Bill Nye Disses "Regular" Software Writers' Science Knowledge

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.")

Comments

Good grief...

[Frosty Piss]

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.

Re:Good grief...

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:Good grief...

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Good grief...

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:Good grief...

[Capsaicin]

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!

Re:Good grief...

[skids]

"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.)

Re:Good grief...

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Good grief...

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Good grief...

[Mike Buddha]

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

Isn't that obvious?

[Skarjak]

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

Wow

[kamapuaa]

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!

Misleading Summary

[estitabarnak]

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.

Re:Misleading Summary

[Headw1nd]

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.

Bill Nye, the Dogma Guy!

[GoddersUK]

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.

Re:Horribly misleading summary

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Evidence based, reasoned arguments don't work

[PeterM from Berkeley]

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

Synopsis

[meglon]

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.

Context matters

[joebagodonuts]

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

Television entertainers know about as much about..

[Karmashock]

... 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.

Re:Mostly right.

[xigxag]

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.