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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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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.
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 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.
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.
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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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.