is to keep people stupid by underpaying teachers so that the people most qualified to be teachers do something else because of the low pay. ... thus making sure that people cannot follow a logical argument therefore are much easier to be manipulated by appealing to their emotions. ... and to discourage another group of people that actually can follow logical arguments, are informed, have good ideas, and actually care about improving the state of things by making marihuana illegal and performing drug tests.
They are now so good at their game that they lie and steal from us right in front of our noses and we do NOTHING about it.
I would really love to go into education but I would have to take something like a $15k a year pay cut from my current IT job. No thanks.
what voters really SHOULD know is how to filter bovine fertilizer. The average voter isn't going to be making major scientific decisions anyway. But he will have to decide which of all the BS spouting politicos WILL be making such decisions, and it would be nice if they could recognize when they're being fed a line.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
See this is why you want deliberative democracy. In practice this means replace the presidential veto with a large "jury trial", say 100 jurors (a large jury eliminates the need for jury selection). Congress critters would vote not just "yey" or "ney" but also for an "advocate". Any advocate receiving at least 5% or 10% from either the house or senate would have the right to argue in the trial. Mr. President could also name an advocate. In the trial, the advocates would try to convince randomly selected ordinary people that the law was good or bad, or to drop specific provisions, like pork. Advocates could also parade around expert witnesses, expose the biases of other witnesses, etc.
Such a system is really the only way to bring more science into government because people can not be expected to know much. Such a system is also the best way to control government spending.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
"Democracy is based on the idea that many people are smarter then one person, wait that can't be right. Totalitarianism is based on the idea that one person is smarter then many, I don't like that one either, lets look at the previous one.' -Lazerius Long, Time enough for love "We live in a world based on science and technology, where almost no one knows anything about science or technology."
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
That's the thing about voting. You get to vote regardless of whether someone thinks you have The Right Information about whatever topic.
But that's not how democracy was supposed to work.
From what I remember from my history books, the way it was supposed to work that all eligible citizens (women, children and slaves not allowed...) were supposed to gather around, debate furiously for a while and then vote only after they were informed about the topics at hand.
Obviously you can't gather 200 million people together to vote once a week, so we have representative democracy these days. But nevertheless, a working democracy requires informed citizenry. None of the modern democracies have that and as a result our way of democracy really isn't working all that well for the benefit of the citizens.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
It's nucular! nu-cu-lar!
Now go back to Iraq and get me that thick black nectar for my SUV!
How many voters are informed enough about economics? You know, there are very smart (but ignorant) people out there that want to impose a 100% income tax for salaries over some threshold, say $300,000/yr. They can perform all the mathematical analysis to say what the added tax revenue would be, how the money would be distributed, etc. But they do not seem to understand the major fallacy in their proposal: that if there is a 100% tax on income over $300,000, then there would be no incentive to earn more than that. It would make no difference to someone if they earned $300,000 or $3,000,000. So obviously, the tax revenues would plummet.
Knowledge of economics is just as important as knowledge of science, yet no one seems to really care about how well the average voter (or politician for that matter) knows.
How about adding heath & well being, international policy, finance and grammar to the list. While your at it add Canadians.
Are US Voters Informed Enough About Science?
abs(not). All they do is lay around and tan(themselves), and cos(loans) for their loser children who _derive_ less and less pleasure from their conspicuous consumption. They think 'electron' means that guy from the 80's movie is running for office.
There's no sin() of it getting any better, either. The only _integration_ that's going on is when they mix below- and above-average students so no one's feelings are hurt.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
First, I'm more worried about the number of college graduates who can barely read and write than whether or not 8th graders know science.
Second, I suspect the root cause of the first point adequately explains the pitiful science testing performance. That is, our science education is not very good because our schools are not very good.
I would add to that a general decline in American culture, which is even harder to reverse than our ghastly schools, contributes to the general decay of education. It takes quite a lot of effort to turn a naturally curious child into a mumbling, illiterate worker bee who lives to shop, but Americans are known for their can-do spirit.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am much more concerned about the civic ignorance among Americans. The USA is not a Democracy, it never has been, nor should it ever be. According to US Constitution Article 4 Section 4, the USA is a Republic. The idea was that a republican form of government would have a harder time taking your rights than a democratic one, where you only need a majority to oppress.
Voters also don't know much about politics, but nobody cares about that. Quite in contrary, to those in power, it is pretty good, as one can easily compensate his lack of political skill with charisma.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
Someone can want to be a "scientist" starting in K-12, but he or she can still be discarded by the system in college or graduate school because you don't fit the expected profile of a scientist "diamond in the rough".
On people from other countries studying in the USA, you have an excellent point, but Goodstein didn't say it was impossible to recognize a peer by those artificial standards, just harder. And foreign students have already gone through K-12 and maybe college in their own countries. He isn't claiming any superiority of "white males", he is just pointing out a historical situation.
Actually, there is a much deeper problem with Goodstein's remarks in that he fails to acknowledge this deeper problem of scientific elites, which implies our selection of "scientists" and other professionals are actually fairly political:
"Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives"
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
One reviewer: "I have been waiting a long time for someone to write this book, and Jeff Schmidt has done it. He exposes, in crystal-clear prose, the inevitably political nature of the professional in our society, and, most importantly, suggests a strategy for resistance. This is an extraordinary and valuable piece of writing."
From the Amazon blurb: "This book details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker, showing how an honest reassessment of what it means to be a professional in today's corporate society can be remarkably liberating. Poignant examples from the world of work reveal the workplace as a battleground for the very identity of the individual. Schmidt contends that professional work is inherently political--that the unstated duty of professionals is to maintain strict ideological discipline. Career dissatisfaction evolves as workers lose control over the political component of their creative work."
Anyway, foreign students are usually in such constrained circumstances that they make near ideal slavish grad students who are easily exploited. Some may be exceptions of course, same as the issue with H1B visa holders. So, that is a reason professors may be more tolerant of some of their differences -- it's the cost of cheap labor.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Between 43% and 47% of Americans have agreed during this 26-year time period with the creationist view that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/108226/Republicans-Democrats-Differ-Creationism.aspx
So, obviously not enough Americans understand science.
