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NSF Report Flawed; Americans Do Not Believe Astrology Is Scientific
RichDiesal writes "A new report (PDF) from the National Science Foundation, which we discussed a few days ago, states that roughly 40% of Americans believe astrology to be scientific. This turns out to be false; most of those apparently astrology-loving Americans have actually confused astrology with astronomy. In a 100-person Mechanical Turk study with a $5 research budget, I tested this by actually asking people to define astrology. Among those that correctly defined astrology, only 10% believe it to be scientific; among those that confused astrology for astronomy, 92% believe 'astrology' to be scientific."
I searched/skimmed the NSF paper, and it wasn't obvious that they took any pains to define astrology for their interviewees. So you very well may be right; good job.
How many who could correctly define astronomy still believe that it can be used to predict your future. Because that's astrophysics.
Even more of them will confuse cosmetology with cosmology. Someone trying to weigh a poll to make Americans look uneducated could have done much better.
I absolutely believe that ... astro... something science to be scientific!
It probably has electrolytes too!
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The problem is not that we are mystical idiots, just that we are can not spell and are not sure of the correct pronunciation of words.
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Given the state of education, what else would you expect? We're talking about a nation that doesn't even know it's own geography, much less that of neighbours in the world. If they think Toronto or Vancouver are the capital of Canada, how can you expect them to know something like astrology vs. astronomy?
Regardless of whether the majority of the population believes astrology is "scientific" or not, one thing is clear: the population as a whole has a shitty education.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It is easy for surveys to give very misleading results if the questions are not well thought out, or if they have intentionally been designed to produce some result. The media tends to pick up on the more surprising results from surveys so that magnifies the effect in the public perception.
"do you believe in evolution" "do you believe the current theory of evolution is correct" "Do you believe that god was involved in the creation of life" "should students be taught to question scientific theories like evolution". "do you think evolution likely is a correct description of the species we see on earth now" These may seem to be asking the same question, but are really quite different.
40% of Americans can't differentiate astrology from astronomy.
When you don't know one of those from the other, what does it matter how you think about their scientific merits?
They are, if you think about it, poorly-chosen words. After all they both start with "astro" - meaning star. Then "ology" meaning study, versus "onomy" meaning naming of. Logically it might well be the other way around. On the other hand I agree with the conclusions. I'm an astronomer, but I notice that more and more of my colleagues are calling themselves astrophysicists rather than astronomers. They may simply be choosing what they think of as a higher-status term, or perhaps to avoid the confusion between astrology and astronomy, which (in my experience) is more common in the USA than in the UK.
A friend of mine in 7th grade signed up for a cosmetology class thinking it was cosmology, and boy was he surprised. At least it was only one of those 1 hours per week deals to fill in a gap with our weird rotating schedule (7 classes for 6 periods).
Adam Corrolla and Jimmy Kimmel (and many, many other pranksters) have proven that people really don't know the language, but will gladly treat a misconception with confidence when given just a little nudge.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
So you're saying that it's not that Americans are prone to believe in pseudo-science, but that they lack basic English comprehension skills? Even if I were to believe that this unscientific internet study with a small sample size somehow trumps the observations of the National Science Foundation's wide ranging academic study, the conclusions derived are equally troubling. It's not that they're scientific illiterate - they're simply illiterate! Either conclusion indicates a serious deficit in US education standards, and rather than trying to justify the survey results away, we should be looking at ways to improving American education standards. If they can't distinguish between astronomy and astrology I'd be worried about their English vocabulary.
So instead of being scientifically illiterate, USians are just vanilla illiterate?
This $5 study does NOT support that conclusion since the overwhelming majority of Mechanical Turkers are NOT Americans.
Although there there plenty of stupid Americans, America does not have a monopoly on stupidity. There's plenty of competition from the rest of the world.
Friend of mine use to get these Fan boy catalogs for Star Trek/Star Wars trinkets. (ie. Stuff people made in their basement)
One of the ads was for "Official Star Trek Badges". Engineering, Command, Medical, Security, and Astrology.... and it took us 10 mins to explain to him.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
People have actually looked at overall scientific literacy in the US, and it compares favorably to the EU (and the rest of the world):
https://www.sciencenews.org/bl...
Of course, it would be nice if scientific literacy were higher everywhere, including the US.
