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Bill Nye Disses "Regular" Software Writers' Science Knowledge

Posted by timothy on from the line-in-the-sand dept.

conoviator writes Bill Nye, one of the foremost science educators in the United States states that only the upper crust members of American science and technology (with degrees from top tier schools) understand science, particularly climate change. He opines that "regular software writers" dwell in the realm of the semi-science-literate. Nye rates science education in the U.S. an F. ("But if it makes you feel any better, you can say a B-minus.")

35 of 681 comments (clear)

  1. Good grief... by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Bill Nye, one of the foremost science educators in the United States...

    I think that's overstating it a bit. I don't know what Nye's bona fides are (some: bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering in 1977), certainly he's a knowledgeable science guy who has done much to interest kids and young adults in science, and of course there is his Great Debate with the "Intelligent Design" idiots. But "one of the foremost science educators"? Hmmm.

    states that only the upper crust members of American science and technology (with degrees from top tier schools) understand science, particularly climate change....

    Well SNOOT SNOOT, my good mad! Not an MIT grad? Did'nt go to Stanford? Hit the bricks! You opinions, masters, PhD, or whatever? Not worth the paper your diploma was printed on.

    Good grief.

    Of course Nye is a Cornell University guy, so, you know, everyone not of the Ivy League is suspect. I wonder which secret society he is a member of...

    Science in the US get's low grades? University in general in the US gets low grades. Why? It's not about education, it's all about money. And football, don't forget the football.

    So let's just solve this by insulting everyone. Washington State University knows nothing about medical science. Oregon State University knows zilch about forestry (or is that not science?). There are many well known public and private universities that while not up to Bill Nye's Ivy Standard, do good and great science.

    Nye is off the beam.

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    1. Re:Good grief... by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

      To be fair, he was just answering the question an interviewer asked him. It's not like he was writing a thesis or anything. Someone asked him his opinion, and he gave it.

      I can tell you, I've given much, much stupider opinions of my own before.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Good grief... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Just because you've self-taught science well doesn't mean every programmer has. He's right. Most programmers are just ordinary people, and most ordinary people aren't very science literate.

      A comp sci degree, if you even have one as a programmer, doesn't ask very much in the way of physical sciences -- it's a math degree as much as it's anything besides plain programmer trainer, in my experience. Doesn't cover many of the skills needed for reading scientific literature or doing proper experimental design (which is a shame -- digression here -- because I think that is a skill relevant to debugging).

    3. Re:Good grief... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's actually something he's spot-on about. Science knowledge in general in the US is absolutely dreadful.

      If you don't believe me, try asking people some science questions and see how many of them even get it close. What is the chemical formula for water? How old is the Earth? What's the difference between a dominant and recessive trait? What does half-life mean? What is red shift? What is kinetic energy?

    4. Re:Good grief... by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Someone asked him his opinion, and he gave it.

      A fairly accurate opinion, in my opinion. CS people are better educated than the average person, but many of them are still surprisingly ignorant about scientific topics.. Many of them don't even understand how computers actually work.

    5. Re:Good grief... by phantomfive · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Many of them don't even understand how computers actually work.

      Now that's actually depressing. If you get through a CS program without learning how a computer works, then your CS program failed you.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    6. Re:Good grief... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The nuts and bolts of computer architecture isn't in the scope of computer science. Sure, you might want to know a little about how things work from an abstract level, but let's be clear; Computer science and electrical engineering are two different disciplines. As a comp sci grad, a lot of the nitty gritty details of the computer are irrelevant to my study.

      An astronomer might know a little about the optics inside his/her telescope, but the level of understanding that a physicist would have is simply not in scope.

    7. Re:Good grief... by Capsaicin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      CS people are better educated than the average person, but many of them are still surprisingly ignorant about scientific topics.

