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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 :)