Author Topic: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>  (Read 12192 times)

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Offline Bobboau

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
would you look at my thread title, me saying idiots is me being lazy on the part of my post I didn't care so much about.
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Offline Lorric

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
would you look at my thread title, me saying idiots is me being lazy on the part of my post I didn't care so much about.
Ah yes. I didn't notice you were the OP.

That's not me saying that makes it right or anything, but I see.

 

Offline karajorma

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
And I'd say there's a reasonable case for people not being idiots in every case. Evolution. I really don't get it why Evolution is held up as this great litmus test of intelligence when it really has no impact on your everyday existence or capability to actually do anything short of actually working in a position directly related to evolution whether you believe in Evolution or not. Where I came from while certainly interesting is not particularly important to me, especially when put next to the question of what I'm going to do while I'm here. The thing is, since Evolution is really not relevant to your ability to live your life, I can see why people would either not deem it important to know, or default to the seemingly simpler explanation and scoff at the notion that we came from apes. Also, while Evolution was well taught to me here in England in the schools, I know how much of a contentious issue this is over in the USA where the survey was done, and how inconsistent schooling in the subject is.

The fact that it doesn't have a major impact on everyday life for lay people is exactly what makes it such a great litmus test. I'll quite happily admit that there are a great many things I don't know about when it comes to science. As a result, I leave those matter in the hands of people who are vastly more educated than me on the issue to debate. I might ask questions but I am not stupid enough to believe that my uneducated opinion on the matter carries any weight because even though I am educated in a science, that doesn't mean I know all science.

On the other hand, the very act of someone who knows nothing about evolution claiming that people vastly more educated on the subject must be wrong, makes them idiots. The very fact that it doesn't have a real world impact requiring a deep understanding of the issue (unless you are involved in medicine, science, or one of the other fields where it does) makes it a particularly dumb thing to take a stand on. Unlike GMOs or MMR or climate change, the actual physical effects of accepting evolution even if it turned out to actually be wrong are pretty small. So it takes a very special kind of idiot to decide that this is something that needs to be challenged.
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Offline jr2

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
Or maybe it's just everyone doesn't have a completely polar view of the popular "you're stupid and a worthless human being if you do/don't believe ___" topics.  Science is no place for smugly superior attitudes.

Is that the voice of reason I hear?

 

Offline InsaneBaron

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
Francis Collins is most definitely not a creationist, that is a giant slander on him. He's a firm believer in Evolution, but he's also a firm believer in Christianity. There are plenty like him.

e: I mean, if Collins was a creationist, that would be a massive boon for the Creationist movement. You don't see them parading his name do you? Well, make your own conclusions over that one.

Yeah, Collins' view is more about evolution being the tool God uses to shape life. Which is a perfectly respectable position to take.

That being my position for that matter.

In high school debate club, my debate partner and I ran a case that would involve using GMOs (like Golden Rice) as part of a US-based international aid program. It was tragically hilarious how opposed many people were to that. We joked that Jurassic Park must have scared everybody off the topic.
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Offline Scotty

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
Rather than an indicator of intelligence, I tend to view strong opinions on topics such as evolution to be an indicator of what I just decided to name a couple seconds ago as "intellectual inertia."  It's not necessarily being stupid, it's reacting badly to being told you're wrong.

I think to some extent all of us know that such is a difficult thing to admit.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
It's also a well known thing that smug superior people (like me! I'm arrogant to the point of abuse sometimes) use to insult others as being stupid, and because, as Lorric correctly points out, it's absolutely irrelevant for your day to day life, they absolutely enjoy the hell of obnoxiously sticking to their beliefs as a barrier against what they perceive as an atheist secularist sinful attack on their religion, by the usage of obligatory education that insists that Life as we know it was the product of a blind process, not the beautiful hands of their god. The more they want to show to everyone how deeply religious or deeply commited to their own community they are, the more denial they will express on this kind of knowledge.

And because it's not like denying gravity (the consequences of which would be immediately clear), the price of insisting on this knowledge is exactly zero (at least in the near term).

