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How To Make Science Popular Again?
Ars Technica has an interesting look at the recent book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, a collaboration between Chris Mooney, writer and author of The Republican War on Science, and scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum. While it seems the book's substance is somewhat lacking it raises an interesting point; how can science be better integrated with mainstream culture for greater understanding and acceptance? "We must all rally toward a single goal: without sacrificing the growth of knowledge or scientific innovation, we must invest in a sweeping project to make science relevant to the whole of America's citizenry. We recognize there are many heroes out there already toiling toward this end and launching promising initiatives, ranging from the Year of Science to the World Science Festival to ScienceDebate. But what we need — and currently lack — is the systematic acceptance of the idea that these actions are integral parts of the job description of scientists themselves. Not just their delegates, or surrogates, in the media or the classrooms."
From TFA:
From quotes on websites to a joke by Stephen Colbert, they offer anecdotes about how the public was against the IAUâ(TM)s (International Astronomical Union) decision to remove Pluto from the list of planets, leading the authors to call the situation a âoeplanetary crack-upâ and then ask, âoeDidnâ(TM)t the scientists involved foresee such a public outcry?â Well, if the scientists did foresee an outcry, then what? Should they conduct a public vote next time?
Mooney and Kirshenbaum barely mention any of the scientific bases for the IAUâ(TM)s decision. Instead, they present the case as if the astronomers chose to reclassify Pluto on an inexplicable whim, and it makes one question whether or not the authors looked into any of the actual science for themselves.
I think it's pretty well established that the goal should not be to fit science into pop-culture, at least not if we want it to remain correct and relevent. Your average citizen doesn't care that pluto is only the first discovered Kuiper Belt object, they care that they learned it was a planet when they were a kid. That isn't thinking scientifically. There is no way to make the decision popular without compromising on proper science.
It's not an easy problem to fix. It seems to me like it requires you to teach people to care about science, rather than making science into something people care about. It wasn't that long ago when Bill Nye was getting kids interested in more pure science. Now about the best we have is Mythbusters, which certainly piques curiosity, although it has to resort to explosions and skipping most of the steps in the scientific method to make it palatable. They even have a "warning" for science content, which is a bad sign (tongue-in-cheek or not). Maybe we could get back to that, but it seems the prevailing momentum is toward smaller tidbits and shallower topics.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Science's irrelevance is some of the long-time-in-coming consequences of a society that emphasizes short-term, extremely self-interested value system with a repudiation of the notion of social plurality.
Unless they adapt by supporting cavemen and women riding dinosaurs or hitching a ride on some other demagogue, Science remains irrelevant.
After all, I don't benefit from science in any special way. Where's my flying car so I (alone) can leave the unwashed masses on the ground. How about my super-smart pill so only my children and I don't have to work very hard?
I mean c'mon... This science thing is bunk unless I alone profit at the expense of everyone else.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Speaking as a European, actually science is pretty popular in the USA, globally (except for the mad handful who think science is the sworn enemy of their faith). Actually, I quite like to think of the USA as the country of nerds. Case in point, that's where all the Europeans nerds want to go cause since some time around the 1930s that's where all the big science and engineering are. In Europe (UK excluded, too much of an American satellite to be representative) we don't make offerings to the holy ghost of Charles Darwin, and we couldn't care less about science fiction (seriously, we care nowhere near as much as people in the USA do). But we're better at mathematics, physics, chemistry or biology, because secondary education didn't fail us. It's not a cultural problem, it's all an educational one.
The problem is not how "popular" or "cool" it is, the problem is with education. To put it simply and bluntly, your educational system sucks, particularly when it comes to science. Reform it. Education is pretty much the same problem for anyone, you're doing it wrong, look at how others are doing it right.
An obvious rift exists between many religious and scientific communities.
Yep, and there shouldn't be one. Science and faith aren't incompatible, some great men of science were also men of faith. But in America more than anywhere else it was turned into an epic science vs faith war where everybody picks a side and the battlefronts are shit that no one would normally care about, like biology and genetics or palaeontology or even palaeoclimatology.
Also, why the hell can't I post this comment? It says "There was an unknown error in the submission.". It seems Slashdot is crumbling to pieces day after day.
You just got troll'd!
For public school situations take that damn football money and use it for science classes.
