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It's Time To Bring Pseudoscience Into the Science Classroom
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "'Roughly one in three American adults believes in telepathy, ghosts, and extrasensory perception,' wrote a trio of scientists in a 2012 issue of the Astronomy Education Review. 'Roughly one in five believes in witches, astrology, clairvoyance, and communication with the dead (PDF). Three quarters hold at least one of these beliefs, and a third has four distinct pseudoscientific beliefs.' Now Steven Ross Pomeroy writes in Forbes Magazine that it's time to bring pseudoscience into public schools and universities. 'By incorporating examples of pseudoscience into lectures, instructors can provide students with the tools needed to understand the difference between scientific and pseudoscientific or paranormal claims,' say Rodney Schmaltz and Scott Lilienfeld." (Read more, below.)
"According to Schmaltz and Lilienfeld, there are 7 clear signs that show something to be pseudoscientific: 1. The use of psychobabble – words that sound scientific and professional but are used incorrectly, or in a misleading manner. 2. A substantial reliance on anecdotal evidence. 3. Extraordinary claims in the absence of extraordinary evidence. 4. Claims which cannot be proven false. 5. Claims that counter established scientific fact. 6. Absence of adequate peer review. 7. Claims that are repeated despite being refuted. Schmaltz and Lilienfeld recommend incorporating examples of pseudoscience into lectures and contrasting them with legitimate, groundbreaking scientific findings. For example, professors can expound upon psychics and the tricks they use to fool people or use resources such as the Penn & Teller program "Bullshit".
But teachers need to be careful or their worthy efforts to instill critical thinking could backfire. Prior research has shown that repeating myths on public fliers, even with the intention of dispelling them, can actually perpetuate misinformation. "The goal of using pseudoscientific examples is to create skeptical, not cynical, thinkers. As skeptical thinkers, students should be urged to remain open-minded," say Schmaltz and Lilienfeld. "By directly addressing and then refuting non-scientific claims, science educators can dispel pseudoscience (PDF) and promote scientific skepticism, while avoiding the unhealthy extremes of either uncritical acceptance or cynicism.""
But teachers need to be careful or their worthy efforts to instill critical thinking could backfire. Prior research has shown that repeating myths on public fliers, even with the intention of dispelling them, can actually perpetuate misinformation. "The goal of using pseudoscientific examples is to create skeptical, not cynical, thinkers. As skeptical thinkers, students should be urged to remain open-minded," say Schmaltz and Lilienfeld. "By directly addressing and then refuting non-scientific claims, science educators can dispel pseudoscience (PDF) and promote scientific skepticism, while avoiding the unhealthy extremes of either uncritical acceptance or cynicism.""
Even if you show them that what they believe is bullshit, they still choose to believe it.
Just look at religions all over the world.
You can't teach critical thinking in schools. The Texas state Republican party platform is explicitly opposed to it.
I piss off bigots.
When I was in high school, one of our teachers told us voodoo magic was real, and that contrary to popular belief, it would work on you even if you didn't believe in it. Try to make teachers talk about astrology and you'll end up with them going around the classroom with shit like, "That's because you're a Virgo".
...and other commin deities.
When I was in high school, one of our teachers told us voodoo magic was real
I bet the teacher has a Geforce now. You can't change these people.
Ezekiel 23:20
A lot of the pseudo-science out there has, in a sense, adapted to having common knowledge applied. Take vaccines for example. A class might teach how they work, discuss the history of how they have stopped many diseases, but what is one to do when presented with the latest anti-vaccine goal-shifted argument, like the 'too many too soon' line? When you have people who will continuously invent new arguments as their basic premise is yet again demonstrated to be false, it is best to teach people the basics of pseudoscience along with science, so that the former can be spotted for what it is. The same applies for a slew of other common nonsenses, which could be used as case studies. I suspect giving clear case studies may be particularly beneficial. My personal anecdote, I was raised to believe in young earth creationism, and it was the realization that I was being expected to commit the same kinds of errors as homeopaths & other woo-woos that helped me to realize that what I had been taught was wrong in a great many ways.
It's a real religion with real practitioners.
Most people believe in neoliberalism, Marxism, or some other fundie extreme.
Most people believe there is an objective point to life, when there's no reason not to just die except the one you make up for yourself.
Most people believe that hypotheses which cannot be falsified are even relevant to science, then get all hyper about people's belief in them because SCIENCE RAWRRRRR.
This is one of the more compelling arguments for national standards where local administration would have the excuse that they were "forced" to follow imposed guidelines. Otherwise, every nutter in the community will rally to tar and feather the administration.
And this isn't even a slight at the push for Creationism or similar bull on our kids. It's that we don't even teach our kids how science works. Maybe because else they could instantly debunk crap like Creationism as the pseudoscience it is.
Our school system still works along the lines of "it is that way because I say so". Critical thinking, which is the basis of the scientific method (because "doubting" basically IS the scientific method) is not what is asked for. What is wanted is simple acceptance of what you're told, rote learning and parroting. It's a rare class where you actually get to use applied thinking. Most of the times, what's required is simply rote learning, "sponge" learning as I love to call it. Soak up the crap, release again when required, no need to retain anything or do anything else with it.
As long as we don't teach our kids that science is NOT soaking up and spitting out what you get told, teaching them other pseudosciences on top of Creationism is something I'd consider rather harmful. They might not be able to tell the difference to real science, because from their point of view, there would be none.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Science education at the primary level has long emphasized the products of science, with little regard for the process. Science teachers are a product of this system as much as everyone else. Most of them just aren't equipped to draw a distinction between science and pseudoscience.
Mumbling something about falsifiability isn't going to fly without motivating it and showing evidence, whether or not they have internalized those concepts themselves. Holding them to higher standards won't help, as there aren't enough qualified individuals to go around, unless some sort of mass teaching approach becomes the norm, and it's hard to see that working well with kids.
This is not an educational problem. It's a cultural problem, and it needs a broader approch.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
It's never wrong to attempt to apply science to, well, everything in the universe. The summary mentions those beliefs that have been scientifically tested and failed to show any repeatable results. It's likely all those things have their foundations in faith, imagination, fear,... rather than some particle or wave that a scientist could test for. But...
"4. Claims which cannot be proven false."
I guess these Schmaltz and Lilienfeld guys are teachers, and not scientists; otherwise they would have never penned a sentence like that. I think everyone here knows the scientific method, so I won't go into that, and maybe I'm being a little pedantic; but if we are talking about the classroom, then the details need to be right. And the science classroom is not the place to mock the ignorant, and even though the last paragraph says as much, it uses a whole lot of words when the phrase "learning the scientific method" would have done.
But I do see why some would be hesitant. Take ESP for example. They apply the scientific method in some controlled experiment. They have a narrow sample of 30 kids, so they are going to have to repeat the tests and take averages. But they only have 55 minutes. They don't have the resources to pursue a course of research if the initial results are... interesting.
So out of, say 15 science classes that day, most will find the ESP test results are about the same as the random control, a couple will find that ESP is significantly worse at predictions than random, and one that finds that ESP significantly increases accuracy over the random control. The bell rings and those kids have to go to PE. You've sort of proven, to 30 out 450 kids, that ESP is real...
Not quite all of us live in TX (or AZ, OH for that matter) mate...
Manuals are your last resort only
Like "the universe is a simulation", multi-verse, anthropic principle.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
FTL proof will be given to mankind in 2024.
--
"By 2024 the Fermi Paradox will be shown to be incomplete."
This is different. While slashdotters might believe in the possibility of an scientific and technological advancement which is yet not realized. These pseudoscience believers think the things they believe in exist even that there is no prove or even prove that they are wrong.
Furthermore, even if your argument would be true, that both believes are structural identical. This would not make your argument valid. As it is a problem that people believe in pseudoscience, it is also a problem when another group believes in some other hokum. They do not cancel each other out.
Well, he was partially right. Some of voodoo magic is chemical or potion based. See for example zombie powder which is actually a combination of drugs (one to induce a coma in a death-like state and another to make the person pliable and open to suggestion in a trance-like state).