The idea for the movie Idiocracy must have come from US.
Mike Judge captures the future outlook on USA as a country briliantly. Just take the energy drink-thing in the movie, and change it to Christianity, and you'll probably see where US is in 500 years.
This is blinging
Definitional error - Creationism is not science because it does not follow scientific method and standards.
Empirical error - Insistence on abstinence education only and not paying for condom distribution empirically leads to more pregnancies and STD cases including AIDS.
Clean water has demonstrably lowered spread of infectious diseases. Digging your pit toilet next to your water well is a WRONG answer.
Theoretical error - When McCann thump the table to drill offshore and insists that it'll lower gas price at the pump, it reflects a lack of understanding of the oil commodity market (or extreme pandering or BOTH!). At peak projected production 20+ years from now, such offshore production would be only a fraction of 1% of global production. THAT is just not enough to move the spot or futures oil market today. It's buried in the noise!
Look, it's quite simple really.
There is only so much scientific intelligence to go round. If your Nobel prize winners hog it all, then the rest of the population has to be extraordinarily dumb to make up for it.
It is called the Law of the Conservation of IQ. Either everyone is mediocre, or some are geniuses ad the rest are loonies. You guys wanted to win a lot of Nobel prizes, so you paid the price - a nation full of dummies and a handful of ueber-geniuses.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Funniest thing I've read in ages. Thanks.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Pretty sad "test". But if the average person has gotten 6-7 correct over about a decade and half of sampling, it's probably an embarrassingly accurate indicator of the problem.
Shouldn't a 9th grader ace those questions? If you aren't supposed to get out of school until you are at least 16, a lot of time is being wasted with little effect.
Religion does not really have a problem with science. Religion has a problem with God. Everytime Religion comes face to face with something God has done, Religions freak out.
If you don't believe in God, you can just skip my reasoning here. If you do believe in God, and believe in a God that made the universe, please bear with me a few minutes.
Western peoples once believed the Earth was the center of the universe and the Sun an all of the planets and stars rotated around the Earth. When the Copernican model of a heliocentric solar system started to be taught, religious leaders opposed it. It contradicted their dogma and their doctrine. They thought that if the dogma and doctrine were proved wrong it would undermine religious authority. This still goes on today and is often portrayed as a 'fight' between 'science and God'.
But, for believers anyway, it was God that made the Earth and the Solar System. Who on Earth is powerful enough to try to dictate to God that God got it wrong? It seems the leaders of most religions think they are!
Religion was being brought face to face with the works of God. In particular a heliocentric Solar System. They didn't like it. Too bad for God! God should have known better! How dare he oppose doctrine and dogma like that. Who did God think they were undermining the Church's authority?
Its still going on today. Science reveals the way a part of the universe works through Evolution, quantum mechanics, or the big bang and Religions get in line to oppose it. They don't like being shown how God does things.
Its not 'science vs. God'. Its 'Religion vs. God'.
Religions don't like the way God chose to create the universe and they want to outlaw the study of God's creation (science). Religions do not like it when God gets God's way!
If Religions don't like the way God made the universe and the mechanisms at work in the universe (like Evolution), then those Religions should make clear to their followers how they disagree with God and don't like how God chose to do things. They should make clear that they prefer a book printed by Mankind or dogma created by Mankind over God's way.
If only God stayed out of their way, most Religions would be much happier.
(non believers can now return to their regularly scheduled programs)
...as a result our way of democracy really isn't working all that well for the benefit of the citizens.
No one promised you a paradise on Earth. Human institutions have human failings. No amount of scientific knowledge or good intentions or anything else can change that.
If you deny government institutions power, you can limit the damage from their mistakes and you can make the best choices for yourself and your family. If you give government institutions great power, you end up with no choices and are subject to great damage from their mistakes.
Almost none of our politicians nor candidates are informed enough about science either, so what difference does it make? We're simply screwed.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
most americans tend to think a scientific theory is a matter of opinion.
if they read a scientific fact or theory they dont agree with, they tend to replace it with something they feel better about, like creationism.
real science is pretty ugly. its why reports on climate change, 9/11, genetically modified foods, and the origins of life tend to get censored alot.
Good people go to bed earlier.
How can you expect them to be informed about voting when they don't even understand history and a huge percentage can't even list all 50 states let along tell you where Iraq or any other country is on a map of the globe?
The real question is my mind is: "Are people in the US informed about anything that is not on TV shows?"
Now obviously I can point to myself and some people I know and probably many of you here on Slashdot who are vociferous readers and who think most TV is trash designed to dumb down the public and say, yes, there are Americans who are very informed.
But as far as the general public is concerned? I think the answer is "no."
In general whe people talk about this there is a snarky lightheartedness that comes out, but I think behind that is a sadness for our country and the prospects for the future; a sort of resignation of hopelessness.
I don't blame the people entirely, even mostly. it has happened so slowly, and I think it is the result of policies that have allowed corporations and profits to come over everything else, including people and politicians/legislators who have abdicated or been corrupted and allowed this to occur.
I will give one example. Look at television (which I think is a HUGE part of the problem) and the FCC - the airwaves are supposed to be for the peoplel, the people supposedly own them. This is a total fucking joke. Corporations own the airwaves, even public broadcasting. "Public Access" stations, which were so few and far between except in some major metro areas have been almost wiped out. Instead we have "infotainment" news that focuses on scandals and sex; (hey, sex is great, but not in the place of real news). Reality TV? Seriously, why watch this crap, who cares what some completely brain dead over-privileged Laguna Hills teen slut obsesses over?
Look at how textbooks have been politicized, especially in primary education and in one area in particular: history. I had a chance to look through some high school and jr high history books several years back and was appalled. There are decent history books like Howard ZInn's "A People's History of the United States" which seem to only be used in better schools.
So these sorts of things progressing over years are what allows a populace to end up where ours is, with a system that has institutionalized corruption and an administration that has ushered in the age of a kinder, gentler fascism - So are the voters informed? FUCK NO - and it's so much worse.