2nd Hire decent teachers that actually enjoy learning and teaching.
3rd Encourage questions. Ask the students questions, and then wait for a response. Let them actually think! Have some actual communication.
Optional: go places! Take students to new environments to get them to think outside of the box. Science is awesome, you don't have to dress it up to make it fun!
All else fails: Blow shit up! Then explain why it blew up!
If each schools Academic Decathlon team got the same amount of exposure as the high school football team did then you would see a lot more interest in academics from the general population.
My senior year our Academic Decathlon team made it to the national conference in Chicago. I heard that we placed in the top 10 in each category, but I never did see a single thing about it in our local paper. And this was a small rural school.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I think you're a troll, but I'll bite anyway. As someone who is fascinated with all things science related, I bemoan the total apathy towards science within the community. However, I feel that it is important to point out that it is not just science that is being neglected by the community; politics, philosophy, social conscience and other highly important fields have also been totally lost to the common mind.
It's not just discussing the latest article in Nature magazine or Scientific American that results in dumb stares, but also trying to discuss things like the relative merits of current geopolitical policies of various nations, how and why the legal system has gotten to its current state, even this very subject, the apathy of the common person, is not the sort of thing that most people are able to discuss in any depth.
This may all sound very high-horsey, however, I challenge anyone to go to a party, bring up a discussion about the question of whether mathematics is invented or discovered, and see how long you can keep it up. I'm likely to get laughed at for the mere suggestion of this, someone will call me a dork or similar.
The thing is, I actually get out a lot. I travel several times a year, and spent a lot of time meeting new people. It's something that I really enjoy. I'm not a dork. I think.
So, how do we make science (and other "intelligent" subjects) popular again? I dunno, how about priming children in an environment that's a bit more stimulating than the modern day care facility. How about teaching them the basics in an environment that's a bit more positive than the jokes that are primary schools where teachers' hearts are rarely in the job. Don't even let me get started on the barbaric mass-cagefight that is high school.
You want to know why science is not popular in the first place? Because we (as a society, we can't just blame the "education system", after all, parents, they're YOUR kids) as a society are teaching our kids to be consumerist, apathetic, self-centered brats. We need a whole new social order, including a new social mindset that teaches people a proper set of values. Science and all the higher arts won't be popular again until people learn to value them.
Thus, asking how to make science popular I feel is the wrong question. The correct question is how to teach people it's value.
I hate printers.
So how do you get the girls to flock to science?
The problem isn't with a lack of people entering the field; it's that the fields aren't seen as exciting. (Others might note that you can make more money in other fields; for example, I'd be making at least 2x what I make now if I was an electrician instead.)
You then have people who aren't interested in excitement getting into or getting pigeonholed into those fields. "Oh, Beardo is kind of quiet and smart. Perhaps he'll be a good scientist, sitting alone in a lab all day."
That's the problem. Science is exciting, no matter what branch you're getting into. I'm an Engineer -- an applied scientist. I'd like to think that I'm a reasonably exciting guy.
I bike around, I make speeches, I SCUBA dive, I have a house / car / family, I can build a radio with scrap, I've saved thousands of lives, and right now I'm working on a series of billion-dollar vehicles.
There are MILLIONS of people like me, but we don't sell magazines. It's not a matter of comprehension -- I have been able to adequately explain my job to my 5-year-old daughter -- but a matter of the stereotype of the scientist being a dork like Frink or evil like Baltar.
Nobody without decent charisma can do a good job. You have to be able to sell what you do and sell your opinions to you colleagues and supervisors.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Look,
International capital interests are banking against a US role in the future. They own the casino, and you are a fool to bet against this house.
There is an active effort to dumb-down America in particular, and to lose the capability for sound argument in the roar of mindless accusation and countercharges.
There is a reason that Fox News and the like are funded to billions of dollars, every year. These are investments in an outcome, not wild and speculative spending.
So.
Don't get your hopes up, Eloi. You ar ein a Morlock zone - and all your cleverness and intelligence will not change the decisions that have been made for you. Enjoy fighting the school board brownshirts over "Creation Science".
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I'd say science is not popular because ignorance is easy and science can be inconvenient. It's hard to actually learn things; people are lazy, no doubt. And when those things to learn aren't what you want to hear, that makes it *that* much harder to like.
