The Problem With Congress's Scientific Illiterates

Lasrick (2629253) writes "Brian Merchant at Motherboard examines the March 26th House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology's 2015 budget request hearing. White House adviser Dr. John Holdren addressed the committee to defend funding for science programs. Video clips show comments that are difficult to believe, when you hear them. From the article: '"So, when you guys do your research, you start with a scientific—what do they call it—postulate or theory, and you work from that direction forward, is that right?" Representative Randy Weber (R-TX) said. "So, I'm just wondering how that related, for example, to global warming and eventual global cooling." He paused to make a joke about getting the scientists' cell phone number so he could call to ask when to buy a coat, before concluding that science just isn't up to the task.'"

Comments

Don't bother.

[Petersko]

All you can do with somebody like that is just look them over, wince, be perplexed for a moment, and then move on. They aren't interested, nor would they listen to any attempt to aid their understanding.

It's not a winnable battle, so don't start the fight.

Re:Don't bother.

[Berkyjay]

And this is why we fail. We get so defeated by ignorant politicians and just throw up our hands and say "what can you do?" But we get the government we deserve and most of this country is horribly undereducated and ignorant of how the world actually works.

Re:Don't bother.

[JohnVanVliet]

"All you can do with somebody like that is"
is to do EVERYTHING possible to have them removed from office ASAP!!!!

Re:Don't bother.

[MickyTheIdiot]

I think you're maybe half right.

We have a little less than half of the people that throw up their hands and give up because it is just so dumb.

We have another group at a little less than half that are so worn out with work, the 3 kids society said they should have, the junk they spend their money on, etc.. etc.. that they don't have the time to pay attention.

So you have 2% that are pissed off that our leadership is dumb as hell and are willing to fight the idiocy. And that's not enough.

Re:Don't bother.

[lonOtter]

It's not even that they're tired, or that they give up. It's that most people are apathetic and unintelligent, all in one convenient package.

Re:Don't bother.

[Jason Levine]

The problem is that these people aren't just ignorant. People who are ignorant can be educated and then they're fine. These people are willfully ignorant. They are purposefully ignorant. They take pride in their ignorance and will do everything in their power to stay ignorant. Trying to educate these people is a losing proposition because they won't listen no matter what you say or how much proof you show them.

It would be tolerable if these people were just conspiracy nuts ala the "moon landing were faked" folks. We could laugh at them and move on with our lives. These people, however, are in seats of power in the government and are making big decisions about scientific funding. Again, perhaps we could laugh at them if we knew that the educated populace would toss the ignorant politicians when the next election rolled around. Unfortunately, the purposefully ignorant politicians are representing purposefully ignorant people who keep voting them in and who actively oppose educated politicians. To make matters worse, the willfully ignorant politicians gerrymander their districts so that it is nearly impossible to get them voted out of office. They might be purposefully ignorant about science but they are very intelligent about how politics works - a very dangerous combination.

You can't reason with these people. You can oppose them, but it can be very frustrating when you are derided for wanting someone who is educated to make these decisions instead of someone who thinks God *poofed* everything into existence 10,000 years ago as proved incontrovertibly by a book that they take literally. In the end, I can understand why some people throw their arms up in frustration.

Re:Don't bother.

[Jason Levine]

There's also the group that see idiocy all around and, knowing they can't fight it all, fight some battles and toss their arms up on others.

For example, my wife and I are fighting against EngageNY, Common Core, and the high-stakes testing that New York State has implemented. Without going too much into it (since it is off-topic), let's just summarize to say that New York's Board of Education is highly corrupt and this was rushed into to benefit politicians and funnel money to corporations, not students or teachers. In fact, it is actively hurting students. So we're fighting this fight.

Unfortunately, we can't fight every fight. I doubt anyone could. Even if you were single, with no kids, and were able to fight these fights every day, I doubt you would be able to battle all of them. At some point, you need to pick and choose and people are more likely to pick the battles that affect them immediately (schools) and less likely to pick battles that might affect them later on (science funding). This isn't to say that science isn't important - I definitely think it is, but you can't fight all the fights all the time.

Before you judge someone for throwing up their arms in frustration at this instead of fighting, take a closer look and see what other battles they're fighting.

Re:Don't bother.

[flaming error]

This is about science in general, not AGW in particular.

But if you want to make it about AGW, the science is not based on surveys, nor is it based on computer models.

It is based on old school physics that's been developing over centuries.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Not the most potent, but the primary driver.

Since the industrial revolution began,
a) Atmospheric CO2 has gone from 280 ppm to 400 ppm (40% increase)
b) ocean pH has gone down 0.1 (30% increase in acidity).

What each upcoming season's weather will be we aren't sure.

But we are sure our changes to the atmosphere are warming the planet, acidifying and enlarging the oceans, and displacing and killing living things.