Given the availability of information, they are as informed as they want to be. You can lead a horse... It starts with basic education, which is generally not good around the country. Kids don't get enough science, math, critical thinking, etc. Add on top of that the pace of progress in a widely dispersed field ("science" covers a lot of ground.) I suspect that to a great many people on the average, "science" still means guys in lab coats with beakers of "stuff", telescopes, microscopes, etc. Sad, but true.
And they said "1/4 of the people are retarded". No amount of learnin' will help them. :-)
Changing the world... one research project at a time.
US voters weren't informed about much. How else could you possibly re-elect Dubya?
Americans who are aware they don't know enough about science are balanced out by those who think they understand science but don't. Watch slashdot next time the subjects of evolution or religion come up.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world
They produce more in terms of total output, but the USA is a big country so you have to take its size into account when assessing the quality of its scientists. Measured in terms of Nobel prizes per capita, the USA is nothing exceptional by the standards of developed nations - a little better than France, a little worse than Germany, and way behind Nordic counties and Switzerland.
Clearly this doesn't tell the whole story (and I'd be interested to see the figures in terms of output per unit expenditure, and output per scientist), but perhaps part of the problem is that no-one in the USA challenges the idea that the USA is the top-performing scientific nation.
http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/08/12/182243.shtml Just yesterday!
"It takes quite a lot of effort to turn a naturally curious child into a mumbling, illiterate worker bee who lives to shop, but Americans are known for their can-do spirit."
John Taylor Gatto makes exactly this point, suggesting schools were designed specifically to destroy curiousity and initiative so as to make people obedient workers, obedient soldiers, and compliant consumers. See:
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto - 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm
And:
"The Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm
"Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can't do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders."
And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They should elect a politician who will consult with the best scientists in the world and act on sound scientific advice on topics that both they and the electorate don't know enough to make a call about. Is man-made global warming real? I don't know, I think it probably is, but that's the kind of question that climatologists should be telling us the answer to. Should we put a man on Mars? I don't know, that's up to NASA to convince congress that there is enough benefit either technologically or in terms of international prestige and national pride. Elect someone who will take advice and act on it in a way that is not guided solely by prejudice.
If US voters were more informed about science, none of this socialist BS would win any votes and we definitely wouldn't be crippling the economy for the new religion of 'climate change.'
~ now you know
Yeah right.
Democracy is where the winner usually has less than half the popular vote. But they still get the power to make everybody jump in the lake.
I thought this was about science, where 1 point of view may very well turn out to be correct - despite popular opinion.
He wrote that in 1994, and it was based on even earlier research, so that part may be out of date these days, even as the general crisis in science has grown worse. His theme also conflates US corporate imperial dominance, and ignores many high performing "US" scientists were imported from Nazi Germany (Einstein or von Braun) or also from the USSR later.
I'm not as pessimistic as Goodstein is, since I do see the world transcending eventually to an economy of abundance where all people have more time for doing science (or other creative things) as a hobby. See for example:
"TEDTalks : New insights on poverty and life around the world - Hans Rosling (2007)"
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html
"Researcher Hans Rosling uses his cool data tools to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He demos Dollar Street, comparing households of varying income levels worldwide. Then he does something really amazing."
Or:
"RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper."
http://www.reprap.org/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I had a horrible physics teacher in high school, (we had a new physics teacher every semester for a while) she taught out of an equally horrible book. She didn't have the answer key though so frequently anyone in the class who enjoyed physics would get marked wrong on certain questions that they had answered correctly.
But my main concern is this: the book actually stated, as a fact, that since colder water heats up faster than hot water, cold water will boil quicker than hot water. This is empirically disprovable and totally illogical but it was taught as fact! I can understand hearing taught as fact in cooking school, but PHYSICS! WTF! the book also gave a similar statement about hot water freezing faster than cold water.
So no, the American voter certainly doesn't know enough about science if a physics book for high school can get away with those kinds of assertions.
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
It is blatantly obvious why large number of people cannot make informed decision on most topics of importance. However, I believe that is also the very reason why I need to explain this is the case.
In any type of economy where trade occurs, specialization is needed, encouraged, and ensured to support large number of people. For example, if a fisherman wants to survive compete with others, he must be able to fish better than the average laymen.
But specialization also requires individuals to spend more time in their field of expertise. For example, A medical doctor may not necessarily champion in particle physics or environmental science.
On the other hand, a democracy ensures that everyone has a voice in deciding the future direction of the state. It is certain there are more laymen making decisions than experts when it comes to specific issue based voting due to the fact people specialize. But people need to have a sense that we are in control of our lives. Thus democracy is some-what needed to calm the masses and create social stability. And this is exactly why the founders of many countries chose representative democracy as opposed of true democracy.
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
I always found this quote interesting "The greatest argument against Democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter" -Winston Churchill
You get to vote regardless of whether someone thinks you have The Right Information.
No, you get to vote because someone knows you have the right information, and only the right information. And you have the right choices, and only the right choices. If you didn't have those you wouldn't be trusted with having a vote.
I am more worried that most American Scientist don't understand good science.
my old sig is obsolete, and I haven't come up with a stupid enough new one yet
It sounds like it's impossible to meet those constraints:
-Be democratic.
-Recognize how pitifully incapable people are of making rational decisions about the issues.
But it's not: You just have to recongize the difference between 1) a goal, and 2) how you get there. So, a simple compromise would be to let voters determine the specific goals of the government, that is, a "social utility function" that determines how much economic growth should be traded for how much environmental protection, versus national defense, protection from terrorist acts, civil liberties, etc. Each person's vote would tilt the SUF toward putting a higher weight on the values the voter has picked.
Then, you would let people with a clue determine how to maximize utility by that criterion. For example, use predictions markets (where people bet real money and thus need to be honest) about whether a particular policy will actually improve the given SUF.
So, you're still letting voters decide policy (via what values the government pursues), while not letting idiotic ideas about how the world works mess it up.