Now if he was talking about voodoo dolls and curses? No, that's bunk. They only work on people that fully believe in it, giving a huge placebo effect that has been scientifically researched and documented. In fact, one scientist when confronted with someone "cursed" and suffering from a life threatening placebo effect had to "uncurse" the man, "curing" him by convincing him he wasn't cursed any more. It wasn't the curse itself that was killing him, but his belief in the curse was so strong that his brain was shutting down his own body.
https://www.princeton.edu/~pea...
"The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, which flourished for nearly three decades under the aegis of Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, has completed its experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality."
Disclaimer: I worked in a joint program with them when I was managing the PU robotics lab in the 1980s. The program was funded in part by the McDonnell Foundation (of McDonnell-Douglas) in part because supposedly strange unexplainable things happened in fighter cockpits especially to pilots under stress in emergency situations. Rather that give the money just to the PEAR lab, it was decided to give the money to a group of labs that would work together somehow exploring aspects of human consciousness (or something like that, not saying how effective all that was). Dean Radin is the researcher who connected the groups back then and has been active in parapsychology work since: http://www.deanradin.com/
Another person active in this field of consciousness studies is Charles Tart (unrelated to PU, but interesting in the field).
http://www.paradigm-sys.com/
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/...
Related items at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (founded in 1973 by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell) which include mention of Dean Radin and Charles Tart:
http://www.noetic.org/search/?...
Mainstream science has been apparently useful, even if it is more the tinkerers and engineers who actually invent and bring to production useful things. But ultimately, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit we don't very much understand the nature of consciousness or the deeper nature of reality, which together, as much as we think we know about them, still form a "great mystery" (a term some Native Americans used for God and such). And, no, mapping a few or even many neural pathways or having a chemical analysis of brain neuro-transmitters does not equate to understanding the mystery of consciousness. As Charles Tart points out, there is a step where many otherwise good scientists move from apparently solid ground in their specialties to claiming fallacious things like "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" and so create essentially a new religion of "Scientistic Materialism".
http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/a...
"His [Tart's] and other scientists' work convinced him that there is a real and vitally important sense in which we are spiritual beings, but the too dominant, scientistic, materialist philosophy of our times, masquerading as genuine science, dogmatically denies any possible reality to the spiritual. This hurts people, it pressures them to reject vital aspects of their being."
Anyway, mass compulsory schooling in "classrooms" (intended by 1920s eugenicists to segregate people by social class so they interbreed and stratify, see Gatto) is also in general another way of hurting people: ... Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility an
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"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.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Big bang isn't certain, but it certainly is falsifiable. Every experiment set up to date has verified it, though.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The real problem is that people in western countries forgot to practice critical thinking which is part of the scientific method. One central question is "Why is something?" and "How does something work?". Such thinking also results in questioning yourself, criticizing your ego. For example, the recent dispute between Kay and Linus Torvalds about the use of certain kernel parameters is a perfect example.
True! Including critical thinking. And that you have to question things where you only have believe in but no prove.
When I was in high school, one of our teachers told us voodoo magic was real
I bet the teacher has a Geforce now. You can't change these people.
Ah, yes. Enjoy this obligatory metaphorical response.
Why are scientists increasingly concerned about what some people in our society think and believe? I don't want to sound argumentative, but surely a good scientist does what a good scientist does? We are not here to force a particular world view on everyone, just carefully research and explain the world around us. In any scientific discipline there will be people with different perspectives and often these differences of opinion can boil over into quite hostile interactions. Discourse, argument and differences of opinion motivate research and science benefits from this. Research groups compete - do meticulous research to prove their view, have it peer reviewed and hopefully trash the competition in the process. This is science. This is progress. What we have here is a mentality of "you can't believe in ghosts because I am a scientist and I say so". A view that is not consistent with scientific method and smacks of arrogance. I would much rather science engaged and provoked wide eyed wonderment. I personally do not care if people want to believe in ghosts, gods, psychic powers and the like. I care that these same people can appreciate the work I do, understand it and (hopefully) find it interesting.
It also only works if there isn't pseudo-science in the survey. One of the questions was "Is an electron smaller than an atom" to which it appears they assumed the answer was yes. This is fine if you thin of the atom as a mini-solar system (the Bohr model) but this is wrong. The size of the atom is determined by the size of the electrons' 3D standing waves that are bound to the nucleus. So actually the size of an atom is literally the size of the electrons in it.
The problem is that the "size" of an electron depends on its state as anyone with an understanding of undergrad quantum mechanics should know. So did students answering 'no' to this question do so because they had no clue about atoms and electrons or because they actually understood the quantum wave description of the atom?
Apart from that the survey is very poorly worded for example the statement: "There are phenomena that physical science and the laws of nature cannot explain.". I could easily say "strongly agree" to that and think "dark matter" which is something that physical science cannot explain at the moment but which I'd hope we will eventually explain. So does the statement mean "cannot ever explain" or "cannot at the moment explain"?
So perhaps the survey authors ought to worry a bit more about pseudo-scientific surveys and a little less about pseudo-scientific beliefs among undergrads.
Thou shall not eat lobster.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Bleh, I ment AL, not AZ :)
Manuals are your last resort only
Any time you are trying to tell someone what not to think, or what not to believe, you are entering dangerous territory. This is even more important when state sponsored - aka the public educational system. If schools do their job right, then students will be able to make their own informed choices on what to believe or what not to believe, and even if a student does not adhere to what the school "wants" them to believe, that is okay - the school has done their job either way. Direct comparisons against things schools do not espouse is not necessary or appropriate in any shape or form.
To be perfectly clear, let me explain what I'm NOT talking about. Take cigarette smoking for example. There are hard scientific studies showing that smoking causes specific health problems, so it is appropriate for a school to teach that smoking is bad and then provide the evidence. Now on the other hand, suppose there are people in the world who believe smoking is beneficial (and certainly those people are out there). Is it the school's job to incorporate that into their anti-smoking teaching and attempt to specifically discredit or call out the opposite viewpoint? No. That isn't necessary or even feasible. What this story is talking about crosses far into this kind of territory.
Better known as 318230.
You can't teach critical thinking in schools. The Texas state Republican party platform is explicitly opposed to it.
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I piss off bigots
Your sig is ironic since your opinion is quite bigoted. There is a great deal of pseudoscience belief on both sides of the isle. The left has irrational beliefs on nuclear power, GMO foods, etc. There was an article in the Washington Post about Democrats believing in horoscope and astrology more than Republicans/Independents: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Shh.. you will bust his bublble and make him snap. You all know how dangerous a critical thimker can be when he finds out he is wrong. He will use his mentsl powers to give you migrain headackes from acrosd the county.
The core problem with psuedo-science is a lot of it is unfalsifiable. Sure, you can show in a double-blind study that magic magnet bracelets have no significant effect on mood or back pain, but ghosts, ESP, etc? At most you can prove that individual instances are hoaxes, but you can't scientifically disprove their existence as a class. To claim they are bullshit as a class is itself an unscientific claim - at worst they are a hypothesis unsupported by evidence.
Of course there could still be great value in bringing them into the classroom to compare and contrast with scientific claims and the methods used to verify them - given the number of people willing to dismiss inconvenient science as a "belief" as though it had no more certainty to it than any random religious or pseudo-scientific doctrine our schools are clearly doing a poor job at conveying the qualitative difference in the level of certainty science brings to the table. But debunking should not be part of the science curriculum, it just isn't possible and claiming otherwise harms the very integrity of science we're trying to convey.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
After going through the woes of public education with 4 kids I can tell you that it's no fun for the teachers. Teachers are there to teach however nowadays they're overburdened with school administrations and core curriculum/testing laws that give them little leeway to be creative or to inspire kids to learn more and get the best education possible. Couple that with the facts that there are a lot of at-risk kids out there and parents who consider schools responsible for everything and we now have teachers who have to deal with a lot more things that parents should have to deal with vs. just teaching. What needs to happen is more positive involvement in our public schools both by parents and by other people who could help. There are lots of engineers and scientists out there who could contribute to STEM education in public schools if they were only given the chance and that way you would alleviate some of the pressure on teachers to be everything to everybody and focus on curriculum and learning in the classroom instead of whether or not the teacher understood the concepts you were presenting. It sounds like he was trying to inspire your understanding by having you play tug of war with the sphere, nowadays he'd probably have been repromanded for creating a situation that could have injured the students.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
An excellent point.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Roughly one in three American adults believes in telepathy, ghosts, and extrasensory perception," wrote a trio of scientists in a 2012 issue of the Astronomy Education Review.