      And neither should we expect them to be experts outside their own field. I should have no reasonable expectation that a farmer (Nye wrote "regular software writers and farmers") would have expertise in astrophysics for example. And as science requires ever more specialisation, I should have no reasonable expectation either that an astrophysicist be an expert in pharmacology (just don't try telling any physicist that! ;)

      The problem is not so much the lack of knowledge about "scientific topics," it the lack of humility in regard to those who have knowledge. You are free, of course, to contradict the orthodoxy in absolutely any field of science, but it is impertient to do so unless you have done the hard yards and made yourself an expert. The knowledge, the skill rather, that everyone ought to possess (and this IMO is more important than direct knowledge of "science topics") is the skill to assess the credibility and authoritativeness of sources of scientific "information." It is this skill, in light of the increasing supply of disinformation, that a science education ought to impart.

      You may think that measles isn't that serious (you'd be wrong), but it could just as easily have been polio. The inability to sort out scientific information from scientific disinformation kills!

      --
      Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
    8. Re:Good grief... by skids · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "Computer Systems Engineering" covers it pretty well -- it's a mix of EE and CS so you end up with a ground-up understanding from transistor to circuit to chipset to architecture to OS to software. Of course, these days there are so many competing standards/products that all do the same thing but differently and so many layers of bloat, it's not humanly possible to know every detail, and the more actual work you do the further you fall behind in "knowlege" compared to someone who manages to find a way to just read books/code for a living and never has to put shoulder to wheel (not that we don't need those sorts of people, as they can see the forest rather than the trees.)

      --
      Someone had to do it.
    9. Re:Good grief... by Hognoxious · · Score: 1, Insightful

      When you say "build" do you mean "assemble"? Or are we expected to start with sand, oil, and malachite?

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    10. Re:Good grief... by Capsaicin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      [A]s a college educated person, they should know the approximate age of the universe, that the universe is expanding, and that we know that because of the red shift. They should know, roughly, the scale of the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, etc

      Why should a farmer, or a software writer, be able to put even an approximate number (OK, understanding red shift is pretty basic) to any of those factoids. Surely it is far more important to know that the effects of capsaicin are mediated by the TRPV1 receptor ... or am I naval gazing? ;) (Believe it or not, but that question was actually put to me over lunch this weekend.)

      OK, any science graduate must have a working knowledge of the basics of physics, chemistry and maths (as these are the building blocks of the other sciences). Knowing that the universe's age is measured in billions rather than thousands of years doesn't hurt either, (but really, if you thought the universe was 5 billion years old that is not going to affect most of the work you do in biochemistry).

      However increasingly when "facts" are only a few keystrokes away memorising them becomes less important, while recognising fact vs non-fact becomes more so.

      Bill Nye is ... saying that too many people lack basic scientific literacy.

      I can read what Bill Nye is saying. What I'm saying is that, in the context in which he answered that question, his diagnosis is wrong. It's not so much a database that is required, as a bullshit detector.

      I'm not sure, perhaps your knowledge of immunology is so good as to be comparable to amount to a knowledge of "age of the universe ... the scale of the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, etc." But even if your work in science has never brought you into contact with CST, you ought to be able to assess the credibility of evidence led by anti-vaxxers for example.

      --
      Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
    11. Re:Good grief... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You're paraphrasing Dijkstra, but missing his point. Astronomers, in general, know a heck of a lot about optics. His point wasn't to excuse ignorance of how computers work (he worked on the design of the STANTEC ZEBRA and wrote an incredibly scathing review of the IBM1620, for example, so clearly knew his way around the design process), it was to point out that this is a building block.

      I'd consider any computer science curriculum that doesn't cover logic gates up to building adders, the basics of pipelining, the memory hierarchy and virtual memory translation at a minimum to have seriously skimped over computer architecture. The better ones will include design and simulation (on FPGA if budgets permit) of a simple pipelined processor.

      If you want to work on compilers or operating systems, to give just two examples, then you need a solid grasp of computer architecture.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    12. Re:Good grief... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Understanding how a transistor works requires quantum mechanics, but 'transistors are tiny magical switches' is enough to be able to understand how to build them up into gates, how to assemble gates into arithmetic, logic, and memory circuits, how to assemble those into pipelines, and so on.