All your denialist microquibbles, character assassinations, and FUD are red herrings.

The core science is not in dispute. It is accepted by every established scientific association on the planet, for every branch of science.

It's basically accepted by everyone except one political faction in one scientifically illiterate country.

Re:Don't bother.

[SuperTechnoNerd]

People think that politicians on committees are by default, advocates of what that committee represents, in this case science. However in government, it is a powerful tactic to form a committee with the sole purpose to subvert, control, or even destroy that which it supposed to support and represent. What better way to change something that you don't like than to be in a position of making important decisions about that thing. There is a calculated reason why there are no scientists on such committees. That explains why they make no attempt to even have a high school level of understanding about science and it's methods. Because it's not about the science to them - it's about control. They already have their opinions formed and the rest is just window dressing. As you said they are very intelligent about how politics works. Why else would people so out of touch with science, who even hate it, want to be on a science committee if not to throw a wrench into the works and control it, and to use it to support their political (and religious) agenda.

Re:Don't bother.

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit. Oh yes, let's not argue with Science Guy here who shows REAL EVIDENCE that because heating in a box appropriate for a fucking real greenhouse, you know, with plants and shit, seems to be dominated by convective heat transfer, that this THOROUGHLY DISCREDITS the whole fucking fields of observational and theoretical chemistry, and THOROUGHLY DISCREDITS real fucking measurements of in-welling and out-welling radiation measurements. Oh my fucking God, are you that fucking stupid, or that fucking arrogant that you actually believe that you understand this shit? You know (well, YOU probably don't know) that we've sent stuff up into space, measured the amount of radiation coming down onto the earth, measured the radiation that makes it to the earth's surface, and measured the radiation that leaves the earth, and you know what?? It all can't be explained by some fucking air-filled cardboard boxes with plastic film stretched on them. Imagine that!

There is nothing wrong with not understanding something, but do yourself a favor and don't try to sound like you understand something when it is clear you have no fucking clue what you're talking about. Parroting technical shit to browbeat someone who doesn't understand something is bad enough, but don't try it on someone who actually understands basic physics and chemistry and expect to not be held in ridicule. The link you provide looks like a nice experiment that seems to have been well thought out and executed. I could even offer some opinions on the way it was done, how it could be improved, and the conclusions drawn (exercise for the student: look up the transmission spectra of CO2 and silica windows and polyethylene, and look up the emission spectrum of CO2 and see if you can find one issue to be addressed). But then to take that and run with it because it THOROUGLY DISCREDITS the whole concept of what is referred to colloquially as "greenhouse gases" makes you sound like a complete fucking tool who can parrot all that great "science" and "facts" and shit from other dumbasses with blogs.

And another thing, your list of refereed papers is pathetic. What is the point, besides AGAIN trying to overwhelm the unaware with a long list of references. Big fucking deal. I read papers like that, so I looked a bit through your papers. First off, a list of random references is completely meaningless if you don't provide context. What is the fucking context here? Why were any of these papers put on this list, because most of them you can't tell from their titles. So let's look at a few of these papers: The Knorr paper, where he says "I expect atmospheric concentrations to have increased, but my modeling suggests it has been relatively flat. We need to understand this better." HOLY SHIT! Tear down the walls! What is the point of this paper on your list? This sounds like a real science paper, not some shocking expose that the emperor has no clothes. Oh, here is one from Iron and Steel Technology. As fine a journal I'm sure that is, I'll think I'll look to another source for climate science related issues rather than one that uses the term "alarmist" so frequently. How about the 2009 Essenhigh paper? Oh, look, as I was googling for it, one of my first links came up with a paper that points out that Essenhigh is repeating a common misconception (and the author thanks Essenhigh for useful comments on his paper to boot). Or how about that 2001 Essenhigh editorial, yes, editorial (even in peer-reviewed papers, editorials don't follow the peer review process).

Look, learn some basic science, look at the research going on, get involved (intelligently) in the discussions, and leave your pathetic armchair science distortions with the bozos on the radio where you get your other opinions.

Re:Don't bother.

[artor3]

Somehow we need to find a way to promote science as a way of thinking and do so without hurting the feelings of the religious right.

No, see, that's the problem. You're aiming at the wrong group. These congressmen aren't ignorant because they're religious. They're ignorant because certain entrenched interests pay them ENORMOUS SUMS OF MONEY to remain ignorant. You can never, ever compete with that. No education, no promotion of science, will ever make a dent.

If you want it to get better, you need to get serious campaign finance reform. And that can't happen until you get rid of the current SCOTUS. Which means that our one and only chance to fix this is in the next presidential election, since the winner might, maybe get to replace a conservative justice. If we get a Republican president, Scalia and Kennedy will retire, and we will be damned to another 20 years of oligarchy.

