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The US Public's Erratic Acceptance of Science
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. general population is often the butt of jokes with regard to their understanding of science. A survey by the Associated Press now shows just how arbitrary and erratic the public's dissent can be. 'The good news is that more than 80 percent of those surveyed are strongly confident that smoking causes cancer; only four percent doubt it. Roughly 70 percent accepted that we have a genome and that mental illness is seated in the brain; about 20 percent were uncertain on these subjects, and the doubters were few. But things go downhill from there. Only about half of the people accepted that vaccines are safe and effective, with 15 percent doubting. And that's one of the controversial topics where the public did well. As for humanity's role in climate change, 33 percent accepted, 28 percent were unsure, and 37 percent fell in the doubter category. For a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth and a 13.8-billion-year-old Big Bang, acceptance was below 30 percent. Fully half of the public doubted the Big Bang (PDF).'"
Don't ALL scientists doubt the Big Bang and other models for the universe in the sense that they are all subject to comparison with observations? If a model conflicts with observation, the model either must be dropped or modified.
Science isn't about believing something to be true.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I'm not entirely sure what your point is supposed to be. If your definition of safe is "completely devoid of any possibility of risk," then I wonder how you justify getting out of bed every morning. A more reasonable argument is that safety is always a relative measure. Injuries attributable to common vaccines are uncommon, permanent damage is incredibly rare, and death occurs at a frequency that can best be described as vanishingly small. On the other hand, many of the diseases that we vaccinate against often cause permanent damage or death, and weakening the herd immunity puts not only the individual at risk, but society at large. So, yes, there are some potential (though very small) risks to vaccination, but that does not mean that they are unsafe.
Rhapsody in Numbers
Much as most don’t understand the scientific definition of “theory,” you seem to be using the wrong definition of “doubt.”
Proper scientists recognize that a currently held theory is merely the best explanation we currently have for a phenomenon. In light of the evidence, they believe it’s PROBABLY MOSTLY true, but they are willing to easily accept that it isn’t if new evidence demonstrates that the older theory doesn’t explain all the facts. This isn’t “doubt” so much as “critical thinking.”
The doubters the article is referring to are people who, DESPITE the evidence, believe the theory is NOT true. Of course, most of them are painfully unaware of the evidence, they have no idea how to get to it, and they wouldn’t know how to interpret it if they had it. A lot of that is due to a broken educational system.
People say there’s “mounds of evidence” for evolution. So I’ve asked biologists if there was a compendium of major publications in the area, but I didn’t get very far. There are decent college text books, but many don’t present the original evidence; they only recount the findings from the literature. Part of the problem is that most of the “evidence” is boring tables of measurements of fossils and bones. If you won’t know what the numbers mean and how they relate, they’re just numbers. They are the evidence, but it doesn’t help they layman at all. Another part of the problem is that any summary of the evidence would leave out too much. A proper treatment of the topic would be on the order of “every peer-reviewed publication on the topic since Darwin.” This is because publications cite each other so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. They make “assumptions” they don’t have to justify because someone else already did, but it’s a major undertaking to follow all the rabbit holes. Biology PhDs have trouble with that. A farmer will be hopelessly lost.
With most sciences, most people are clueless. But since they have no other reason to doubt it, this doesn’t cause any conflict. People have heard of chemistry and astronomy and mostly just consider them to be overly difficult or esoteric. It’s only biology (and some of cosmology) that makes any statements that go against things people have been taught to believe. They have no hope of understanding the science, but they do believe what their religious leaders tell them, and there is nothing intelligible to the that says otherwise.
It’s this lack of understanding of what “common folk” go through that makes me really angry with people like Richard Dawkins. As far as many people are concerned, he’s nothing more than an arrogant jerk who thinks that everyone who believes differently from him is a moron. I’ve seen dozens of videos of him on YouTube, and I never see him present evidence. He merely claims that it’s there and believes that it should just be obvious to everyone what it means. It’s like me (the computer nerd) when I was in high school who treated people unkindly because they didn’t understand computer as well as I did. Now I’m a CS professor, and I have to teach basic CS concepts to young adults. It’s VERY challenging to get some concepts across, but I work hard to do it. Dawkins is terrible at this. Perhaps if he deigns to teach an undergraduate course now and then, he might do okay, but he strikes me as one of those all-too-common lecturers who has no patience for anyone who questions what he says. His attitude reminds me of so many religious people who insist that you’ll go to hell if you don’t believe blindly exactly as they do. I guess calling someone a moron isn’t as bad as telling them they’re going to hell, but it’s a similar intolerant attitude, intolerant to people who don’t share your same training
I stopped listening when one of them wanted to argue that the King James book was God's word.
God's word? That book is a translation of a (very bad, I may add) translation of a translation of a translation. And possibly you have to add another "of a translation" in there, the jury's still out on that one.
That's like a homeopathic dose of God's word.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Climate change: A theory about very complex system to model with the most famous proponent being a politician [with vested interests and suspect behaviour]. Of course there will be some doubters.