Yes we must use government institutions to regulate what people believe! If we start young we can change the next generation.
Really if you want to see pseudoscience in action take a good look at all the assumptions behind cosmology and astronomy. Redshift = distance is an ASSUMPTION and Edwin Hubble himself was the first to point that out. Or start being honest enough to teach students that LOTS of biologists as well as physicists like Sir Hoyle have valid doubts about the theory of evolution, and no they are not creationists. Their main problem with evolution being that it is so often presented as settled established fact when it really has a lot of serious problems that need to be worked out. Just saying that is some kind of heresy in most English-speaking areas. Truth is many scientists would love to replace evolution with a better theory.
Please, name an established fact and explain how this differs from a normal fact.
Force equals mass times acceleration.
The equation yeilds accurate predictions for 100% of use cases where velocity is less than 0.01C, and distances are greater than 0.1 nm.
This fact differes from other facts becasue it involves a usefull method of predictiing behaviors of systems. It is verifiable, and falsifiable (although it has only been falsified for very high speeds where it is replaced by a more complicated set of equations, and very small distances where it is replaced by even more complicated equations). The point is that scientific facts are theroies that are overwhelmingly supported by evidence, and are falsifiable by nature. Much of the trouble people have understanding this concept stems from the unending stream of bullshit advertising they see on TV to the affect of "Our new dieting pull is scientifically proven to reduce your body mass index in just three minutes!", and other such nonsense.
Teaching critical thinking in school will only help so much because people inherently believe what they want to believe, even scientists. That is why there is so much faking of data in the science community. They are only human after all. A better solution would be a group who are granted the copyrights to most science related words like "scientifically", and "proves". This group could prevent most crap science just by suing advertisers out of existence who insist on improperly using these terms. After the media is forced to stop using the terms incorrectly, people will slowly stop using them incorrectly as well.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
People in general are gullible and believe whatever they hear. Being skeptical, double checking facts, looking at references...those are things people don't even think about anymore (well, they never did, its not new).
Schools need to push more on THAT. Teaching people to prove what they say, that its not because everyone says something that its true, and to learn how to separate facts from made up stuff. The rest will follow.
Climate Change is real - the climate has changed in the past and is still changing...
You're being too literal (on purpose, I think). They weren't referring to someone in a religion, they were referring to someone who can actually cast spells. Those don't exist. And no, voodoo does not cast spells, it relies on psychological reactions. There's no supernatural element at work.
As a left-hander, I submit that the article you linked to consists of roughly equal parts of wishful thinking and of hogwash.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Since there's people both on the left and right that are against vaccination.(RFK jr is an example of one on the left and there's various religious groups that oppose vaccination.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Look, all the ancient alien theorists cannot be wrong. The sky-people will be along any day now to validate their claims...yes, even the Greek fellow with the electric hair and suntan from hell...errr....alien radiation.
I bet a major reason why conservatives are into organized religion is because organized religion is by its nature authoritarian.
By contrast, pagan and new age stuff are pretty much anti-authoritarian and very individualist (but just as stupid as organized religion).
The lines between science and superstition and religion are very fuzzy and often arguable. Possibly the best indicator of this stuff is that somebody wants me to believe it. I believe many weird things, but I don't try to convince anyone else.
"Claims that cannot be proven false". Yes, science operates on statements that can be proven true or false. And the statement cannot be proven one way or another, that doesn't mean it's false. Did God create the universe? Nobody can prove it 'yes' or 'no'.
"Adequate peer review"? How many witches were burned at the stake. Wasn't that peer review?
Just because something is non-scientific doesn't mean it's false. And sometimes even false things can be useful. Example: every paper (flat) map you've ever seen is wrong, but useful and not very wrong.
The witches in the Wicca religion are the witches the Christians burned. They might not have mystical powers but they have a lot of the same paraphernalia and rituals. The witches in our cultural memory are stereotypes aimed at these people. There is not two distinct ideas of witches, there is one real group of people called witches and the propaganda aimed at demonozing them. They might not really go around hexing our crops, but they very much are witches.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Bleh, I ment AL, not AZ :)
Most of us would not know the difference anyway. This is an international forum, so please avoid 2LAs and zip-codes.
Alabama? Alaska?
Fuck you slashdot and your ever more clickbaity headlines. I've been coming here for nerdstuff since the 90s but it makes me angry now more often than it teaches me anything.
Lame, dudes. Super lame.
Hoyle didn't have doubts about evolution, he had doubts about hypotheses concerning the origin of life (abiogenesis). He thought life came from space via viruses and evolution happened subsequently. The biologists you are talking about for the most part have doubts about aspects of currently accepted theories within evolution, not the fact of evolution itself. Sure there is plenty of stuff to be worked out within evolution: how it has worked under varying circumstances on earth, the increasing variety of hereditary mechanisms and methods of change, how to engineer the evolutionary process in the lab to get the results you want instead of unwanted adaptations, etc. Lots of scientists would love to add their own chapter to evolution; they aren't planning to shitcan it.
Seems the south park equation needs to be adjusted 1 in 4 Americans is retarded.
It seems that America just grown more stupid now its 1 in 3.
Judging by all the anti-intellectual fluff I've seen posted already in this thread, I suspect that your estimate may be a bit generous.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Scientist teaching: Kids, here are the principles of evolution ***principles***. Here's why we believe it to be correct ***beliefs***.
Parent: What the hell are you teaching my kids, stop inflicting your beliefs on them. Teach the controversy.
School Administrator: Dear Parent, we're sorry for our Visiting Scientist's misapprehension of the controversy and we aim to provide a quality education.
Parent: "Misapprehension of the controversy", so you think I'm stupid.
Parent's Lawyer: My client and I are willing to settle for $20 million due to the damage your school as inflicted on my client's spawn. Can we expect that shortly or would you like us to drag you through the courts and newspapers?
School Administrator: Oh fuck it, you win, here's your winnings, $20 million.
Parent's Lawyer: Thank you, but since you fell over so easily, could you make that a round $40 million, I need a really good boat.
Forgot time travel on DeLoreans, thing that will be confirmed in Oct 21 of next year.
I'm no American either, nor have I ever lived, or do I live there, but yeah, those ANSI codes aren't generic knowledge I guess. :)
btw:
AZ is Arizona, AL = Alabama :)
Manuals are your last resort only
Something I never understood, how did the creation story get so much later evidence in science?
The creation and big bang closely match. There was nothing and it exploded.
The great flood. Lots of water from the deep.. Now we find moons or planets with underground oceans.
How did ancient writings get some wild concepts right? Proving creationism and thus God isn't likely to happen with scientific method, but there may be more than psedoscience to it.
The truth shall set you free!
Teach what are and how to recognize all of them. Then using that to explain how pseudoscience come to be will be just an exercise.
How about teaching the scientific method and then teaching how to apply those methods to proving or disproving all these theories, not just current scientific ones. Instead of just displaying political intolerance and applying "my thinking is the only way to think" fanaticism to what you disagree with.
It has the potential to challenge the underpinnings of religions. And it threatens the authority of leaders in general, depriving them of a supply of blind and willing followers.
Have gnu, will travel.
1. Don't believe something because "a scientist" says it. A scientist should provide evidence for the claims they make. Once lots of evidence has been collected, scientists form a consensus about the claim. That doesn't mean the claim is correct, but if you're going to argue that the claim is incorrect, you had better put forth very compelling evidence if you want to convince anyone.
2. Just because you prove some evidence provided by a scientist is incorrect does not mean a particular conclusion is incorrect. There was a recent fraudulent study of stem cells that used fraudulent data. That doesn't mean all stem cell research is fraudulent. Similarly, if one climatologist falsifies data, that doesn't mean AGW isn't happening.
3. There is a consensus among medical researchers that there is no link between vaccinations and autism. There is a consensus among climatologists that AGW is occurring.
So, no, it's not a political issue. It's just science as usual.
40% of Americans believe in creation and about 80% hold a belief in an invisible man in sky. I agree that it's time to show students the difference between science and irrational assumptions. Maybe by bringing the science of ghosts, God's and all other matter of insane ideas into the science room we can finally move past the iron age and into the 21st century.