      Eventually you need quantum mechanics (or relativity, or both) to understand how anything works, but understanding the electron transfer involved in combustion is not essential to understanding how a car works. Computer science is all about building abstractions.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    13. Re:Good grief... by Mike+Buddha · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You missed an obvious joke? You should be sad, at your own idiocy.

      --
      by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
    14. Re:Good grief... by CastrTroy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Just about every good programmer I know started doing it on their own in highschool, or earlier. then, many of them took a 4 year degree in computer science or software engineering. I don't think there's a lot of people who could become a good programmer in 2 years. I took software engineering, and by the end of the second year, I don't think I was really that good. Sure there was a bunch of courses that weren't programming related, but you can't just jam everything together into the same semester. There's a reason classes have prerequisites, 2 years does not give you enough time to progress to progress in your knowledge.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
  2. Isn't that obvious? by Skarjak · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Go read any slashdot article on climate change and Bill Nye's claims become self-evident.

  3. Wow by kamapuaa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Does this guy read Slashdot? How does he know that people who are good with software could have such poorly informed and ridiculous opinions on matters of scientific interest? Makes me want to give the guy a high five!

    --
    Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
  4. Misleading Summary by estitabarnak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Summary is misleading. Nye basically says US as a whole is failing when it comes to educating average people about science. He admits that, sure, we have top top-tier institutions and scientists, but we need to do a better job educating the average person.

    Hardly the swipe aimed specifically at Slashdotters that TFS makes it out to be. Furthermore, if we use /. as a case study, given some of the gems I've seen here recently, I think "semi-science-literate" isn't a bad estimate of the average.

    1. Re:Misleading Summary by Headw1nd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Second this. Not only is the summary totally misleading, it bespeaks an insecurity that might well be grounded in truth. Or it's just rabble rousing, hard to tell intent with so little of the submission.

  5. Re:Horribly misleading summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Missing footnote after Posted by timothy*

    *Not checked for factual accuracy.

  6. Bill Nye, the Dogma Guy! by GoddersUK · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, this is the world’s most technically advanced society, and we have people denying climate change. These guys are still in deep denial, and future generations, what few of them will be alive, are just going to go, “What were you freaking people doing? What was wrong with you?”

    No. This is why Nye, and people like him, are not "the foremost science educators" anywhere. This is not science. Science is not about being correct, science is not about deferring to authorities; science is a process for understanding our world, for explaining and predicting. It's a philosophy, not a set of facts. People in the future will be saying “What were you freaking people doing? What was wrong with you?”, but they won't be saying it to climate change "deniers" or "sceptics" - they will be saying it to the "science educators" who thought levelling charges of heresy was a better course than providing a reasoned, evidence based argument.

    You see if you truly believe in the scientific method, and the wider philosophy of rationality, you provide a reasoned, evidence based defence of your position and attack on your opponents position. You don't tell them that they're not qualified to speak because they don't have a PhD from Harvard, or because they disagree with the "consensus". Science does not rely on qualification or authority or consensus and the myth that it does is the biggest threat to scientific literacy today.

    And show some f***ing consistency, please. If you're going to shout down "conservatives" for being unqualified to talk about climate change please shout down "liberals" and "greens" that talk about, and accept, climate change as being unqualified to talk about it too.

    1. Re:Bill Nye, the Dogma Guy! by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ooo I'll do it:

      Climate Change Deniers you're as wrong as anti-vaxxers and anti-nuclear power advocates.

      As to science being about reasoned evidence defenses. The reasoned evidence defenses of climate change science have been made. The people who deny it don't use science they use a misrepresentation of science or no science at all "Well it was hot yesterday!"

      So yes it's perfectly legitimate to slam conservatives who refuse to accept a reasoned well cited scientific paper on global warming and it's perfectly legitimate to slam liberals who think their kids will get autism from a vaccine --not because it's a case of "heresy" but because they aren't practicing science they're practicing belief under the guise of science aka psuedoscience.