In case anyone's interested, that's Robin Hanson's "Futarchy" idea.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Americans seem to forego skepticism in order to be agreeable with their peers and leaders and national direction. So they are good at pulling together and fighting things or overcoming challenges.
Unfortunately, that collectively agreed and beleved direction could easily be heading off a cliff. That's it. Today's Americans are like plains buffalo.
So the best you can hope is that the most charismatic charmer (the one will therefore become leader) is coincidentally also one of the rare few who does know how to be properly sceptical and methodical in their analysis of the issues of the day.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Would you like fries with that? (I'm joking of course, I'm actually very interested in philosophy)
May I please have no-clip?
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
This should be a surprise to no one. Obviously, the framers of the constitution thought this, and thus we have the Electoral College for presidential elections. The question is: Is there an excuse for not being informed, or should we punish people (take away voting rights) for those who aren't?
As they have shifted more of their provision to governmental leaders, they have also shifted the burden of doing the intellectual heavy lifting on scientific issues like "Global Warming" to government. Unfortunately, government is no better at science than the average person - politicians are basically salespeople because they weren't good at science in the first place.
As a result, many are misled by those with ulterior motives and/or similar scientific disabilities.
Groupthink is definitely a player, but only because few care to do the research (which, ironically, is far easier than in the pre-internet age) to inform themselves and to understand WHY they believe WHAT they believe.
I cannot tell you how many times I have had to explain basic scientific concepts to people - it's like I'm teaching them something they've never heard of before. And I'm not even a professional scientist - just a guy who tries to read a lot and not be an idiot all that often.
This isn't that much of an issue really. The public has never been that well-informed, and even when they are people will claim they aren't for their own political purposes. The current solution that seems to be in use is to end democracy and the republic system that we have. It's what the well-meaning people of the USA have been pushing for years. Of course, at the same time they claim to want to make things more democratic. It seems like the two goals are contradictory, but they seem to work quite well together. Some well-meaning (often liberal, but not always) leader has an idea that he knows the public won't go for yet. The idea is well regarded by the intelligentsia, and they want it made into law.
They have two options to do this. One is to convince judges to make it law. However, this is hard to do and can be unreliable (but with the right judges it is much easier to do). The other is to use grass roots campaigns that won't stop fighting. If you have an idea that only 20% of the population likes, but they like it enough (particularly on the local/state level), they can push it through. They do this by continuously revoting on the issue. The idea being that if the first vote fails, get another one, and another one and another one . . . If they're lucky they can get the vote to occur at an election that most people don't care about (some local only election with traditionally low voter turnout). Eventually they can get it to pass, and now their plan is passed "democratically" through a referendum. The opposition is often not organized enough to stop it (most people don't support it, but aren't passionately opposed).
I always find it amusing how direct-voter referendums tend to be the LEAST democratic method of determining laws because of things like this. I'm sure people all over have seen the same sort of ideas steam-rolled through. It helps the intelligentsia pass their ideas without having an informed public, and still maintaining the idea that the people have their say.
Phil
An airplane is on a conveyor belt that moves backwards at the same rate as the plane moves forward as it attempts to take off. Does the airplane take off or not?
I think a more relevant question would be whether the current candidates, leaders, and those who call themselves scientists have enough science education to make informed decisions about issues. The sad reality is that far too few people (globally) actually recieve any type of instruction in basic reasoning. Outside of math classes, there is virtually no formal training in logic and reasoning in the US school system. Most science classes are little more than exercises in rote memorization. While a sufficient command of facts is necessary to support the thinking process, no accumulation of stored facts is sufficient to replace critical thinking and to correctly assess the validity, scope, context, and relative value of those facts.
There has been a long-running attempt to get the Presidential candidates to have a debate focusing on science issues. http://www.sciencedebate2008.com/www/index.php This proposal has gotten a fair bit of press. However, studies like this call into question whether such an event would be at all useful. On the other hand, perhaps a science debate would get people more involved and help them get some of the basic background details necessary to understanding larger issues.
Uninformed voting causes interesting problems. It's very easy to manipulate uninformed voters. This tends to make the wealthy very happy since they are the ones with the resources to manipulate.
I'd like to try out a system that forced voters to become educated in order to vote. Some system like slashdot that allows voters to compose arguments. If an argument for a particular law has all good votes, it is given weight, if all bad, it is not. If there is a mixed good/bad, it would be necessary to break down the topic. If it is too difficult to understand, replies can clarify and examine it.
Something like this would be much closer to the original "Democracy" where people got up in front of everyone at once to make arguments. Although this is no longer practical in a physical sense, it might not be a bad goal to try for.
I'm not asking for a wholesale replacement of American politics--I'd just like to see someone try something new on a small scale. This republic/capitalism stuff seems to be showing some pretty large cracks.
"Test your science savvy..."
3. It is the father's gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl.
True - um, not exactly, no. Father's chromosome does. Chromosome bodies hold lots of genes. It's not an on/off switch, have this gene you're male, that one you're female.
7. The universe began with a huge explosion.
True - debated, theorized, not proven. And for inclusive definitions of "explosion", too.
10. Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?
11. How long does it take for the Earth to go around the sun?
C'mon, now. Trying to ensure folks get one right?
No. We don't want that. We'll take the American system. It has problems. We know about them. We don't need an untested pie-in-the-sky replacement system.
Government systems have a very poor track record with tragic results in almost every case. The US system is slightly better than most alternatives. It is time-tested and the results are imperfect but not tragic.
You're asking us to spin the roulette wheel and bet our lives on double-zero. If we win we get to feel good about ourselves. If we lose it's totalitarianism, tyranny and probably civil war. No sensible person would choose that bet.
Maybe you need to spend less time on science and learn some history.
About anything?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is exactly the problem: it isn't about 'knowing things about science' - which is how our current education system works - so much as it is about being able to understand what the scientific method is and how it works. If everybody was a skeptical thinker, then the media couldn't get away with the kind of reporting it does now, we wouldn't elect the bonehead politicians to office we do, we wouldn't have these silly politicizing of scientific issues, hijacking of the education system, and we would not tolerate the government and corporate abuses of power that are happening.