Just saying that is some kind of heresy in most English-speaking areas.
In many areas close to where I live, saying that gets you elected to Congress. Of course, whether or not folks in those areas are speaking English is debatable.
It is one (unprovable) thing to claim God exists. It is quite another (unprovable) thing to claim that God has a specific list of rules for you to follow, and a specific set of rewards and punishments lined up for them, and specifically wants you to give me a specific amount of money.
Why draw this distinction? Because it is widely understood that belief in God helps maintain psychological health, especially when under pressure. It is a critical element of the most effective addiction-recovery programs as well as keeping military personnel functional when the crisis hits and sane after it has passed.
None of this means God exists. But it means that belief in God, even in the most abstract way, is beneficial to humans. It also seems true that some humans can cope just fine while being strictly atheist, or just agnostic. However, this does not change the fact that for most people, belief in God is useful.
The problem is not belief in God, but belief in all the other baggage that humans bring along with belief in God. And this fact has also been widely recognized. Spiritual-but-not-religious may be hackneyed, but it is still popular, for this very reason. And it is nothing new. For example, the Sadducees (a Jewish sect that were part of Jesus' primary target audience and comprised a lot of the early churches) did not believe in an afterlife at all (no heaven, hell, reward, or punishment, yet still they found reason to believe and benefit from belief).
The teaching of critical thinking, and methods of recognizing pseudoscience, is important. People need to learn this, not only to protect them from charlatanry of every variety, but also to help them recognize when their own faith might be a bit heavy on the unsubstantiable details. It should not be presented as a definitive disproof of theism, however, since it is not (agnosticism is the only truly logically defensible position), and since the psychological harm this could cause will be socially harmful and will cause tremendous political resistance.
In Science, there is no distinction between verification and supporting empirical evidence. The question of whether or not something is scientifically truth is entirely empirical. Scientific theory is the best description of these observations that we have at any given point. It is probable that every scientific theory yet invented will be superseded at some point by a better explanation.
You should know all this. Either your nick is well-earned or you're just playing games with semantics.
To address the specifics of your ignorance, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is unambigous evidence for the Big Bang. There is approximately zero chance of the Big Bang cosmology being disproved at this point; steady-state cosmology is as dead as geocentrism. The only less credible theory would be...you're not a Young-Earth Creationist, are you?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Janine Melnitz: Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis?
Winston Zeddemore: Ah, if there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. - Will Duran
The same critical thinking should be brought from the hard science classes, where it is so particularly effective, to history and "social studies". The awareness of how people are confused or deceived, and how to detect it, are invaluable in understanding what we often call the "soft" sciences, and to understanding human behavior in general.
The point of bringing these into the classroom is not to prove they are bogus - the point would be for kids to think how they would go about proving that the belief(s) in question are right or wrong.
What if you find that 98% of the people who buy magnetic bracelets feel better, and have a significant effect on back pain? If three double-blind studies said so, would you believe it, even if it makes no sense?
How would you test to see if ghosts exist? Magic? Gnomes? What would you actually test for? You could start getting into signatures, etc.
It's actually really entertaining to think about, and would be a great curriculum addition if you handle it right.
You can't teach critical thinking in schools. The Texas state Republican party platform is explicitly opposed to it.
"Critical Thinking" is a meaningless phrase. The Wikipedia page contains nine different defintions, several of which contradict each other. This is my favorite: Critical thinking is a commitment to the social and political practice of participatory democracy. I am not complete sure what that babble means, but it appears to mean that "critical thinking" means going along with the crowd.
So instead of using a meaningless phrase like "critical thinking", why don't you say what you mean? What specific skills should the schools be teaching? What would a lesson in "critical thinking" entail? How would that differ from "normal" thinking?
Christians burnt and drowned little old ladies that lived on their own just in case they were witches.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Remember when Common Core dropped cursive as a requirement and I think implemented keyboarding (typing)?
Why it shouldn't be dropped is mentioned below.
This is one of the dumbest articles I have read in a while. A similar case could be made for teaching every child how to shoe a horse.
Is there a chance Common Core is economically focused?
Are you seriously suggesting that it shouldn't be?
unless you were jewish and didn;t convert to christainity or lapsed in your christainity
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
While not an advocate for pseudo science, it's illuminating to consider how these seven symptoms can be applied to the practice of regular science:
1. The use of psychobabble – words that sound scientific and professional but are used incorrectly, or in a misleading manner.
Most specializations are rife with jargon, often using words that have been incorrectly appropriated from the English language and had their meaning changed. To test this at home, apply a spell check to a scientific paper.
2. A substantial reliance on anecdotal evidence.
Anecdotal evidence is there to guide your research (though not to validate it). It doesn't need to appear in your paper, but it is a critical part of the discovery process.
3. Extraordinary claims in the absence of extraordinary evidence.
I think this is a prerequisite to getting published in Science or Nature. Your claims have to be sensationalized to sell. Take your convenience sample with ten data points and spin it until it's ground breaking!
4. Claims which cannot be proven false.
Anything described as "universal" or "ubiquitous" probably falls into this category.
5. Claims that counter established scientific fact.
A dialectic is necessary to advance science. Surely you don't want dogmatic group-think to predominate?
6. Absence of adequate peer review.
Have you been through a peer review process? Why aren't you making eye contact with me?
7. Claims that are repeated despite being refuted.
You mean the type of stubbornness necessary to overcome the inertia of the currently dominant paradigm? So I should withdraw my research if a single group publishes a study indicating that they "were unable to reproduce" my results?
However the witches as listed in the defrocked monk's witchfinder's manual never have. It was an excuse to sexually assault widows, murder them and take their stuff with half given to the state to allow the murder to be carried out. Funny how we went from a monk's fantasy of girls rubbing on broomsticks to Harry Potter and Quiddich.
Or stripped attractive spinsters, widows etc to look for "the devils mark" on their breasts or genitals. Some were carefully examined for days. Witchfinders were rapists, torturers and murderers that got away with it by sharing half the money they got from their victims with the authorities.
teaching the scientific method. Those students who can absorb (and not all can) the concept of disciplined critical thinking, do not need to have examples of pseudoscience discussed, as those examples become self evident to the properly educated. Any teacher who says "I believe" in evolution, red shifted star light, plate tectonics, etc., has already lost this battle. Saying instead "We are compelled by evidence, observation, and rigorous testing, to accept this explanation, until such time that further evidence, observation, and rigorous testing compel us to change our opinion." is the only correct way to teach science. That many teachers fall short of this ideal, is painfully obvious. Discussing faux science is a waste of precious time.
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
Indeed. Hence their moniker change from "global warming" to the more general and happens everyday "climate change". Much harder to disprove that climate changes everyday. They had to adopt something to hid their half truths.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
You are merely mocking your ignorance of the subject. Meanwhile the scientists are not wanking with words like yourself but instead dealing with specific models which are most definitely falsifiable.
Science is a bit of a different field to social media advertising or whatever mindset you are trying to squeeze it into.
Rhetoric, psychology and logic. Students should be trained to automatically pick apart and analyze any argument or assertion they come across, note its underlaying assumptions and measure any "wiggle room" the speaker is leaving for themselves.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Just because you recognize something as pseudoscience doesn't mean you won't believe it.
Not necessarily. They just need to give the public appearance of it so that they can get elected to office.
Your school system maybe. I got physics and chemistry and biology and the scientific method from age 12 if not earlier. Not at the same time of course.
And there were plenty of kids who cannot rise above concrete thinking. Literally if they can't see it, it doesn't make sense. A car engine makes sense, so they grow up to be mechanic with no ability to grasp what you want them to grasp. If you demonstrate car based experiments and how that is scientific method, you could convey the idea. But customizing education to even a class of 10 means you spend 1/10 as long on the subject.
Your local school system probably has a curriculum available for you to review stating when kids learn what. And probably a tracking procedure to advance the smart kids and remediate the others.
If you find out more, instead of repeating the same unverified pseudoscientific claims, you would be surprised. In some cases you will see it being done. In others you will see why it can't be done.
Your personal experience as a student is not representative, so don't bother. Learn about what you are talking about, start at the local school board or council.
If that is as you say then curse can and does work but in somewhat different way we imagined. That is interesting - is curse a curse if we know how it works (by suggestion and some such)?