 

Offline Bobboau

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
Rather than an indicator of intelligence, I tend to view strong opinions on topics such as evolution to be an indicator of what I just decided to name a couple seconds ago as "intellectual inertia."  It's not necessarily being stupid, it's reacting badly to being told you're wrong.

I think to some extent all of us know that such is a difficult thing to admit.

there is already a name for this, confirmation bias, also stubbornness.
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Offline Mobius

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
My biggest issue with studies like this is not their accuracy, but the fact that they always tend to contribute to this "America is a country of idiots" thing. Do that in Italy and other western countries, and I can ensure you that the results would be similar, maybe not worse, but similar (this has been elected the most ignorant nation in Europe, where 'ignorance' in this case means overestimating a number of social issues). Yeah, I understand that the widespread presence in the USA of creationists, anti-vaxxers and other groups whose ideas derail from the scientific consensus does have an impact on statistics, but isn't the study simply stating the obvious? Can anyone please name at least one branch of human knowledge where the opinion of experts doesn't differ from that of the general public?

By the way, I don't get to spend a lot of time in the US, but judging from what I see there, groups driven by rationality and reason (like the atheists and pro-vax) are gaining more and more importance over time.
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Offline Dragon

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
Yeah, if you go by percentages, America would likely have just as many idiots as any other country. It has more of them by absolute numbers, but that's just because it's so darn big. And because English is the current lingua franca and (despite the slow decline) US is a superpower, the world tends to hear about them. Also, in Europe, most backwards attitudes seem linked to the Catholic Church. America has a truckload of religious nuts, ignorant dolts and backwards conservatists (with a small "c", I'm not talking about the party here), but they are spread over a great number of vocal organizations. European countries have them, too, but they're more unified than Europe itself, mostly aligning themselves with the Church (regardless of what the Pope actually says about that sort of attitude...). We also have creationists here in Poland, just as stupid as in America, but they're seen as a part of the general "backwards religious" category. Dunno if it's that way in other countries (especially in Italy, which actually has Vatican at arm's reach).

 

Offline Rheyah

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
Disagreeing with scientists is fine.  It's the reasoning that makes people sound ignorant.  I hesitate to use the word stupid because ultimately I don't think that is the problem.

However speaking as a physicist myself, the public understanding of even the basics of my subject (even on a place like here, relatively educated and reasonably up to the minute on these things) is pretty poor.  There is a tremendous gulf between the layman, an undergrad physicist, someone like myself at PhD level and my professors.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
and then there's Edward Witten.

 

Offline Rheyah

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
There's a lot of talk about individual geniuses in physics.  Witten.  Einstein.  Hawking.  Newton.  However they always fail to acknowledge that the bulk of all research is enabled by and mostly completed through PhDs.  Individually clever and inquisitive types who just want to make a mark.

I would say 70% of the output of my research university is entirely from the use of PhD students and postgrads.  Behind Witten, there would have been a legion of collaborators, cross correlators, bright PhD students and others.

 
Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.
- U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

I am appalled at the state of discord in the field of climate science…There is no observational evidence that the addition of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have caused any temperature perturbations in the atmosphere.
- Award-winning atmospheric scientist Dr. George T. Wolff, former member of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, served on a committee of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and authored more than 90 peer-reviewed studies.

The cause of these global changes is fundamentally due to the Sun and its effect on the Earth as it moves about in its orbit. Not from man-made activities.
- Retired NASA Atmospheric Scientist Dr. William W. Vaughan

The recent ‘panic’ to control GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions and billions of dollars being dedicated for the task has me deeply concerned that US, and other countries are spending precious global funds to stop global warming, when it is primarily being driven by natural forcing mechanisms.
- Climatologist and Paloeclimate researcher Dr. Diane Douglas

Temperature measurements show that the [climate model-predicted mid-troposphere] hot zone is non-existent. This is more than sufficient to invalidate global climate models and projections made with them.
- UN IPCC Scientist Dr. Steven M. Japar, a PhD atmospheric chemist who was part of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Second (1995) and Third (2001) Assessment Reports, and has authored 83 peer-reviewed publications and in the areas of climate change, atmospheric chemistry, air pollutions and vehicle emissions.