If we manage to get a Democratic president, Scalia and Kennedy will try to hold on as long as they can.

Absolute best case scenario (barring a miracle heart attack), we might be able to start fixing this around 2025.

It will probably be too late by then.

Re:Don't bother.

[lonOtter]

Pro-tip: to someone else, so are you.

And? To some ignorant person, Einstein might seem stupid. Someone's going to be wrong. The mere fact that someone else might deem me unintelligent is not something that makes my observations incorrect.

The reality is people are really stupid when they go outside their field of expertise.

It's not just that they're ignorant; they're unintelligent and have almost zero critical thinking skills. Examples of this are people who buy into the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" nonsense, accept the TSA or NSA surveillance, keep voting for 'the lesser of two evils', or do any other such thing, and (this is the important part) continue to support these things even after it's explained why it's a bad idea.

That and most people don't even seem to have the ability to truly understand (not just memorize) even trivial math makes it seem extremely likely that most people are unintelligent.

Re:Don't bother.

[DamnOregonian]

I think you are very confused about Fourier's theories on the greenhouse effect...
Fourier always knew that his friend's experiment formed a real greenhouse. His postulation was that the atmosphere, and "greenhouse gasses" within it could function to similar end, with various gasses of various levels of opaqueness to light wavelengths forming the stable barriers that the glass did.

That theory is in fact not discredited one bit. Space is the glass. It very efficiently prevents the convection of the atmosphere with the non-heat conducting void beyond. What you cited as being discredited is the theory that physical greenhouses retain their temperature because glass blocks long-wave radiation. I'm not really familiar with this theory, but it's pretty ridiculous on its face. Anyone with elementary understanding of thermodynamics can tell you that the lack of air exchange will greatly outweigh the radiative energy. But the best part is- that has *nothing* to do with the greenhouse effect. It's some kind of weird red herring straw man to distract someone from looking up what the greenhouse effect really is, and to see that you have absolutely no clue what the hell you are talking about.

The basic physics behind the greenhouse effect are so damn settled, that you have to undo our entire knowledge of the universe, relativistically, and quantum mechanically to alter them. The spectral absorption lines of various molecular gasses are *known*. Some simple thought experiments will lead you to the correct conclusion. Short-wave solar radiation hits something, say the ground. The ground absorbs it, heats up, and emits appropriate black-body radiation (long-wave). In a happy, greenhouse effect-less world, that emitted black-body radiation goes back out to space, and the Earth is a very fucking cold place. In our (thankfully obeying the laws of physics) world, a percentage of those long-wave photons hit something that is opaque to long-wave radiation on its way back out to space. Let's call this substance a greenhouse gas, since its existence will make the Earth retain heat- like a greenhouse retains heat. It is then refracted, with some of the incident photons going back to space, and some going back to the ground for re-absorption. The Earth just netted some thermal energy. It's a good deal for us, and it's entirely necessary in order for this planet not to be a spherical skating rink.

To call the "greenhouse effect" discredited is to claim that thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics are all wrong, and everything we know about heat transfer, photon absorption and emission and energy are all wrong. You must be some kind of fucking genius. I can see why you don't appeal to authority- you *are* the fucking authority.

Re:Don't bother.

[N1AK]

The reality is people are really stupid when they go outside their field of expertise.

No. People are uninformed about things outside their expertise. They are only stupid when they try and comment on other fields. I'm not stupid when it comes to combustion engines. If someone asked me if a V8 or V10 were better I'd say I had no clue, stupid would be going V10 on the basis that 10 sounds better and I heard of a good V10 car once. In a way it's our own fault that our representatives express uninformed opinions: the politician who regularily says "I don't know" would be judged as ignorant or stupid.

Re:Don't bother.

[TapeCutter]

More depressing clips: A guy called ClimateBrad has a large collection of clips from US politicians doing their very best to make up their own facts and rules of logic.

Up until I reached my 40's I thought people like Senator Inhofe in the US and Tony Abbot here in Oz were uneducated, stupid, or more likely both. They are none of those things, they're just plain immoral by normal western standards when it comes to honesty (even the good ones). To paraphrase Shaun Micallef - "The media is called the fourth estate but behaves like a fifth wheel", like the political system it revels in conflict and is trained in the (in)humanities. If it can't find controversy in a story then it invents some (say) by equating a "one jump away" lobbyist's press release from one of their major sponsors to a meticulous scientific report. The Iraq war and "Climategate" are both prime examples of commercial media being worse than useless in clarifying a complex issue, particularly in the US.