Critical thinking doesn't mean that you should mindlessly doubt everything. It's about as bad as mindlessly believing everything.
The basic premise of critical thinking means that you face a theory, ponder its validity and unless you can disprove it, it's valid. If you can offer up a competing theory, all the better. Then you can pit them against each other and see which theory describes the observation better.
That's critical thinking. It doesn't mean pissing on everything you get told, it means simply that you should not believe whatever any kind of "authority" tells you without pondering the validity of the claim.
That also doesn't mean that every opinion is equally good. It's not. If it is my opinion that computers run much better if you soak them in lemon juice, it's fairly easy to show that my opinion sucks.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your post is ironic since it's a pure straw-man attack. It's also just stupid. Can you find a school board anywhere that's pushing for astrology,etc. in the classroom?
Play Command HQ online
How about pseudoscience like "forcing people to pay more for something won't make them buy less of it" (higher minimum wage)?
And AR = Arkansas....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I'm not sure you can teach "critical thinking" period, but even if you can most public school educators are poorly equipped to attempt the task.
I'm also unsure why educators feel they must create the psuedo-philosophy called critical thinking when the real philosophies of Epistemology and Logic so adequately covers the subject matter.
Additionally I don't see why the Democrats would be any more receptive of the sheeple being freed from their version of group-think then the Republicans are
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I doubt most people even have the mental facilities to grasp any one of those 7 points, which is precisely why they work.
"By incorporating examples of pseudoscience into lectures, instructors can provide students with the tools needed to understand the difference between scientific and pseudoscientific or paranormal claims"
Everyone already has all the tools they need to separate "real" from "pseudo" science. It's not that they can't, they just won't.
People who want to believe in this stuff believe in this stuff. It's not a lack of understanding or intellect, they simply want to (or not to) believe.
It's not simply belief. Witches exist. I know some.
That's not to say that they have any kind of supernatural powers but they follow the Wiccan religion.
Tighten up your claims, please.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The critical thinker is usually the one kid in the room everyone glares at for asking the "stupid question" that everyone else "knows" the answer to but no one knows how they know.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The witches in the Wicca religion are the witches the Christians burned. They might not have mystical powers but they have a lot of the same paraphernalia and rituals. The witches in our cultural memory are stereotypes aimed at these people. There is not two distinct ideas of witches, there is one real group of people called witches and the propaganda aimed at demonozing them. They might not really go around hexing our crops, but they very much are witches.
You have a point - the claim "Witches don't exist" is a conceptually muddled and factually incorrect statement. The intent of the claim (in the context of pseudoscience) is really that spell casting does nothing. A different topic is to point out that the myths about witches told by Christians are untrue.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Did you ever test it? I did, but without really understanding Voodoo, so I now know that it wasn't a valid test. So that was a fail in critical thinking. I've still never actually experimented with actual Voodoo, according to the currently most dominant beliefs. (There are lots of variations, so I couldn't actually disprove all variations of the belief. I've never even ritually sacrificed a chicken...though I did once ritually sacrifice a pint of rum.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It is also interesting to point out to people (what my "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and all) that witch trials and burnings were not a notable feature of Medieval Europe, but were phenomenon of the Renaissance and early modern Europe. It did not end entirely until the start of the Industrial Revolution.
(It is also interesting that the early Christian church generally rejected the idea of supernatural spell-casting witches. This belief took hold in a more "enlightened" and "advanced" period.)
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
None of what you say say changes the fact that the Religious Right is vehemently opposed to teaching critical thinking and is using their political power to ensure that it is not taught in schools. Democrats may read tea leaves, but they don't insist that reading tea leaves be part of the science curriculum.
I piss off bigots.
Something I never understood, how did the creation story get so much later evidence in science?
The creation and big bang closely match. There was nothing and it exploded.
The great flood. Lots of water from the deep.. Now we find moons or planets with underground oceans.
How did ancient writings get some wild concepts right? Proving creationism and thus God isn't likely to happen with scientific method, but there may be more than psedoscience to it.
You have convinced me! The ancient texts that provide the earliest, least corrupt source of these stories is clearly the religion most likely to be true and valid.
All hail Enlil, father of the Gods! Enlil's commands are by far the loftiest, his words are holy, his utterances are immutable!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
P.S.: After you sacrifice the chicken, you barbeque it and eat it. You may also draw designs with corn meal. I've never learned what designs.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Of course, whether or not folks in those areas are speaking English is debatable.
Round these parts, we talk "Merican", boy. An doncher ferget it.
Not redundant. This is precisely where it leads. From pseudo-science to inclusion of people who disagree with any scientific consensus on anything, especially those paradigms with dominant political activists.
I don't recall Genesis talking about an explosion and I don't recall the Big Bang theory saying there was nothing before the Big Bang. I also don't follow how you can conclude water on a moon of Saturn is a proof of the great flood. Anyway, even at the time the Bible was created, I think several people already knew of this thing we call "water". There is really no need for proof for the existence of this "water".
We now know Genesis is ridiculously wrong. I even suspect some people were able to say it was ridiculously wrong at the time it was invented. Those who wrote it had absolutely no clue. It's not even pseudoscience, it's plain illogical fantasy. I mean, plants were created before the Sun? Even at the time, they could have thought of it and at the very least put the creation of the Sun before plants. Of course in a fantasy world anything is possible and those details are irrelevant, but still...
I don't really blame all the people who wrote the Bible, at least no more than I blame J.K. Rowling for writing Harry Potter, but I certainly blame you for not being able of basic thinking.
No, I am afraid that you are in grievous error.
You do not suggest a theory and claim the inability to of an ecperiment or observation to falsify it as verifying it.
You do not, clearly, but that is actually how science works. We have two categories of scientific theory, the falsified and the yet-to-be falsified. Theories (mark you, not hypotheses) which have yet to be falsified are considered true.
Support and verify are completely separate things...
Not in the context of science. There is no such thing as "proof" or "certainty" in this context, either. If you want to continue playing semantic games you'll have to find another player: these are well-defined terms.
"...when you indirectly test a concept by indirect measurments..."
Most measurements are in some sense indirect. They can still be strong evidence for a theory; even null results (notably, Michaelson-Morley) can be valid and useful observations. I'm sorry if you wish, like Thomas, to personally probe the mysteries of the universe, but we are not endowed with a universal perspective nor even vision beyond a tiny spectrum. You cannot directly observe subatomic particles; they exist regardless. However, to most definitions of the term, the CMBR is a direct measurement: it is residual radiation from the Big Bang. We don't have to be there to see it; we have a snapshot. We have other evidence, but that alone should be sufficient grounds for the theory. There are no competing theories for this observation -- one might say that it is "settled science". In the same way with AGW, almost everything we know about physics would have to be (wildly) wrong for it not to be true.
You don't seem scientifically literate, and I include the adverb as a courtesy. You may feel free to redefine "evidence", but it won't change anyone else's definition, and it definitely doesn't discredit the observations. It's a pretty bizarre departure from reason; I'd ask what belief you're sheltering from reality, but I think we'll all be the better for not knowing.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I don't think that's the issue precisely, but I think the idea of debunking actual pseudoscience is really dicey.
When you teach evolution you're teaching something the parents think is wrong. They fight it but you can do it.
But if you debunk creationism you're teaching that the parents are wrong. They're going to fight that a lot harder.
Similarly with "Roughly one in three American adults believes in telepathy, ghosts, and extrasensory perception,"
So if you use those as examples of pseudoscience you're saying that 1/3 of parents are wrong.
Even if you could manage it politically I don't like it from an ethical perspective.
It's better to concentrate on teaching good critical thinking skills. The Texas GOP notwithstanding the idea of making kids better critical thinkers is something everyone can get behind, I doubt you can find a single creationist, astrologer, or antivaxxer who doesn't attribute their belief to superior critical thinking skills. Everyone can agree with making the kids better critical thinkers because everyone thinks that they're right and smarter kids will agree with them.
If you want to attack the pseudoscience directly you might be able to get away with inventing some ridiculous fictional pseudoscience and debunk that just so they understand the existence of cargo cult science. But even you'd probably get in trouble as it would be pretty obvious you were "shilling for big science" or something similar.
I stole this Sig
How did he think the viruses came about?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Global warming nazis seem to have lots of mod points today :)
1. The use of psychobabble – words that sound scientific and professional but are used incorrectly, or in a misleading manner.