Unfortunately, Climate Science has become Political Science…It is tragic that some perhaps well-meaning but politically motivated scientists who should know better have whipped up a global frenzy about a phenomena which is statistically questionable at best.
-Princeton University Physicist Dr. Robert H. Austin

"My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy."
-Dr. John S. Theon, Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist

"Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.
- former UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh



Just FYI, when the messiah climate of prophet for profit, Al Gore, left congress in '02, he was worth ~$2M.  13 yrs later, he's now at ~$300M.  Go figure...

The social engineering involved in combating "global warming" fuels my skepticism of the celebrities espousing it.  People &/or governments are willing to manipulate the data to produce a desired outcome for effect, which seems to be about control.   The ends always justify the means...

 

Offline Klaustrophobia

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
Firestorm in 3.....2.....


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Offline karajorma

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
No real point in a firestorm. Wheelspin just demonstrated the exact point I made about evolution for a different subject. It's exactly this attitude that makes the anti-vaxxer movement so popular.
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Offline watsisname

Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
Wheelspin, why are you using a single local temperature dataset (GISP2) to make a point about global average temperature?

This is a thing I see a lot of people who don't accept scientific consensus on climate change do, and to me it just emphasizes how readily people seem to feel capable of forming opinions about a subject that they don't actually study rigorously.  When temperature is analyzed with a global perspective, one finds that those earlier warm periods are a lot less significant than the warming we are experiencing today.  Which is a good clue that the current warming is also quite fundamentally different in character than those earlier ones.  This one is caused by a change in the thermodynamic properties of the atmosphere, and the physics behind it is remarkably simple compared to some other physics we could be talking about.
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Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
There's a lot of talk about individual geniuses in physics.  Witten.  Einstein.  Hawking.  Newton.  However they always fail to acknowledge that the bulk of all research is enabled by and mostly completed through PhDs.  Individually clever and inquisitive types who just want to make a mark.

I would say 70% of the output of my research university is entirely from the use of PhD students and postgrads.  Behind Witten, there would have been a legion of collaborators, cross correlators, bright PhD students and others.

Without question! I was only following your escalating of a genius ladder. At some point the sheer complexity of theory must be ( I say "must be" because I don't even have the capacity to see it myself) so unbelievable that it takes a genius of Witten's or Hawkings' size to make some sense of all the hard work all of the PhDs working on the subject matters do. Fortunately there are plenty of them.

 

Offline Aesaar

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
No real point in a firestorm. Wheelspin just demonstrated the exact point I made about evolution for a different subject. It's exactly this attitude that makes the anti-vaxxer movement so popular.
But he quoted 8 people who say it's not real.  Surely that trumps the hundreds of others who say it is, and the many, many studies done that confirm it!
« Last Edit: February 09, 2015, 05:01:54 pm by Aesaar »

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Scientists and Public at Odds <clickbait>Americans are idiots</clickbait>
If you really want to be baited into that discussion, I think sarcasm won't really be helpful here, it plays exactly into the mindset that I was talking about, those who believe in X behaving in a condescending, sarcastic way towards those who are skeptical, those who are skeptical behaving in a defiant pose against what they perceive to be either the Big Lie or just The Great Sheeple Belief.

Regarding the Global Warming debate, I wished people could focus on discussing political actions that could be shared with people who are more skeptical about the stuff for purely pragmatical reasons. Even if some people might disagree that Global Warming is real and dangerous, surely we could avoid the "Toxoplasma Of Rage" theory here and agree in certain actions that converge both towards combating climate change and other values (like pollution, economics, technology, etc.). Raising the standards of gasoline use in cars, for instance, could be argued for both CC and improving the economics of oil imports; investing in smart grids will create better conditions for solar power for individual houses but also waste a lot less energy and improve the economy (solar power for each household has lots of libertarian interest for the possibility of making people more independent of the big government and whatnot).

Surely hundreds of small alliances like these could be made in order to advance ideas and policies that will contribute to ameliorate the conditions that are the source of the fear of Climate Change. Why waste time in these futile battles instead?

We all know why of course, and I posted an article here about this last month.