Thank you for summing up the core of the problem: too many people think celebrities are more believable than science, when it comes to being told what to think.
If Al Gore had "discovered" climate change, and was the only significant person promoting the theory with little convincing evidence, then people would certainly be right to doubt. But when Gore is only one notable figure of many that's echoing what the huge majority of climatologists have been telling us for decades, and when those climatologists have reams of peer-reviewed studies summarising multiple lines of evidence to back up their conclusions, then who gives a flying fuck about Gore?
Sadly, the answer is "the public", or more specifically, that sector of the public that don't want to accept any responsibility and would rather reframe the debate to be about celebrities and their credibility. Same goes with vaccines - much of the focus is on McCarthy instead of the evidence. Plus of course the Bible itself is probably the biggest celebrity ever, in a way.
Solution? Dunno. Stop clicking on every damn story with a celebrity in it, maybe, and perhaps then "news" outlets might not give such weight to their opinions. Won't help people face facts, but it will reduce the noise levels at least.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I don't think that's even the point. If people doubted the big bang because they carefully considered the arguments and found some flaws that made them doubt it, that would be fine. They doubt it because they can't imagine the terms involved, because a religious book says it isn't true, or mainly just because they don't want to think about it. For the same reason that people think low frequency radiation from their computer is dangerous but Gamma radiation from water at a hot spring isn't. For the same reason people use IE instead of Firefox or Chrome. It usually isn't that they've educated themselves and weighed the evidence - it's that they can't be bothered - and yet at the same time, they feel a need to express their uneducated opinion.
Anecdotal Evidence/Case in point: A friend of a friend who lives in Kansas, USA started trying to buy up bottled water after the Tsunami incident in Japan. Because, you know, the water in the US was going to be contaminated soon. Riiight. Here I live in Tokyo and the water is generally safe, but the water in Kansas was to be undrinkable. Yet he was going to solve this by somehow buying enough water to last a lifetime? I guess food wasn't to be affected. People are just, in general, stupid and illogical - and it doesn't seem to bother many of them.
People in society need to start doing two things:
1. Educate themselves so that they can do some critical thinking about the world in general and enlarge their world view. Start actually caring about things other than which celebrity is cheating on who.
2. Recognize when you don't know and don't care to put forth the required effort and defer to the experts instead of talking bullshit. Sure, the experts may be wrong occasionally - especially about models of the universe or financial predictions - but they have in general a much better chance of knowing what they are talking about than you do, if you can't be bothered to do #1 above.
I suspect most of these results aren't necessarily coming about because of religion, but from basic ignorance of science. Ask questions about something the listener has no knowledge about in any meaningful way, then they either guess the answer or they give the answer that they are expected to give by society. This applies to even people who give the "correct" answer, I doubt many of those who agreed that smoking caused cancer ever read the scientific reports about it or that those who agreed with the big bang theory understand what it really is.
In other words, this is not a poll about understanding science but a poll about which viewpoints are commonly accepted or not.
And this is not use a problem in USA, you will find this around the world, but it's more fun to make fun of the US and pretend that it's more ignorant than elsewhere.
Even if you will find more people in Europe that agree that climate change is caused by humans this does not mean that there are more people who read science journals over there, but that the prevailing public attitudes lean in that direction more than in the US. In the US we've got some people trying to actively sway public opinion about climate change for economic reasons, thus lots of doubt is created which is less common in Europe. For both Europe and the US the vast majority of the people have only heard about climate change from the news media anyway.
Those who would advocate AGW need to provide a solid convincing answer to one thing: the temperature of every planet in the solar system has increased, not just Earth's. I think we can agree there are no humans on Venus and Neptune cutting down trees and burning fossil fuels.
Bullshit; there is no evidence supporting the idea that all planets are warming uniformly and at the same relative rate (which would be necessary for this idea). Any climate variations on other planets is perfectly well explained by proximity to the sun and natural environmental fluctuations. The warming of the Earth, on the other hand, is not explained by these factors. Besides, there's no evidence that the current epoch of warming of the Earth has tracked solar output (in fact there's no evidence that the sun's output has varied significantly, on average, in the past few millenia).
But it's curious how people would cling to the data on the climate on other planets - which is tenuous and sparse at best - and ignore the massive amount of evidence we have for Earth's climate, CO2 concentration, and the interlinking of these two.
And yes, ocean acidity is a huge problem and it's caused by CO2. In fact it's one of the main problems that our carbon emissions have caused.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Another thing that the American public is confused about, is the difference between the way science uses the word "theory," and the colloquial use of the word. In other words, most Americans think "theory" means "hypothesis." They hear "the theory of evolution" as "the hypothesis of evolution" because they have that idiom, "it's just a theory," (meaning mere speculation), at the front of their minds. This gives rise to specious arguments, even from otherwise intelligent people, such as, "Gravity is just a theory, too!" Better to explain the difference between an hypothesis and a theory, if you're going to say anything at all.
-- sudon't
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