"consistent with"
2. A substantial reliance on anecdotal evidence.
computer models
3. Extraordinary claims in the absence of extraordinary evidence.
poor proxies taken as irrefutable, designed with algorithms that generate hockey sticks out of red noise.
4. Claims which cannot be proven false.
the worst part of the AGW trope - no necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement. Every observation is considered "consistent with".
5. Claims that counter established scientific fact.
AGW doesn't hit this so much, since it's mostly a "heads I win, tails you lose" assertion.
6. Absence of adequate peer review.
AGW is notorious for "pal review"
7. Claims that are repeated despite being refuted.
Ah, the "97% of scientists" claim :)
Consensus is not science.
Vaccination science includes the possibility of falsification. AGW does not. Therefore, vaccination science is true not because there is a consensus, but because there is a falsifiable hypothesis statement that has been ruthlessly attacked, even by its proponents, and it has survived.
Keep going around telling people who put you in your place that they are scientifically illiterate. Eventhe links you present disagree with you and agree with me. All you are doing is ptoviding facts that you are illiterate yourself.
I'm confused. Doesn't your country operate democratically? If three-quarters believe something, shouldn't you all be forced to believe it? Mustn't it be taught as fact if that many believe it?
I don't understand your methods.
Read the links you posted. They support my position.
Enhil kicked my dog, you insensitive clod
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Of course AGW can be falsified. If we had not observed warming, it would be falsified. But we observed the predicted warming, so it is confirmed. In fact, we observe no less than ten signs related to the warming.
That phrase is precisely correct. It does not say, however, that absence of evidence is proof of absence.
Evidence for one thing is also often evidence for something else. Example: I hold in my hand a yellow fruit. There's your evidence. It's yellow; you start there. That is perfectly good evidence for bananas, lemons, etc. Turns out I was actually holding a lemon. So the evidence for a banana, while perfectly valid in that context, was not adequate to prove the case.
This is what "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" actually means. It is saying that if you can't find any evidence, a, or one of, the possible conditions this may be pointing to is absence of that thing. Remember: saying something is evidence is not the same as saying the evidence is proof.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Ask any high school or college age person why they believe in antibiotics and they won't be able to answer.
Ask any high school or college age person why they believe in general relativity and they won't be able to answer.
Ask any high school or college age person why they believe in the semiconductor physics that power their computers and they won't be able to answer.
Ask any high school or college age person why they believe in evolution and they won't be able to answer.
"Any"? All it would take is a single example to prove your statements false.
[End Of Line]
Your school system maybe. I got physics and chemistry and biology and the scientific method from age 12 if not earlier.
Merely having the classes does not mean that those classes are good. The existence of such classes is not what's being debated.
[End Of Line]
When I was in high school, one of our teachers told us voodoo magic was real, and that contrary to popular belief, it would work on you even if you didn't believe in it. Try to make teachers talk about astrology and you'll end up with them going around the classroom with shit like, "That's because you're a Virgo".
In school my geography teacher was a believer of the hollow earth and recommended us to read some book about it.
Beat that!
"I think this line is mostly filler"
Really if you want to see pseudoscience in action take a good look at all the assumptions behind cosmology and astronomy. Redshift = distance is an ASSUMPTION and Edwin Hubble himself was the first to point that out.
No, it is not an assumption. Hubble (and others) confirmed it by comparing redshifts with distances measured independently.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
For some reason, slashdot insisted on mangling the href. Here's the correct url without html parsing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
So instead of using a meaningless phrase like "critical thinking", why don't you say what you mean? What specific skills should the schools be teaching?
Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction, too.
A more to-the-point approach might be: Any school class described as "science" should include teaching scientific methodology, in a way that's understandable by the students at that grade level. This should include opportunities to apply the methods in situations that the students can understand.
One long-standing problem with the way that most school textbooks do this is by teaching only "the experimental method" as the way that science works. This has been widely criticized by presenting an obvious counter-example: Astronomers have never used experimental methods, but astronomy is generally considered one of the hardest of the "hard sciences" (in both senses of the term "hard' ;-). This is often used as a primary example explaining why you must teach scientific methods (plural). It's a big, complex subject, and different methods are used in different scientific fields. We can do lab experiments with bacteria or fungi; we can't (yet) with planets or stars.
But the phrase "critical thinking" isn't much used by scientists. Rather, you should try to teach the scientific meanings of terms like "conjecture", "hypothesis", and "theory", which in scientific jargon aren't polysyllabic synonyms for "guess". Figuring out how to produce understanding of such terms would go a long way toward fixing the problems with the way schools teach science these days. It'd also confound the religious folks who dismiss evolution as "just a theory".
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
But nothing hss verified the big bang. Plenty of experiments support it though.
That's the same thing. The more experiments which verify (or support if you like) the theory, the stronger it is. Perhaps I'm being a bit loose with the word? I dunno - but either way, every observation made to date supports big bang and there are no competing theories AFAIK. There probably is some better theory, but the need for it has not come up yet.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Some people have a really hard time separating “truth” from “fact,” and they also have difficulty with how these relate to science.
A novel may contain truth, in that it is not a factual account of anything, but you might learn a life lesson from it. Indeed, many childrens books (and certainly many other genres) are specifically intended to teach valuable lessons. Religious practitioners often conflate the two. If your scriptures are (as they are taught) “true,” does that mean they are factual? You might learn something from the Bible, but there are many things in it provably non-historical, consistent with the Hebrew penchant for taking other people’s oral traditions and adding a “moral” component. Anything historical in it doesn’t necessarily convey useful truth, and anything non-historical is not necessarily devoid of truth.
Conversely, it’s common to mislead by the use of facts. Propagandists often present accurate factual information, followed by specious reasoning that leads the listener to an incorrect conclusion. It’s all in how you present things, what you emphasize, what you downplay, and what teleological conjectures you want to draw to explain those facts. Politicians are brilliant at making the statistics say whatever they want.
Then there’s science. It is indeed fact-based. And we hope that it is true. But in fact, it is not a truth generating engine. It is a MODEL generating engine. A true model is, of course, better than one that is merely numerically accurate, but there’s only so far you can be sure (or maybe even care) just how true it is. Sometimes, you just need something predictlve. A recent Ars article about zebra stripes mentioned how scientists developed and tested several different explanatory models before they found one or two that were fully consistent with all of the facts. Every single one of those models, even the wrong ones, was scientific, because they were falsifiable (a term that few people really understand). Another example is the prevailing theory of the moon’s origin; we have a model that is consistent with what we can measure today, but there’s so little physican evidence that we only accept the model because we lack any better explanation. It if turned out to be wrong, nobody would be the least bit surpirsed. Even a blind, non-explanatory model, like using a neural net for numerical regression, is of scientific value, because it can be used to do engineering, and it may aid in further analysis that leads to a falsifiable explanatory model. Once a model has gone from postulate to hypothesis to theory, consistent with the evidence, we can say that it is consistent with the FACTS, but as for truth, we can only say that it is PROBABLY MOSTLY TRUE. Each time we discover some more evidence that we haven’t explained or which contradicts the model, we have to adjust it, making it incrementally more probably mostly true.
This brings me to pseudoscientific ideas like intelligent design. Even if it were, hypothetically, true, it isn’t and can’t be science. Why? Because it isn’t falsifiable. Anything you can’t explain, you can dismiss as being the result of some outsider tweak, so it’s impossible to prove it wrong. It’s also not predictive. It makes no interesting testable claims that evolutionary theory doesn’t, so it doesn’t yield any new knowledge. Finally, it’s useless to engineering. Not all scientific theories are necessarily going to be used by engineers, but in the case of intelligent design, it CAN’T be. A potentially useful scientific theory must be based entirely on predictable naturalistic mechanisms. This way, engineers can develop new systems that rely on or leverage those natural phenomena. Intelligent design, on the other hand, requires miracles or alien interference that we’re (by definition) too primitive to understand. And unfortunately, engineers can’t perform magic and don’t have access to alien hyperspace nano-wormhole entangement bioengineering technology.
God itself is not incompatible with science. Genesis and miracles described in the Bible are much more troublesome.