The honest self-skepticisim required to be successful in the scientific and engineering world is a career killer in the political world. They have a different worldview that says everything boils down to an opinion, and all opinions are equal. Therefore social skills are more important than evidence and manipulation is more useful than reason. OTOH we have way too many Phd's in the hard sciences who have never stepped foot in a "Ph" class in their life and would not know Popper from Popoff.

Thing is, the political worldview is our natural behaviour, it's instinctual and we all do it to some degree because...well..it almost works. Critical thinking is a learned behaviour that basically refines "common-sense" using agreed rules of evidence and logic, it is the foundation of The Enlightenment, a radical shift in human behaviour barely 500yrs old. It's unsurprising that it hasn't permeated to everyone in the modern world that the "age of reason" created with extraordinary speed over the last 50-100yrs.

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..." - Sagan, Demon Haunted World (Science as a candle in the dark)

Re:Don't bother.

[cusco]

The author of TFA assumes that the congresscritters don't act because they are uninformed, that perhaps with the adequate education they would change their minds. He's wrong. It's not that they don't understand the science, it's that they don't CARE what the long-term affects would ever be. Climatologists say things like "within a century" and "in 50 years", which clues the pols that they don't HAVE to give a shit since they'll be out of office and maybe dead by then. They are, as a herd, immensely self-centered and short-term thinkers. The only way to get them to act is to somehow demonstrate to them the IMMEDIATE value of action, how either they're going to get a lot more money or a lot more power by acting. Want Inhofe to act? Promise him the presidency if he does, or offer him the chairmanship of a bank. No other incentive would ever work, and he wouldn't give a flying fuck whether he understood the science or believed in the climatologists' conclusions.

The symptom, not the true problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is AMERICA's scientific illiterates. How do you think the idiots get to congress? I'll never vote for anyone that speaks out against evolution.

Re:The symptom, not the true problem.

[arth1]

Indeed. I shouldn't be, but am quite amazed with how people abuse their votes, and WILLFULLY put ignorant imbeciles in congress. And then don't even have enough shame to rectify the mistake.
Congress should have our very best people, not dregs.

Re:The symptom, not the true problem.

[Anonymous Coward]

look, he may be an idiot, but he's not that idiotic. he's trolling. same
as what bush jr did. classic bullying, pretending to be so unbelievably
stupid just to get a rise out of your target

the problem isn't the the electorate is putting idiots into office,
its that they've decided that the entertainment value of
putting a bully into office is more important than governance

Lest we forget....

[DKroos]

Takes the crown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

what stuns me

[confused one]

What stuns me is that someone that ignorant of the process and so critical of science in the first place, can get themselves put on the Science Space and Technology committee in the first place. You couldn't have picked a worse group of persons to make budgetary decisions about our countries science future. They might as well just go ahead and deny all science spending, kill NASA, DOE, NSF and NIH, and call it a day.

Twain

[McGruber]

"Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself." - Mark Twain

Obligatory xkcd

[mjvvjm]

http://xkcd.com/154/

Re:economics

[Tablizer]

have no problem accepting the validity of an economic theory based on an "Invisible Hand" - yet...

It's not invisible:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/imag...

He let them know what He thinks of Trickle Down theory.

always Republicans

[globaljustin]

look at the actual votes on policy...it's always Republicans doing anti-science policy

creationism in schools? Republicans
climate change denial? Republicans
defunding research? Republicans

Congress isn't "all idiots"...for every bullshit anti-science law Congress passes there are Democrats/Progressives who vote against it

Any discussion that does not take these facts into account is pointless and will continue infinitely

Re:Cosmos

[lonOtter]

There is more faith in science's belief than there ever will be in religion.

The very same science that's responsible for the technology you're using right now to communicate with others? The very same science that's responsible for just about everything in the modern world that improves people's qualify of life? Betting on something with that kind of track record is nowhere near the same as the kind of "faith" you're talking about.

And that's putting aside your ignorance of the actual science and what the actual scientific theories are about. You go on to talk about how science says that "Nothing created something." as if cretins like you haven't said that same sort of nonsense millions of times already, to no effect.

Which is easier to believe: Nothing created something. Truly absolutely vast quantities of nothingness. No atoms, no quarks, no foam. Just emptiness. And that created something. OR A immortal being who existing in a different reality created this one and because he created it, he is omniscient and omnipotent in it.

Which is easier to believe? Any explanation that doesn't involve all-powerful, infinitely complex magical beings creating entire universes.

There are gaps in our knowledge, yes, but that doesn't mean you can make up bullshit about all-powerful sky daddies, claim it's the real answer simply because we lack knowledge at this point in time, and expect to not get laughed at by anyone who is even remotely intelligent. You will get laughed at, and rightfully so. You are the problem.

Until that day, they must be able to have open, frank and honest discourse without arrogance.

So, you're saying that you expect intelligent people to take whatever nonsensical garbage you can make up seriously? Good luck with that.