Old greek proverb: anything worth knowing is difficult to learn.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
This is an old theme of American history, called anti-intellectualism. The American public isn't so much "anti-science" as anti-intellectual.
I think that GP has a point about the proper relationship between science and policy; all too often people use the authority of science to sneak in policy and value judgements as science (for example, intelligence testing). We need to be critical of the people who insist that science should set policy, as GP recommends.
However, to do so successfully we can't be anti-intellectual, and that's where I part with GP. The Republicans are the party that panders to anti-intellectualism; their war on science was real. G.W. Bush is an anti-intellectual poster boy, too.
Invented, just like chess.
Are you adequate?
An active effort to dumb-down America? I call bullshit. Do you have any evidence for that besides the fact that Fox News says stupid things? It seems to me that a widespread brain leak has been occurring in most of the western world, where science has lost the popularity it had gained (somewhat) during the 60s. A few weeks ago NPR was talking about a train going through Germany trying to get kids interested in science. The founder is very concerned about the slow degradation of GERMAN intelligence and interest in science. We aren't the only ones with this problem
Spatial cognition has been shown to be culturally variable; check out the work of Stephen Levinson on language and spatial cognition. It is possible to design spatial reasoning tests that are culturally biased in that regard; e.g., the Queensland Test was designed to raise the score of Australian Aborigines relative to Australian Whites.
In fact, there's just nothing culturally neutral about getting somebody to sit down to answer an intelligence test. Read the New Yorker's article on the controversy about the Pirahã and ask yourself, in the end: how would you administer an IQ test to this tribe, and would the results be more indicative of their "intelligence" or of their cultural differences to us?
To paraphrase William Labov: if you want to figure out how intelligent somebody is, you have to enter the appropriate social relationship with that person. IQ tests simply fail this; they presuppose that everybody is a well-mannered urban European middle-class authority-fearing white-coat-deferring sit-downer, who is just delighted to sit down and perform decontextualized, pointless intellectual exercise on command.
Are you adequate?
An interesting comment, but note that the Morlocks were the smart ones in control and the Eloi were ultimately the pretty, vacant types. Your analogy doesn't fit perfectly, but if it did, it would be the other way around.
Anyway, I can offer a simple cause for Science not being "popular" (whether this cause is deliberate or not, I'll leave open): science doesn't receive much reward. You look at what gets the hero's share in modern Western society - celebrity, fashion, football, whatever. People are frequently motivated by what gets them adulation or appears as if it might. They therefore desire to be like those people that get such adulation, not like those that don't. It's really, very, very simple. If society sees a celebration of people for their scientific ability, then you will get people wanting to be scientists. If its not celebrated, you will get fewer.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Also, the James Hansons and Al Gores of the world are (and let's be brutally honest here) as far from "scientific" as you can get.
Are they in your opinion really "as far from scientific as you can get" or do you just disagree with some of their interpretations of the data? I've criticisms of every study making any conclusions about climate change, and I've heard an argument that we don't have enough evidence to really justify policy change. But that's all disagreements about interpretation. Scientists always do that (well, they do that if they actually care about the data and aren't sleeping during presentations or thinking about their own research... or just sex...).
If James Hanson and Al Gore make their arguments based on faith or "I believe based on what God told me" then yes, they would be as far from scientific as you can get, but "This person interprets the data differently than I do" is not the same as "not scientific." Lumping them in with fake pharmacists is going way too far, and if you're going to go down that road, why don't you go for the full Godwin?
James Hansen is one of the most widely published, widely-cited climate-scientists in the world. (Consult scholar.google.com for more). Calling Hansen "unscientific" betrays a breathtaking ignorance in Earth-science/climate-science. The only thing Moryath's post proves is that many compsci students get a very poor education in the physical sciences.
Not only that, but science requires a lot of preexisting knowledge. You can't pick up a scientific journal in a field you've never studied and understand an article; that's impossible unless you have the necessary knowledge to even understand what they're saying. Modern science is pushing fringes that are bizarre and hard to grasp. With relativity, you can give a nice example of a man taking a trip to Alpha Centauri and returning younger than his brother who stayed here. It's weird, but you can kind of grasp it in a few minutes. Try to do the same thing with quantum physics and see if they don't come back 5 minutes later completely missing the point. Compare the complexity if relativity to the complexity of string theory; relativity is simple by comparison.