There is a great deal of pseudoscience belief on both sides of the isle. The left has irrational beliefs on nuclear power, GMO foods, etc.
You're trying to pee in the punch with a "both sides do it" argument. The not-so-subtle difference is that "the left" doesn't deny that nuclear power and GM foods exist. To paraphrase the famous saying, everyone is entitled to their own policy opinions, but not to their own realities.
But then the Republicans aren't generally as bad as they get a rap for. Their only substantial reality-denying party positions are on evolution and global warming, and both of those are for easily understandable political reasons (the former too keep the dwindling numbers of the faithful faithful, the latter to please their corporate masters).
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Roughly one in one Slashdotter believes in FTL travel, wormhole travel, colonizing the universe... That's any better?
I guess that means I'm not a Slashdotter, because I don't believe any of those things exist (or are possible).
(Too bad...)
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Roughly one in three American adults believes in telepathy, ghosts, and extrasensory perception," wrote a trio of scientists in a 2012 issue of the Astronomy Education Review.
Yes we must use government institutions to regulate what people believe! If we start young we can change the next generation.
That's one spin you could put on it.
Another choice is "How is a country full of people that believe nonsense going to survive the 21st Century?"
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Really if you want to see pseudoscience in action take a good look at all the assumptions behind cosmology and astronomy. Redshift = distance is an ASSUMPTION and Edwin Hubble himself was the first to point that out. Or start being honest enough to teach students that LOTS of biologists as well as physicists like Sir Hoyle have valid doubts about the theory of evolution, and no they are not creationists. Their main problem with evolution being that it is so often presented as settled established fact when it really has a lot of serious problems that need to be worked out. Just saying that is some kind of heresy in most English-speaking areas. Truth is many scientists would love to replace evolution with a better theory.
Every hypothesis is "an assumption". But some stand up to scrutiny and offer a lot of explanatory value.
As for evolution, what you said isn't heresy - it's a claim that you didn't try to back up.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Eventhe links you present disagree with you and agree with me.
Anyone who reads those links can see that Tenebrousedge is right and you are not.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I confess I have conflicting opinions about Penn and Teller (just as they have conflicting opinions about many things.) And I have no desire to defend their libertarian views.
However, it is clear that Pen and Teller do not support pseudoscience. In fact, they go out of their way to debunk it. This is even mentioned in the very wikipedia link you supply.
I assume you are trying to claim that libertarianism itself is a kind of pseudoscience. I'm not a libertarian, but even I must disagree with that. It is a philosophy.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
yet every assumption is not a hypothesis...or at least a scientific hypothesis. Not saying you fall into this category but many people use the word incorrectly, without the ability to test the hypothesis. If it can't be tested and proven false, it's pseudoscience. But yeah, the AC's post seems to be from the mid 1920's and ignoring all progress after that.
Even Darwin himself made note of potential objections to his theory, as his original "Origin of the Species" was published before the Burgess Shale discovery, and he stated that "as of yet" the fossil record didn't back up his hypothesis. Yet we've found many (well, a few lol) pre-Cambrian fossils now...but many Creationist still will adamantly scream and yell that Darwin himself "said the theory was wrong" because 1. they don't understand the times it was published and 2) refuse to recognize anything that changes their internal world view.
Simply observing warming doesn't mean you've proven that your pet cause for the warming is *the* cause - certainly warming is *necessary* for AGW to be true, but it isn't nearly *sufficient* to exclude all other possibilities of natural warming.
Furthermore, you've had ever increasing CO2 for the past 20 years, and by various temperature sets, up to 20 years or more of no statistically significant warming...would you consider that a falsification?
Unless someone is editing wikipedia, you are lieing.
It evrn starts out using support over verify. I suppose you are going to also claim that the big bang if fact and can never change too.
According to the article, i think you should take your psudoscience and go home if you hold those beliefs.
Start by getting rid of all of the TV shows and Movies dealing with paranormal activities. No wonder people believe this crap.
I am a professor of chemistry and physics with significant high school experience. I was teaching a section of advanced high school students that were dual enrolled in a college section of freshman level chemistry during their senior year of high school. They were subjected to the same rigors of knowledge but we had more time together. I performed the Forer demonstration with them right around the time that I was going over the history of atomic models. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect)
So, I started the lecture that day with a bunch of pseudoscientific garbage. I told them that if you start with something small and multiply it up to a large scale that you'd get large errors but that you could get shockingly good measurements if you started with something big and narrowed it down to the small. For example, if you measured a single floor tile and then multiplied by the number of floor tiles in the room then you'd compound your errors and end up being off; however, if you measured the whole room's square footage and then divided by the number of floor tiles then you'd be really close to a good, precise answer. The kids are nodding their heads by this point. Well, as a professor of chemistry and physics, through the various colleges and universities I'm affiliated with, and the journal publications that I have access to, I can get some very reliable data, astrophysical readings, and other star charts. If I start with data at that scale, and then narrow it down to the scale of say, Earth, then you might be surprised what kind of predictions I can make. Now, I've ran some calculations for you, following the models, along with some computer assisted predictions, and I have some for you to take a look at. These aren't common newspaper style predictions but ones made with access to high level resources. I'm going to ask you to do an evaluation of the model so it's really important that there isn't any talking. I need you to see your work and your opinion alone. We will share after you have completed your written evaluation.
At this point, I'm still talking but I'm handing out pieces of paper. They're folded in half, and on top there is written a last name with a date of birth that I've pulled from their records. I tell them that they are customized to the individual and I'd like you to evaluate them by striking through anything that seems like it doesn't apply to you, underline anything that you agree with, and put a box around anything that is spot on. You'll get a chance to share in a moment, but please keep this to yourself until everyone is done writing.
I have several kids out of the 20 some odd that are having trouble keeping quiet because they're freaking out saying things like, "how do you know this!?" and, "this is scary!" but I try to calm them down until everyone is done. Of course, everyone's says the same thing: "You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life."
Because of the authority that I've established by this unit, I've only ever had one kid give me the, "I know what you're doing look but I'm playing along." The kids are shocked as
"By incorporating examples of pseudoscience into lectures, instructors can provide students with the tools needed to understand the difference between scientific and pseudoscientific or paranormal claims," say Rodney Schmaltz and Scott Lilienfeld."
You don't get it. People KNOW the difference. They just don't CARE.
And I don't see why anyone should be worried that "roughly one in three American adults believes in telepathy, ghosts, and extrasensory perception" or that "Roughly one in five believes in witches, astrology, clairvoyance, and communication with the dead." or that "Three quarters hold at least one of these beliefs, and a third has four distinct pseudoscientific beliefs."
Who cares ? "Science" isn't the be all end all to everything, people know that these beliefs are not "scientific". Something about this article and the work of the authors of the studies reeks of a kind of intellectual power-trip desperation.
If you do not thing science has a great deal of catching-up to do yet, and that at least a couple of these things of this list of concern are going to be elucidated eventually, you know nothing of the history or methodologies or biases inheritance in "science".
You must be confused about what I wrote. Why would I explain how absolute truth is not scientific, and then claim something as absolute truth. "Well supported by empirical evidence" is as close to truth as science gets.
I'm getting the idea you're using "verify" in the sense of "prove." To dispense with this idea, I present this article for your perusal (it was the first google result for 'scientific verification').
I'll excerpt some relevant bits for you:
Verification: The use of empirical data, observation, test, or experiment to confirm the truth or rational justification of a hypothesis. Scientific beliefs must be evaluated and supported by empirical data.
One of the most important consequences of this extended and complex debate is the conclusion that theories cannot be "verified", but they can be "confirmed," "warranted," or "falsified."
It is rare for a scientific hypothesis to be amenable to direct and certain confirmation along these lines: given E, H is certainly true. That is, it is rare that there is a finite body of observations that suffice to establish the truth of a given scientific hypothesis. This is so for two reasons: First, because scientific hypotheses normally refer to entities, mechanisms, or processes that are not directly observable; and second, because hypotheses and theories normally make universal claims (laws) that go beyond any finite body of observations. Instead, verification normally takes the form of indirect inductive or hypothetico-deductive support for the hypothesis: given E, H is likely to be true.
Thanks for playing, have a nice day.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
#8 use of sophistry.
