It is out of their expertise, and so they trust the “experts”, except, it turns out, that many of the “experts” seem to lack expertise in other closely related subjects (in this area, esp., it seems, physics and statistics).
What is a bit scary to me is that a lot of people with STEM Masters and PhD degrees seem to get sucked into the AGW, CAGW, CAGCC (climate change), etc. Today’s world is a constant stream of information, data, stories, claims, etc., and who has time to fully research everything? Critical thinking is an excellent mechanism for quickly winnowing the reliable from the horsehockey, and also serves to help look deeply into whatever is kept.Ī lack of details could be overcome to some degree by the low info voters if they had decent critical thinking skills.Īgreed with the critical reasoning. The skill is so baseline its acquisition helps the individual in all areas: job/work, in the marketplace, politics, and religion too – it’s critical thinking that tells you the dirty toothpick being sold as a piece of the true cross for $5,000 on eBay is likely a scam.
Folks have got to know how to discern shit from shinola, how to recognize poor arguments, and how to consider claims others make. But, sound skills in critical thinking are invaluable to both the individual and to society as a whole. We are all jacks and masters of very little. Science and technology has become so incredibly complex that no single person can know all of it. Still, even more important to me than better science education would be to establish a four-year course of classes specifically in critical thinking, a new stand alone topic to go with math, science, history, etc, i.e. The need for better education in American public schools is obvious, across the board subject-wise, but math and science especially. I strongly suspect that the Warmunists are solidly in control now.Īs Robert Conquest (not a scientist, but no dummy either) pointed out in his Three Laws of Politics, any organization which is not explicitly right wing sooner or later becomes left wing. I haven’t looked at the magazine in years. The whole “maybe yes, but … maybe no” which is absolutely central to scientific inquiry was gone from the pages of SI. That fervor continues today, when the press is infested with statements about how some animal’s (… something, the press never seems to be too sure) is 98% identical to that of humans, or how evolutionary lines diverged so many millions of years ago. But the almost religious enthusiasm of the true believers destroyed the science. It was all reminiscent of the claims for comparative embryology in the early nineteenth century. Its boosters claimed that this would pin down all sorts of evolutionary questions at last, with no possibility of dispute. I vaguely recall that it was something to do with early DNA sequencing. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but it became unreadable. Every issue seemed to have an article about workflow control in Swedish factories, the genetics of the mosaic fruit fly, and a few other stoically repetitive subjects. SI had reached a certain predictability by the 1970s. (Featured Image Source: Occupy Wall Street protester YouTube) However, in remedying that problem, it looks like we need to begin first and foremost with our liberal Democrat friends. The American public certainly may have a scientific literacy problem. When the the political orientation was further subdivided, conservative Republicans - the group many would identify as the “religious right” - out performed even those intellectual titans known as liberal Democrats. Republicans fare a bit better, with only 37.9% failing to get both correct. The report examined the very same National Science Foundation survey and found the following:Ī majority of Democrats (51.4%) could not correctly answer both that the earth revolves around the Sun and that this takes year. Interestingly, a recent report from Northwestern Law Professor James Lindgren turns that incorrect assumption on its head (h/t HotAir). This fits into the popular belief that conservatives were and continue to be anti-science. The emergence of the religious right beginning in the late 1970s created unnecessary battles pitting religion again “reason,” as if we must choose a side.Īmong other things, Kirshenbaum directly attributes the rise of religious Republicans to the sinking influence of science in public policy making.