      Flat Earthers aren't ridiculed because they are heretics. They're ridiculed because they don't have an empirical leg to stand on. Science doesn't say that everybody's opinion is worthy. Science doesn't say (A) is true and (B) is false. But when you have a mountain of empirical evidence saying (A) and no evidence to support (B) but the (B) group uses psuedoscience like "Well we weren't there to observe it on camera. Therefore we don't know God didn't do it." or you have psuedoscience like "My kid got a shot and then developed autism therefore it's a shot" or "The world was warm before so how do we know carbon dioxide is responsible today, we don't" then you aren't exhibiting a critical empirical rebuttal you're just stating an opinion. Science doesn't tell us for a fact that if you jump off of a building without sufficient drag or a soft enough landing pad that you will absolutely die. But if you are a gravity denier and jump off thinking you'll just fly up into the air like a bird we can say "What were you freaking doing? What was wrong with you?"

      To expect science to not confidently state things as 'fact' that we pretty certainly know to be true as far as truth can be known is holding science to an impossible standard. Sure maybe gravity won't exist tomorrow. But if we can't at least operate on the assumption of there being facts then maybe you don't exist. Maybe you're a figment of my imagination. And if you all don't really exist then maybe I should be able to go on a shooting spree--after all if one opinion is as good as another and consensus is meaningless no matter how confidently we have observed something then my hypothetical belief that everybody is actually an alien in disguise performing a grand experiment on me is equally valid to everyone else's belief that we are all human on a planet called earth and I should be allowed to defend myself against all the alien overlords.

      Science teaches us to be skeptical. But it is ultimately a philosophy based on empiricism. We believe the world to be round scientifically because of all the evidence. It's possible it is flat (or a cube) and we recognize that we will never absolutely know for certain, but we also can say for a fact that the world is round and anyone who disagrees is a nitwit without sufficient proof to overwhelm all of the evidence we have amassed to the contrary.

      I know a lot of people hate to "believe" in global warming because it goes against their political ideology. But that's not science. Science is the encyclopedic mass of data that demonstrates its truth (so far as truth can be known).

  7. Re:Horribly misleading summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We're talking about analyzing a few sentences that were jotted down by an interviewer, but still, Mr. Nye's attitude is not so impressive.

    He suggests that one's view on climate change is sufficient to determine one's abilities to understand science. Mr. Nye must have been speaking passionately and not intelligently because that assertion is easy to refute by almost any measure of science understanding. What he probably meant to say was climate change is a very important issue and if you disagree with my ideas, then you are don't understand this important topic. Instead, he said, if you disagree with me on this narrow topic, you don't understand anything about any part of science.

    Then he continues with his "passion" to suggest that regular software writers are not scientifically literate. Maybe he wasn't referring to the software writers at Google because they are in the top tier and therefore not regular. Unless they don't agree with his views, in which case, they're stupid.

    Look, climate change is real and important. Bill Nye may be an intelligent guy, but unfortunately too many smart guys are bigoted and dismissive of others and as a result actually damage the causes that they claim to champion.

  8. Bill Nye pisses me off. by gunslnger · · Score: 1, Insightful

    At this point, anyone who disagrees with him on pretty much anything is much more likely to be right, by Occam's Razor.

  9. Re:Horribly misleading summary by gunslnger · · Score: 1, Insightful

    You don't need to have a degree in X from a "top-tier school" in order to understand it well enough to competently discuss the issues around it, and Nye is still implying that you do, and that's elitist. His comment is still wrong.

  10. Evidence based, reasoned arguments don't work by PeterM+from+Berkeley · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Except on people who are willing to listen to reason and accept evidence. Like for example, take the anti-vaccine crowd.

    You show them studies that say that the risk of the vaccine is really tiny and there's no correlation of receiving vaccines with autism. They whip out Jenny McCarthy and other anecdotal evidence, and postulate vast conspiracies by Big Pharma to perpetuate the fantastically profitable vaccine industry even though vaccines are unbelievably dangerous. Fact is, Big Pharma makes its money on Viagra and pills for chronic diseases, not really on vaccines.