As the /. collective honed the "facist" term to a more concise local meaning, the quality of discussion improved because its application came to imply a certain mindset. Lately, fundamentalism has been getting a lot of air-time. Collectively developing inclusive definitions of the various tropes of fundamentalism will also facilitate discussions in this vein of exploring edge conditions of superstition and reductionist thinking...and particularly in the service of "scientific" rigor as a sole source of "truth". There is (and rightfully should be) a defensible position between scientific "proof" and anecdotal evidence...else we risk loss of black-swan type discoveries/advancements and the value of unexplainable evidence prior to the advent of the mythical "wholly deterministic" state. The pessimistic view that labels a sense of wonder as pseudo-science is no more valid than the optimistic view that refuses to acknowledge the shortcomings of scientific methods. Likely the critical difference (very difficult to teach in the classroom) lies in judgement of the intent of the purveyor which, if appended to each item in the bullet list, would make for a much more meaningful conversation...as that is where this discussion must inevitably lead if critical thinking is the goal. Critical thought must then recognized as an applied process (hopefully improved by new information and trial/error) with the potential to produce wildly divergent reinforcement (positive/negative) in the absence of ongoing open interpretation (momentum). For example, when negative impacts of policy implementation are ignored or not recognized or simply misunderstood (unaffective)...it is easy to find examples of false positive reinforcement. However the critical differentiator lies in intent, more fully evidenced in the causal chain. Thus the difference between a politician and a statesman, the value of reputation (interpretation of the causal chain) and importance of ongoing interpretation of experience, new information and the ability to shift point-of-view (open minded education) hinges on intent...and must be tempered with restraint and tolerance as to content and patience guidance concerning intent. Intent is often a proxy for the subjective “why” of the common 5 part objective scientific or investigative presentation (who/what/when/where/why) and should always be reserved as subjective. Honest observers will readily acknowledge numerous historical instances of failings connected to the “why” regardless of how much “scientific” evidence points to an accepted interpretation of an outcome. The scientific method is brittle, narrow and easily subverted...we should try to keep that in mind lest we begin to believe it can be a proxy for truth or intent,
What makes you think that medicine isn't going to advance sufficiently that the common (say, 20% of the population) man on the Clapham Omnibus today, reading his obituary in the horoscope (or whatever they do with horoscopes), isn't going to live into the 22nd century?
There was a "Ha ha, but serious" article I read a few years ago, which proposed that the first person to live to the age of 1000 has already been born.
Then again, it's as plausible that the last human being to die has already been born, and I'm not postulating an increased average lifespan in that idea.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Great pattern you've discovered for a rebuttal.
Step 1. Ad hominem attack. :-)
Step 2. Make vague references to vast numbers of rebutting examples without actually supplying any.
Step 3. More ad hominem.
Step 4. Ignore actual citations (like in Tart's latest book).
Step 5. Claim area is under study by reputable people without naming any.
Step 6. Profit?
== Some links related to healthy democratic education reform
BTW, from 2006, not that I agree with most of their business-oriented recommendations:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/...
"That's the conclusion of a bipartisan group of scholars and business leaders, school chancellors and education commissioners, and former cabinet secretaries and governors. They declare that America's public education system, designed to meet the needs of 100 years ago when the workplace revolved around an assembly line, is unsuited to today's global marketplace. Already, they warn, many Americans are in danger of falling behind and seeing their standard of living plummet."
Reform in what direction? We didn't get where we are today in public schooling without a hugenumber of powerful interlocking factions, as explained here:
https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...
"This is not to say sensitive, intelligent, moral, and concerned individuals aren't distributed through each of the twenty-two categories, but the conflict of interest is so glaring between serving a system loyally and serving the public that it is finally overwhelming. Indeed, it isn't hard to see that in strictly economic terms this edifice of competing and conflicting interests is better served by badly performing schools than by successful ones. On economic grounds alone a disincentive exists to improve schools. When schools are bad, demands for increased funding and personnel, and professional control removed from public oversight, can be pressed by simply pointing to the perilous state of the enterprise. But when things go well, getting an extra buck is like pulling teeth."
Chris Mercogliano, previously of the Albany Free School, is an example of a true reformer, with 30+ years of success including with some of the toughest kids rejected by mainstream schools, a success almost almost totally ignored:
http://www.chrismercogliano.co...
Or on homeschooling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
"During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency, nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent, with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were "mentally retarded teenagers" - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical western children, "by western standards of measurement."[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional developm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Insightful post. James P. Hogan, a fan of true scientific inquiry, has some good fictional examples of this process in his "Giants" novels and some others (including his last).
I can ask if the scientific process as a skill (including critical thinking and assessment of intent as you put it) is learnable to any significant degree in the day-to-say environment for most of today's kids? So many kids are caught between forced schooling and entrancing but mostly passive media consumption, while they are also generally being fed crap nutritionally and essentially denied sunlight and exercise by all the demands and distractions.
From John Taylor Gatto from around 1991:
http://www.informationliberati...
"After an adult lifetime spent teaching school, I believe the method of mass-schooling is its only real content. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son's or daughter's education. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love -- and lessons in service to others, too, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.
Thirty years ago [in the early 60s] these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television [[or now also computer games and the web etc.]] and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time as well. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a path of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know."
I am, to some extent, a creation of highly-regulated 1960s and 1970s TV. There was not that much on of interest to kids, and much of what was on of interest to kids often either had a moral purpose (even cartoons or comedies/dramas like Yogi's Friends or Batman or Thunderbirds or the Andy Griffith Show) or was connected to scientific or cultural literacy (PBS, Sealab 2020, Wild Kingdom). The pacing was slower then, too, making it more feasible to, say, build with blocks while sort of half-following the screen. So, a limited amount of TV could be a boon even without much parental supervision -- while still leaving plenty of time with nothing interesting on TV to trigger boredom which lead to other things to do which lead to skills connected to science and engineering and citizenship, like in my case building with TogL's (somewhat like LEGO), electronics experiments or eventually computer programming, reading Isaac Asimov novels, playing with our dog, going outside with other kids on the street or a park, going to a summer day camp for sports and arts, or going to church on Sundays. Today's distracted and overwhelmed parents (typically both working full-time, if there even are two) have a much harder (perhaps impossible) job of navigating a complex media landscape for their kids -- even as they may also have a much broader range of good stuff than ever before (including, say. a classic like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood available on-demand on Amazon alongside an amazing range of scientific documentaries and pro-social media programs and movies). The latest Kindle Fire with parental controls on specifying kids' media is perhaps a step in the right direction there, as is the OLPC tablet and pre-selected educati
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
As per good ol' Wikipedia: "PEAR employed random event generators (REGs), to explore the ability of test subjects to use telekinesis to influence the random output distribution of these devices to conform to their pre-recorded intentions to produce higher numbers, lower numbers, or nominal baselines.[5] Most of these experiments utilized a microelectronic REG, but experiments were also conducted with a mechanical device which dropped balls down a peg-covered board.[6] PEAR also conducted exercises involving groups of volunteers which, they claimed, produced more pronounced results.[7][8] In all cases, the observed effects were very small (about one tenth of one percent), but over extensive databases they compounded to statistically significant deviations from chance behavior.[9] The baseline for chance behavior used did not vary as statistically appropriate (baseline bind). Two PEAR researchers attributed this baseline bind to the motivation of the operators to achieve a good baseline.[10] It has been noted that a single test subject (presumed to be a member of PEAR’s staff) participated in 15% of PEAR’s trials, and was responsible for half of the total observed effect.[9] PEAR’s results have been criticized for deficient reproducibility. In one instance two German organizations failed to reproduce PEAR’s results, while PEAR similarly failed to reproduce their own results.[10] An attempt by York University’s Stan Jeffers also failed to replicate PEAR’s results.[9] PEAR’s activities have also been criticized for their lack of scientific rigor, poor methodology, and misuse of statistics.[9][11][12]" I'd say that "proved" is a might bit strong and premature here...
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
It'd also confound the religious folks who dismiss evolution as "just a theory".
Better than "So's gravity, but failing to believe in it doesn't make it cease to exist."?
Learn to love Alaska
No, it's a term mostly used by academics to mean "thinking in a way that is in accordance with currently popular theories in the humanities and social sciences"
while "uncritical thinking" means "thinking in a way that disputes currently popular theories in the humanities and social sciences."