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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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
--
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/...
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.
"Why are scientists increasingly concerned about what some people in our society think and believe?"
Well, if you're an astronomer studying the effects of asteroid impacts and their likelihood, you may come across evidence that it has happened in the past and that their effects are rather devastating. As we may well be able to develop the technology to divert an asteroid on a collision course. People running around that the earth is only 10 kY old are not helpful then.
Climate change same thing.
Bert
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe scientists have grown weary of having to compete with complete nonsense as if it somehow had equal merit?
Maybe it's not just scientists who feel this way?
You're doing the same sort of false equivalence thing that Fox News does with the "fair & balanced" bit.
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.
Your wishing for the impossible does not make it any less so. People who believe in nonsense are not going to appreciate sense.
I don't think you understand what the scientific method entails, or what "falsifiability" actually means.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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 :)
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
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