"Are US voters informed enough about science?"
In the region 50% of US Voters believe the Earth is less than 9000 years old. What do you think?
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
I wait until a celebrity like George Clooney weighs in, then I do what they say! That's what everyone else does......right?
It isn't the voters that need to be more educated about science; it's the representatives, senators, and other policymakers. Most ordinary people aren't making decisions that significantly affect the nation, save for who their representatives will be.
(Which means the voters need to vote for people who know enough about the issues they're considering to make good decisions, which has little to do with their direct knowledge of science and more to do with "common" sense).
How could our government monopoly socialized school system have allowed this to happen????
Yea, it's all good, now pass me that remote control.
Even veals have more autonomy!
Naturalist writes...
Speaking as an American, why should I care about the opinions of someone who plays volleyball naked?
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Americans don't know enough about Philosophy either, which as also quite important to making informed decisions on key issues.
The problem is, people don't know how to think any more, nor do we care to try. We just choose, based on our feelings, whom we want to tell us what to think.
That about sums it up.
There is one issue on which all religions agree, and in this belief they all ALL correct.
The belief is that all other religions are wrong.
QED
Is it the case that there is only one definition of democracy?
Suppose everybody starts off with one vote. Then you get extra votes by demonstrating abilities relevant to good voting.
If the vote is for government then perhaps you demonstrate some basic level of knowledge relevant to government. For example you pass a simple test on arithmetic, compound interest etc. demonstrating you could understand the cost of government borrowing, that you could tell when the government makes statements amounting to cutting that pie into five quarter pieces etc. Perhaps you get another vote for demonstrating that you understand the structural nature of your government (whether it have houses, parliaments, legislatures, senates) and how the parts fit together. Maybe you get another vote for passing high school. And another for university degree.
Heck I think we'd get better results if, in any particular election, we just had a random draw of 1000 people from the pool of eligible voters and then only those people would get to vote. Have the candidates appear in forums directly in front of those 1000 people and ban TV.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
How can voters be informed when the media aren't? It seem that whenever I see anything whatever about science on the TV news, they get something wrong, usually badly wrong and backwards.
It's more than the media... Some people refuse to believe legitimate science. Half the students in that study answered a question incorrectly even after being explicitly told the scientifically correct answer.
The average American (at least the ones I talk to) don't think that scientific consensis is that the globe is heatihng and we are responsible.
And irony or ironies, now you're telling us you're a member of the Cult of Climate Change. Don't you think if it were true, you'd have scientific proof instead of a scientific consensus. It's right there in your own words. You're presenting your opinion, not scientific fact.
Here's how real science works. You publish something and other scientists review it. Your peers try their best to tear it down. If it stands up to the harshest scrutiny, it's considered pretty solid scientific research.
Here's how the "science" of climate change works. One paper is published.... The One True Paper... and everyone is expected to fall in line. Peer review of The One True Paper is not allowed. If you attempt to review The One True Paper you are shouted down as a non-believer. Questioning The One True Paper diverts your efforts and money away from the Cult of Climate Change and puts us all in Grave Danger! There isn't time to question The One True Paper. We must "come together" now! We must convert all non-believers immediately or else we are all in Grave Danger! As a member of the Cult of Climate Change, it is your moral duty to save these non-believers from themselves before the damage is irreparable!!! It is the only way to escape the Grave Danger! that we all face. We know this because The One True Paper tells us so.
But I'm wasting my breath. You're clearly a believer. I could present you with a mountain of scientific evidence and it wouldn't make a dent. Your brain shuts down and your religion kicks in the second you realize I'm disagreeing with your religious beliefs. There are a lot of CCC members reading here too, so I'm sure I'll be modded into the ground. That will certainly reaffirm your beliefs. But just in case... keep chanting it to yourself with cult-like repetition, "There is no dispute. There is a consensus. I believe!!!"
Question 3 from the quiz linked FTA:
3. It is the father's gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl. (True or False)
That would be the Y CHROMOSOME. chromosome != gene
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromosome
There isn't a single gene that determines gender.
"Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." --Barry Goldwater
Japanese Company Says Laws of Physics Don't Apply â" to Cars
Stupid People have a right to vote too. That's what supposedly makes this country so great.
Based on the available evidence, I'm going to have to say "No".
Unfortunately this thread has become more of a discussion about Americans in general instead of American voters. Most of the posters here make it sound like there was a time when at least a noticeable American minority knew science. What a bunch of bullshit.
How could a country which never knew much science (nor grammar ;-), yet still flourish? I know you Europeans are still trying to figure it out. Some have suggested the great abundance of resources which would outweigh any stupid decisions we'd make.
However even in a lot of those books that some of your (you Europeans ;-) observers came to the US in the 19th century all note the same thingy: community*. Town halls, fairs, etc. Acceptance of the majority's decision, peaceful regime change, etc. Stuff that would take about 100 or so more years for the Europeans to figure out.
Also throw in the fact of all the Puritans with their individualistic idealism with white guys who wanted to make a quick buck off cheap/free labor. This sort of culture allowed the acceptance of ideas rejected by the European scientific and rank & file establishments to flourish here.
* - Unfortunately, this community part of American culture has been waning for a few decades, and I fear this upsurge of voluntarily polarization will put the US at risk.
1950s - quiz shows were so tough that they puzzle minds of some of our best today.
Today - Are you smarter than a 5th grader ?
As a nation, we are becoming prouder to be stupid, and I hold our political leadership, more prominently, the Republicans, responsible for making it cool to be stupid.
> Will that christian homeless shelter take in a homeless man who refuses to embrace god? The ones around here require you to console with a church leader and read the bible.
Yes. At least, the ones I've been to. I don't know what yours are like, but ours make a point of pointing out that they don't reject anyone like that.
As for the "people who help in the name of religion are doing more of a look at me thing," that's because of selection bias. You don't see the people who do things secretly, which those who obey the Bible do. That's right, Jesus told us to do good works secretly and some people obey that.