    If someone wants to believe something, your reasoned arguments and evidence based defense of your facts will never persuade them otherwise. Instead, they just end up believing even harder in what you challenged them on.

    --PeterM

    1. Re:Evidence based, reasoned arguments don't work by Orgasmatron · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No snowflake believes that it is responsible for the avalanche.

      Vaccines have a non-zero risk. Not vaccinating one child has very little risk to that one child. The risk of not vaccinating is mostly in the aggregate, rather than the individual. I suspect that some fraction of the people not getting vaccines for their children are hoping to be free riders, trading one tiny risk for another.

      I don't know how common it is, my point is just that not wanting your kids vaccinated isn't necessarily the same as thinking the earth is flat. On a related note, not wanting to meddle in other people's decisions about their children makes you "not-a-statist", not anti-vaccine or anti-science.

      In the end, I think the real problem is that we have unions running our schools for the benefit of the union members, rather than for the children. Plus, math hasn't been cool for decades, not since the end of Apollo. If kids don't want to learn math, and if the schools aren't pushing it hard, you end up with an innumerate population.

      If you can't do math, then Nullius in verba is just a bumper sticker, not a reminder. Certainly not an order.

      Next, we have all manner of quackery on parade. Psychiatrists and psychologists with opposing, but equally untestable, views in criminal trials. Fat, cholesterol, salt and other nonsense warnings from the USDA while they create a diabetes epidemic. Economists pushing more debt to cure our strangulating debt problems.

      Those that practice scientistry do not have a good track record when they try to pass off their non-scientific ideas as scientific ones, and the people have noticed. They may not be able to do science, but they can tell when the other guy can't either, or just hasn't.

      Which isn't a dig against their work ethic. We know that the climate model circle jerk crew runs nonstop, validating their models against other models instead of against nature. And the Ministry of Truth is tirelessly adjusting the historic data to fit today's fashions. And I hear that Mann is again defending his secret program that turns arbitrary data into hockeysticks.

      (For those that are wondering, Briggs has a climate model that you can run on a pocket calculator, and it has more predictive skill than any of the autoregressive abominations being passed off as "science" these days. And the plots of corrections to the temperature record, made by people with the good sense to download and keep old copies for comparison to new editions, are hilarious.)

      If you want to see people that can't listen to reason and accept evidence, head over to realclimate and ask why the past keeps getting colder every year. Or why people that have received billions (with a B) in government money are trying to refute a paper by flinging poo over one of the authors getting around a million in private funding.

      --
      See that "Preview" button?
  11. Re:Horribly misleading summary by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Classic, 'I know you are, but what am I' response'

    Aside from the well written post above by GP (The Rizz), which outlines how horrible the summary of the article was, I think that the very heart of the matter is that the F- minus crowd relies almost entirely on emotional response and belief when faced with a situation that requires scientific analysis

    You are exacerbating the errors of your beliefs by refusing to look into what he actually said (much less the actions that he has demonstrated) and blindly accusing Nye of acting on emotions

    If there is a single lesson to the American public it is to adopt scientific methods, turn down the volume on your beliefs when the facts in front of your negate them, and learn to handle your emotions when faced with the possibility that you are wrong

    Cognitive dissonance can be a very painful feeling, and learning how to handle it can lead to an increased capability in dealing with the facts that life will present to you

    --
    Wherever You Go, There You Are
  12. Synopsis by meglon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whoever wrote the lead-in either can't read, doesn't understand basic English, or is a semi-science-literate who's butthurt for being called out as one. Nye hit's it pretty much on the head in his assessment... we have some fantastic scientists in this country, but they are surrounded by a huge morass of people who are intentionally ignorant and outright hostile to anything remotely intellectual; we need more scientists in this country, and less stupid.

    --
    Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
  13. Context matters by joebagodonuts · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bill Nye is an entertainer. Just because he used to play a character called "The Science Guy", that doesn't give him credibility on all matters pertaining to science. (yes I know he has an engineering degree-but that's a long time ago. He hasn't been paid as an engineer in decades) His opinion carries the same weight I would give to any entertainer's

    --
    "Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
  14. re: your uncle by King_TJ · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Honestly? I probably have a whole list of people who it would be interesting to introduce to your uncle, then.