People have gotten used to not knowing anything about science because they don't know enough to understand what's going on. We all make fun of articles that try to dumb down the science to make it understandable to people, yet that's what's necessary for people to try to understand it. Right now, the average person doesn't know science because it's inaccessible to them, and because they don't know science they don't trust that they can tell the difference between a lie and good research (this is probably because they can't).
The problem is this. . .
You, (the elite managerial over-seer), wants all the little people to toil in order to provide you with food, shelter, safety, power and luxury. It takes back-breaking effort to provide these things to you and there is no good reason to do it. As with most people of your sort, you live with a constant shadow on your shoulder; you harbor a morbid fear that one day the flow of wealth and abundant resources (which you don't work for) will cease. Because you have never really worked at anything, you fear work; nothing is more terrifying than the thought of being reduced to the status of a common peon. And so in fear, you cast about with great concern! How is your fear most likely to manifest? Why a popular uprising! Any moment now, you will be discovered and the slaves will take back what they have given you and which you do not deserve to have.
Thus, population management becomes a great concern to you. An obsession.
So how do you make sure that the slaves never have enough energy or awareness to see who is making their lives miserable and come together to do something about it? Why you make damned sure they are stupid and distracted and constantly fighting amongst one another!
Thus enters the Paradox! --To have the most fashionable elitist lifestyle, you need to employ the Wonders of Science! However, to employ the Wonders of Science, you need thinking men and women capable of sharp awareness and bright imagination. --And yet thinking men and women of awareness and imagination are exactly the kind of people who are most likely to realize that they are slaves and that you are their bitter enemy. They are the ones you fear most!
If only there was some way. . . --A method to mind-program people so that they retain the brain power necessary to engage in research and experimentation and other skills required by the Wonders of Science, while ALSO being remaining stupid and distracted. Is such a thing possible?
Fortunately for you, the answer is YES!
Among the maneuvers used to create the perfect army of mindless scientists and engineers are. . .
-Age segregation in schools. (Humans are pack animals; in healthy communities children of many ages play together, and the older and more experienced ones naturally take on leader/protector roles. In the school system, there are no clear leaders established through age, leading to endless, un-resolvable competition, generally resulting in the most base physical attributes becoming the dominant deciding factors. Say hello to "Jocks v.s. Geeks" --Those who are strong thinkers tend to seek love and approval from the only authority figures who appear to value such attributes, the teachers. All you have to do is program the teachers according to your system and they will make sure that the students are similarly programmed.
-Media! --Children who have survived the school system are shell-shocked by that war zone social structure. Their brains have developed strong wiring as they grew up, programed to have low self-esteem, to fear above all things, ridicule. So all you have to do is create a popular media which tells the population what is being laughed at this week, and you can rest assured that even the most progressive thinkers will shudder and cringe as their deep-programming kicks in.
-Meaningless debate! --It is important to maintain and nourish two opposing camps of thought on any number of emotionally evocative subjects. The population will self-divide and spend all their free energy fighting and arguing and hating one-another, while you rest safely up in your ivory tower and collect taxes.
-False Money and False Economic Theory. My typing muscles are getting tired, so I won't bother going into this. Any smart person, (who hasn't been laughed at recently), is capable of working out how money and debt keeps everybody in check.
-War. Again, no real need to explain this one.
There are, of course, many other techniques available, but these three are the work-h
It took long enough for me to find this response!
I'm sorry, I've been alive for twenty years shorter than the parent poster and I do not remember a time when science was ever "popular". Popularized, maybe, with the moon shots and all, but NEVER popular. If science was ever popular how would it ever lose popularity? Think about that for a moment. Science is a constantly changing beast, with something new emerging from an enormous variety of fields ... hourly! How could you ever get bored with science should it ever become popular?
I call shenanigans on the whole notion of science having been "popular" ... well, ever! Not even in Newton's time, and certainly not Galileo's when it wasn't even called science. Hell, it wasn't even called science until the last, what? 150 years of its existence. It was a branch of philosophy (natural philosophy) before that!
Science has never and probably will never be popular. Sorry to burst anyone's bubble, but use some scientific method and tell me when science was ever popular. I have no evidence to support the assertion and know of none to even test.