As for my own motivation, I serve God because I think it's right. Even if I would go to hell in the end in spite of having done so. I know this because there was a time when I was completely (though wrongly) convinced that that was the case.
from wikipedia:
"The Y chromosome is the sex-determining chromosome in most mammals, including humans. In mammals, it contains the gene SRY, which triggers testis development, thus determining sex. The human Y chromosome is composed of about 60 million base pairs."
So the SRY gene, which determines sex (words have gender, people have sex) is located on the Y chromosome. Since only the father has a Y chromosome, that gene is inherited from the father.
I'm more worried about the number of college graduates who can barely read and write than whether or not 8th graders know science.
I saw some illustrations of this problem back in the 70s, when I was a grad student assistant working as the computer guru for several departments in a university that I won't name (but it's generally considered one of the top schools in the US). A big part of my job was to advise other students trying to use the equipment in the departments' joint computer lab.
A recurring situation was: A student would ask for help on something that I knew was covered in the manual. I'd ask if they'd read the manual, and they'd say they had, but it hadn't helped. I'd pull out the manual and find the relevant section. It looked informative to me. After a bit of questioning, I'd try an experiment. I simply read the relevant passage out loud. The student would say something like "Oh, that's how it's supposed to work?" They'd proceed to do what they were trying to do, perhaps with a bit more consulting, but often not.
Note two critical facts here: 1) I had simply read the passage from the manual, and 2) the student understood it when I read it.
Conclusion: The student was illiterate.
Granted, they could probably sound out the words. But they were illiterate in the important sense: They couldn't extract the meaning from the printed words. This wasn't because the printed words didn't explain the information. It was because they understood the words only when they were spoken, not when they were in print form. And this wasn't just a few students. It might even have been the majority, though of course I was in no situation to be performing the obvious systematic test on the departments' entire grad-student populations.
I eventually mentioned this to a couple of the profs, and they invariably got a sad look on their faces. They understood the situation. One of them passed on a comment from someone else, which I've remembered ever since: The classroom lecture system is the best way known for teaching people who can't read. (I wonder who originated that one. Anyone know?)
Also, I don't think this is just a problem in the US. I suspect that it's a generic problem with schools in most of the world. I wonder what the effect will be when some small nation finds a way to reverse this ...
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
On average, the public knows nothing. Everyone of us has his fields of knowledge, but almost all of us have more fields that we know nothing (or very little) about than we have fields of knowledge. So on average, we know nothing, because in any random sample there will almost certainly be more people with zero (or very little) knowledge of any specific field than there are people who happen to know something about it.
That's true of science, but also of everything else that's not trivial daily-life stuff.
And that's the built-in problem of democracy. For science, the problem doubles because it's easier to convince people with rhetorics and fancy pictures than with numbers and facts.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Yes they are informed about science, but they can't tell the difference between science and pseudoscience.
From: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"In the meantime, the real crisis that is coming has started to produce a number of symptoms, some alarming and some merely curious. One of these is what I like to call The Paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. The paradox is this: as a lingering result of the golden age, we still have the finest scientists in the world in the United States. But we also have the worst science education in the industrialized world.
There seems to be little doubt that both of these seemingly contradictory observations are true. American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world; maybe more than the rest of the world combined. Yet, students in American schools consistently rank at the bottom of all those from advanced nations in tests of scientific knowledge, and furthermore, roughly 95% of the American public is consistently found to be scientifically illiterate by any rational standard.
How can we possibly have arrived at such a result? How can our miserable system of education have produced such a brilliant community of scientists? That is what I mean by The Paradox of the Scientific Elites and the Scientific Illiterates.
...
I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is [currently] more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists.
It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful.
Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result.
...
Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face.
Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong.
Nothing like it will ever happen again.
It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out for us."
As a recently-graduated MS, this is incredibly true. The undergrads are not at all trained as scientists and have at best a relationship with most profs that be summarized as "will this person stop me from getting a middle-class job?", but the grad students are seen and treated far more like peers or potential peers.
Ordinary Americans... scratch that, HUMANS do not know enough about any subject to make an informed decision on any topic.
We have a society of specialists. The majority of people become professional, skilled or knowledgeable about one thing and one thing only. Whether that be burger flipping, repairing cars, deciphering legalese, matching symptoms against accumulated knowledge of disease, analyzing economic trends, etc... the majority of people, taken as an average, make decisions based on hearsay, feeling and what they've read in the media.
To expect a person to make an informed decision about any random topic is like expecting to win at roulette most of the time.
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
From TFA's quiz:
10 or 11 right: You are a geek!
Great. So if you do know science, you get labelled a geek/nerd.
While I personally don't feel offended by being called this (of course
I live in Europe, where the stereotype is less prevalent), it's
generally considered to be a negative stereotype. Which doesn't
exactly help make science interesting and cool, especially to young
people.
See also
http://www.amazon.com/Nerds-They-Need-More-Them/dp/1585425907.
- Felix
"Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature." -- R. Kulawiec
I'd say, technically you're both right. While sex is
determined by the presence/absence of a single gene, you get that gene
by receiving the Y chromosome from your father.
Thus the simplest correct explanation is that receiving either an X
or a Y chromosome from the father determines the child's sex.
Of course, other (more interesting) sex-determination systems exist:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-determination_system
- Felix
"Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature." -- R. Kulawiec
Well, you can't prove evolution. In fact, in science, you can't prove much. But you can disprove. So, disprove God, and you've got a case. But you'll never prove a hypothesis, you just fail to reject it. Get some education or somethin'.
I'm not worried too much about lack of scientific knolowedge, as the lack of knowledge in basic economics. Politicians of both the major parties have long used this ingorance to sway voters with promises of low taxes and free money. The Dems want to make a "windfall profits" tax against oil companies in order to rally the public against the "evil oil executives" where in reality they have one of the lowest profit margins, and over 95% of the stock is owned by the public in the form of Mutual Funds, 401k, pention plans, etc. I'll stop there before I get banned for threadjacking. My point is that knowing basic economics is far more important for the average voter than science.
The problem is not that people aren't informed about science, but that they aren't informed about the scientific method.