    I've almost lost count of the number of times I've watched someone with no real scientific background in the field make a blanket statement declaring anyone who doesn't believe in climate change/global warming is clearly an idiot.

    The fact is, things are much different than that. Quite a few folks who are FAR from being idiots think it's fear-mongering, misplaced nonsense. (I'm certainly no climate expert myself, but I think I fall someplace on the spectrum far from "clueless idiot" -- and I've read enough compelling information from both sides of the argument to feel like the "best stance" to take is one of questioning everything. If we're talking about pretty painless changes we can do, such as substitution of one chemical for another in a product, to reduce the ozone layer depletion - great. Why not? But demanding people spend billions of dollars to try to "fix" the whole climate situation? That just seems like a REALLY tall order for something that reeks of special interest agendas, right now, especially when we don't even have a consensus on a solution that would definitely reverse the claimed problem and revert it to "normal" in a useful time-frame.
     

  15. Re:Horribly misleading summary by The+Rizz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You don't need to have a degree in X from a "top-tier school" in order to understand it well enough to competently discuss the issues around it, and Nye is still implying that you do, and that's elitist.

    He does no such thing. He says that scientists are good, and then starts listing a few colleges and naturally starts with the ones considered top-tier with the best programs. He stops after a few because otherwise, what, he lists several hundred colleges in this country that give science degrees?

    If I were to say "companies that employ top programmers, like Microsoft, Sun, and Oracle, are ..." would you seriously say that I consider anyone working at Valve, Apple, or any other company to automatically not be top-tier just because I didn't happen to mention their company in the short list that first came to mind?

  16. Television entertainers know about as much about.. by Karmashock · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... Science as pop stars do about geopolitics. It is always painful to listen to some pop star lecture people about the middle east or the economic policy of the Fed. It is no less annoying when a television entertainer tries to browbeat basically everyone by suggesting that he's in some elite cliche of thinkers... when really he was paid to put on funny outfits and act WAY too excited about pouring baking soda into vinegar.

    Bill Nye is a poor man's Mr Wizard. Anyone remember Mr Wizard? Way better. And everyone notice how Mr Wizard has spent years acting like the smartest man in the universe long after he stopped even doing his show? Me neither. Get over yourself, Bill. You're not half as smart as you think you are and if the software engineers don't get it then you don't either.

    --
    I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
  17. That Description Though by SuperKendall · · Score: 1, Insightful

    relies almost entirely on emotional response and belief

    Funny you mention that, because it sounds a LOT like the reaction you get from the Warming Alarmists when you point out that the rates of warming are not nearly as high as they thought (and are not going anywhere at the moment) and that simply by observing what has happened when know the models of runaway warming are very wrong. That's not emotion, that is observation based on fact, but you point that out wand what you get back generally "relies almost entirely on emotional response and belief". Usually they will bring up "what about the future generations", etc. etc.

    Global Warming Alarmism long ago passed into cult status based wholly on keeping people in line through fear. Or at least that's the attempt anyway, they tighter they squeeze the more free thinkers and rational scientists slip through their grasp...

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  18. Re:Mostly right. by xigxag · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What you're describing isn't scientific illiteracy; it's mere ignorance of certain specific scientific facts. Big deal. Nobody knows more than the tiniest fraction of true facts about the universe anyway. And unless you're an actual physicist or cosmologist, knowing that E^2=m^2c^4 + p^2c^2 isn't going to give you a leg up on some poor fool who only knows the standard coffee mug equation.

    By way of comparison, not knowing what an Oxford comma is or how to define a subordinate clause doesn't make you illiterate. Not knowing how to read is what makes you illiterate. Similarly, people are scientifically illiterate because they don't know how to "science." They're clueless how to separate fact from propaganda, good science from mumbo jumbo.

    --
    There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.