You can actually restrict Mechanical Turk users to a specific country. It's harder to get Americans to actually answer for a low wages, but they do respond. If you want it done in 3 hours you better not restrict it to the US.
If the NSF Report actually stated "that roughly 40% of Americans believe astrology to be scientific," this would be an interesting use of five bucks. But that's not what the report says.
Here's what the NSF report acually writes—and it's actually interesting:
Page 7-6 of the report gives actual details about the survey—speciically, the Science and Technology portion of the General Social Survey". You can search the GSS survey for the word 'astrology' to see the actual question:
The whole point is that they're asking Americans if they know what the word 'astrology' means.
If there was a mass epidemic of amnesia between 2010 and 2012, I don't remember it. So what caused the reversal in a steady trend that lasted from 1983 to 2010? Why did the number of Americans who know the definition of the word 'astrology' make a sudden and very large negative drop from 2010 to 2012?
This is an interesting result, and to their credit the authors of the NSF report do a good job of accurately reporting their finding without resorting to hyperbole or finger-pointing.
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When I was an undergraduate, the telescope a few miles away was listed in the phone book (remember those?) as the National Radio Astrology Observatory. Nobody really felt like correcting it.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Words are used to express concepts and convey information. The name of the country is the "The United States of America". If any other country used the word "America" in its name you might have something approaching a valid point. As it is now there is zero confusion over the term and in the exceptionally rare cases you might want to refer to all of the people of the Americas it is quite easy to unambiguously do so (see, I just did it?). The term "USians" is used by pseudo-intellectual jerkoffs like you with some sort of bizarre chip on their shoulder and no intellectual capacity to express it so you revert to temper tantrums on the internet to avoid feeling totally impotent.
This isn't about English literacy, either, unless you think that most people regard "debt" and "deficit" as abstract coinages passed down from Cleopatra's personal mentat.
Here's how the lizard brain encodes language in people with an aspy deficit:
jackpot = pussy
debt/deficit = no pussy
astronomy/astrology = preoccupations of pointy hats who get no pussy
There's simply no need in this model to discriminate words from the second cluster. Here's a truly horrible capsule summary of what we're up against:
Secret Formula For Persuasive Writing Techniques
This is designed to influence exactly the kind of person who fails to conceptually discriminate astronomy from astrology. Advertising is not a universal technique. It's merely a universal technique for the shaking the trees most easily shaken: small cognition, big lizard.
The core element is the appeal which answers "What's in it for me?" and the answer either needs to be "more pussy" or something from the first list of things regarded as being directly associated with more pussy, or the proximity of more pussy, or the vain fantasy of the proximity of more pussy.
The bottom brain works on a system of warm, warmer, warmest. I know of a person who has made at least three trips to China thinking he's going to score himself a docile second wife; he has no clue whatsoever that these Chinese women he meets can decode his demeanour as an OCD control freak by the second interaction—if, in fact, there was any legitimacy to their desire to score a comfortable N.A. lifestyle in the first place. In his own culture, most women decode his personality style in a single glace. In his mind all these women have be ruined by a culture which turns them into snooty princesses. Who knows how much money this guy has poured in this project, where 60 seconds of input from a properly functioning top brain could have informed him that "warmer" amounts to a snowball's chance in hell on day where hell's barometer is falling.
Judging from how long he's had his top brain stored in the garage under a dusty tarpaulin, he long ago gave up on welcoming any input from this part of his brain. Either the input is faulty (unlikely), or it conflicts with his cherished lizard-brain fantasy self-image (likely). He's plenty functional in an ordered environment where he has far fewer options to make his own choices.
The problem with this study is that a large slice of the population—in one or more major spheres of living—fails to curate their "beliefs" into consistent/inconsistent, but merely partitions into warmer and colder, using an internal vocabulary where there's only a single word for snow.
These scientists who conducted this study without comprehension of this are living in a similarly tiny mental closet. s/pussy/p-value This is the lizard brain of successful careers built upon bad science.
Scientific method: Statistical errors
I guess it accords with a cherished lizard-brain fantasy of someday scoring tenure. For three decades, at least, tenure has become practically synonymous with barometer rising. Engaging in this kind of research project is an awfully indirect way to confront their own delusions.
Citation not needed at all, just look how many believe there are gods and miracles and creationists
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