Scientific Creationists come up with a "theory" and present it as some sort of equal competitor with Evolution. The notion that a theory has to allow one to make predictions, and to test the theory with experiments, and thus to be experimentally falsifiable, isn't well understood, and it is critical. Scientific Creationists would never admit of an experiment which, if performed, could prove their theory was wrong as stated, and needed modification or simply had to be discarded. This is what makes Creationism dogma and not scientific.
This extends to popular opinions about controversial scientific questions, like Global Warming. Everyone from George Will to Al Franken has an opinion about the subject, and all but a handful of them desperately avoided taking a college course that involved labs and any real interaction with the scientific method when they had the chance. But they figure they have as much right as anyone else to weigh in on the subject.
Of course, they do have such a right, but it doesn't help the general understanding when they ignore the scientific method, which they do not understand, but claim that their innate intelligence allows them to understand something which scientists have to sweat over for years.
The net result, I fear, is a "science without tears" society, where students are given to believe that it is not necessary to actually study a subject in order to assert a competence in it. Employers may want to see certain courses on the transcript, but public policy won't be driven by fact and empirical observation - it will be driven (moreso than it already is) by who has the biggest microphone.
too bad we can't just elect representatives that actually do know stuff. Like what if communities of us, like a few towns or so, got together and picked someone we trusted and they could take time to really get down to brass tacks on presidential candidates and pick for us.
Naw, that's crazy, I'm going to pick my favorite for Prom King in November!!!! TXT UR FAV NOW!!11!
This is just a veiled attack on the religion. Ask any slashdotter and they will proclaim they know all about science yada yada and that religious people are ignorant.... Besides, why does being able to recite a list of scientists make an informed voter? Politicians don't know jack-poop about science. Who's the last candidate that had a pronounced science agenda? Washington functions on palm-greasing and backroom deals. Whether or not Joe voter knows science isnt going to select a more scientific politician. In fact, as recent and not so recent candidates prove, the less emotional, more pragmatic and practical the politician, the less likely they will be elected. Democrats (save the baby) and Republicans (boo terrorists) candidates have been making emotional appeals since the formation of this country. You people need to vote for another option than the same old thing. You need to vote for someone who can balance the budget without raising taxes and eliminating critical programs. The only thing a science knowledgeable voter will do is vote 3rd party. (BTW Bush is the first president to approve a stem cell research budget, he called for numeric based goals in education, and he has renewed US goals in space exploration and scientific achievement.)
Democrazy has a another advantage. According to Adam Smith, the societies interest is best served when all individuals serve their individual interests. (from an economic point of view) And maybe the way a country is ruled might not be as important as wether it experiences economic growth for a prolonged period under whatever system. (might be more applicable for poor countries but economic wealth, offcourse, is relative.)
If only it were that simple. Giving the educated more votes means the undereducated (which could, depending on where you live, correlate strongly with race or income) aren't represented adequately in government. You have to trust that those with the votes will take the time to ensure the needs of those that don't (can't) vote are met. Historically, this doesn't happen.
You know, I hope, that the Sun and the Earth rotate around a common centre of gravity located somewhere between the centres of the two of them.
I'm not actually sure this C of G is within the heliopause (radius of surface of the Sun.) If it is, we could say the Earth rotates around the Sun. If outside, they wobble around each other.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Popular Science != Science
If the above is true .....
Mmmm I'd say women and blacks getting the vote are pretty good counter-examples to your claim. In any case my main point is that "one man one vote" and (theoretically) everyone voting isn't the only way to run a democracy.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Religion is dogmatic, science is not. Science only accepts the authority of reason and the scientific process. Religion is based on faith, science is based on questioning. They are fundamentally different. By that reasoning, religion does indeed have an inherent problem with science.
If you have a purely scientific mindset, you will eventually come to the conclusion that no religion has sufficient evidence to qualify as a probably theory.
42. That's why.
The real crime at the heart of this entire debate over Science, is the wholesale abandonment of Philosophy. Schools do not teach Science. Schools teach information deemed "fact" by scientific academia. The test is wrong, the schools are wrong, the scientists are wrong... Science is not writing an encyclopedia of "facts". Science is a process founded on a philosophically unsound foundation. Science as a process is perfectly reasonable, but the mechanist foundation scientific academia cling to is unreasonable. This article presupposes the validity of "Science", when this entire discussion should be "Are US Voters Informed Enough to Pursue Philosophy?"
as always there is the question of 'the beginning'. If the god is question is just a computer programmer, then is he part of another computer program himself? It is possible to use mathematics to show infinite sets, sets within sets etc., but as a physical expression there may be a limit to such nesting. Maybe not.
In any case, if it is not possible to continue nesting physical sets within each other infinitely, then there has to be a beginning, which would be the reduced form of this recursion, the base case.
Assuming there is a base case, we can just reduce our own case to the base case to avoid the recursion complexity. In this situation there is not need for god, the physics, the chemistry, the biology worked themselves out eventually. Back to the Big Bang.
You can't handle the truth.
>science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education
It doesn't have to be this way and it's a recall-class bug in our system that it is this way.
Ever been around a preschool child? They want to know the why of everything. They come up with ingenious hypotheses. They test their environment to an extent which jeopardizes domestic tranquility. Science comes naturally to people!
Maybe the answer is to integrate science instruction better with what people know. Explain how you can use a coast-down measurement to find out how much power your car uses at cruise. Then convert those to the same units and compare that to a light bulb, or to the average power consumption of the student's house.
Is this a question? The real question is if USA's voters are well informed at all? Do they have the right information to be able to make an well informed decision? No. Do they have the time? Not everybody does. Do they care to be informed? No, for most of them at least.
How is that a counter-example? Women and blacks were underrepresented in government (voting). They pushed for equality and increasing democratization, and achieved that. What you're advocating is an anti-democratization push, where votes from the educated are given more weight than the uneducated. This depresses the "value" of the uneducated's votes and puts exactly back where we started: with certain minority groups significantly underrepresented in government because they happen to be, on average, less educated.
I do agree that there are other approaches one could take, but I don't agree that this one in particular will work.
The Polish SF writer Stanislaw Lem wrote a short story "Non Serviam" on this theme which is well worth a read.
It takes the form of a review of a non-existent book by a computer scientist who creates an artificial universe populated with AIs, and studies them from outside their universe. Obviously they have no access to the "real" world at all; living entirely in a virtual space. After a long process of evolution he eavesdrops some of his AIs discussions of theology. He is logically and morally forced to agree with the atheists among them even though he knows in fact they are wrong.
The story was published in "A Perfect Vacuuum", and also appeared in Hofstadter and Dennet's book "The Mind's I".
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Wait, we have public education so these people think they are informed and qualified to give there opinion. They feel that their opinion matters and should be listen too despite what proper evidence might suggest.
Look, just because Congress is as knowledgeable as a brick when it comes to science, doesn't mean that the public is. Yes, a lot of the public is as ignorant as Congress when it comes to science, but we usually look it up in a book rather than making a beeline for the nearest lobbyist.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
If everybody knows everything?
Ever heard of the Hatchback of Notre Dame?
Are you nuts? Exponential expansion ended years ago. And was replaced by Exponentialexponential expansion. New discoveries are being reported at so fast a pace as to be dizzying. Computer speed is increasing by a factor of 1000 every ten years. Electronic storage is beyond comprehension. Believe it or not Chinese and Indian scientists exist. Oh, I just noticed that you claim to be from Caltech. Overfunded, underproductive.
An even more important question is are our candidates science literate. We delegate responsibility for decisions on many issues to politicians that have little background and take their cues from lobbyists with the deepest pockets. Granted these are two different issues, intelligence and greed, but it comes back the question of qualifications.
Hmm, so you'd rather have an idiot rule you than someone who can think logically?
Wow, talk about the stone age...
What an arrogant wank stain...and I am a scientist...a physicist even!!
Ooo... china suppresses religion. And they havn't overthrown the government in awhile.
I mean just take a foreign language course if you want to see a class that is definitely flunkable since that's a humanity course.(Yes, you can put in the work and still get flunked because you have no ability and the person grading the course is a dirtbag. Yes, I'm bitter.)
And I'll say it again:
Statistics have shown over and over again, that fully 50% of Americans have IQs of less than 100!
HA! Name me another people that has such an abysmal level of intelligence!
.
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- aqk
F U
Amen. Media consolidation has been the #1 driver of the lousy, complicit news "coverage" we have been getting ever since deregulation, begun under Reagan (as were most modern ills).
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
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An indicator of the ignorance of the people of USA is that keep calling themselves "american".
America is a continent.
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by forum i mean it in the way the Ancient Greek and Romans used it as a gathering place where people shared ideas, knowledge, and opinions; had debates (fancy term for arguments); and generally annoyed big multibillion dollar corporations like M$oft... personally i feel ALL the media sources out there are corrupted and need to be cleared of this for actually news. after a while it sounds like their all broken records... anyone else feel like that? good i'm not alone...
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What the hell does God or religion have to do with the original post? Assuming you believe in a Western style God, and most Americans do, then you believe you have free will. God has left these decisions up to you. As such you should understand the world you live in. That means science, math, literature, and history are important topics. Americans do not have nearly enough education in any of these topics to make me comfortable. Case in point, McCain and Obama will both use a lot of advertising to sway voters. If you think you can watch these TV ads and be immune to their influence you don't understand how your brain works. A thorough understanding of the brain would change your attitude towards advertising. Some forms of learning happen through repitition, without conscious effort, and sometimes despite a conscious effort to not learn them. It's not quite brain washing but it's not that different either.
Gabe My Blog
NSF does a study of this every year:
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/c7/c7s2.htm
The facts speak for themselves. These questions are asked true false:
â The center of the Earth is very hot. (True)
â All radioactivity is man-made. (False)
â It is the fatherâ(TM)s gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or a girl. (True)
â Lasers work by focusing sound waves. (False)
â Electrons are smaller than atoms. (True)
â Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria. (False)
â The universe began with a huge explosion. (True)
â The continents on which we live have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move in the future. (True)
â Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals. (True)
â Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth? (Earth around Sun)
And the scores people post are 59% correct...a cool 9% higher than random guessing. They break it down into demographics and many are at or below 50%.
So if you ask certain demographics a scientific question, use the opposite of their answer and you'll score higher than the national average...not bad.
See at07-04.xls file for full breakdown. SAD.
Well you said:
You have to trust that those with the votes will take the time to ensure the needs of those that don't (can't) vote are met. Historically, this doesn't happen.
Those with the votes voted to give the franchise to women and blacks - two groups that were under represented in government. So apparently those with the votes can, and at least occasionally do, address the needs of those that can't vote.
The idea that only those who share attribute X can adequately represent the needs of others that have attribute X is fallacious. And giving more value to the vote of those who are educated on relevant things seems reasonable to me as long as everyone has the opportunity to become educated about the relevant topics. Do you really see it as a bad thing that people who can do basic arithmetic and figure out the cost of borrowing have votes a little more weighted than those who cannot figure out if government is being honest when it says it will fund three 1 million dollar projects from a 2 million dollar fund? Heck if that's the case then I want my dog to have the vote too because he'll make just as good decisions.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
One of the many reasons this passed was because it was clear that the majority could not be relied upon to keep the minorities' interests in mind. This makes this situation somewhat of a special case.
But even assuming I agreed that this was a legitimate counter-example, it just means that sometimes, the majority does the right thing. It does not mean an elite group of super-voters can be relied upon to do that. If that were the case, you could simplify this scenario to one of a single dictator. How often do you see a benevolent dictatorship?
I do agree that a situation like this (even taken to the degree of a dictatorship) has the potential to be better. I think it obvious that an educated person is going to do a better job of effecting public policy than an uneducated person, but you're never going to eliminate politics, and once you get enough people upset that they don't feel they're being listened to or that their requests are being ignored, you're going to end up with a revolt of some kind. So you have to do one of: