Science a Mystery to U.S. Citizens

maddugan writes "CNN and probably others are posting their synopses of the National Science Foundation's biennial report on the state of science understanding in the US. Sixty percent of those surveyed believe in ESP, psychic power, and alien abduction."

geek monothink

[Anonymous Coward]

It is typical of left-brain geekdom and sadly inaccurate to suggest that belief in the possibility of ESP, psychic powers, alien abduction et al demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the concepts of science -- particularly when reputable scientific research explores some of these possibilities quite directly.

Princeton Engineering Anomolies Research (PEAR) is an excellent place for subscribers of the Sceptical Enquirer to visit to learn a smidgen of open mindedness:

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/

Also, I would also suggest the Complete Works of Charles Fort. Fort was an American empiricist and philosopher of science.

READ THE ARTICLE

[linefeed0]

I totally agree that the ESP questions are somewhat biased, but if you'd read the article, you'd find that most questions dealt with concepts and proven facts that people could be expected to know -- that the earth revolves around the sun, that lasers work with light, etc. Some are things which everyone NEEDS to know (that antibiotics don't work against viruses, when many people are using them for the sniffles and resistant bacteria are a growing problem).

The most obviously controversial questions are those about evolution and the big bang, but there is plenty of scientific evidence strongly in favor of both of these (and I am not an atheist, to give you a point of reference). Keep in mind that the NSF is fighting a losing battle in many states against religious extremists who want to prevent these well-supported theories from being taught in high school biology. Of course the survey is getting at something -- anything involving a large government agency like this will have some small amount of politics. But most of the questions aren't of this nature anyway.

Re:So what?

[MWright]

The problem is that it's really impossible to disprove. Several experiments have been done that have showed no signs at all of psychic phenomena - but that won't stop people from saying things like "Well, _that person_ wasn't psychic, but other people are" or things like that. No matter what you do, people can make up some "problem" with it. (For example, I remember seeing on Nova (the documentary) how a certain organization claimed to have developed "charged water", and that someone could tell psychicly whether or not certain water was "charged". When put to the test, the claims didn't seem true - but they simply started saying things like "well, trying to tell if water is charged actually charges the water").

Personally, I very much doubt the existence of psychic phenomena... it still hasn't been proven, despite the vast number of claims (and a 1 million dollar prize from James Randi for anyone who proves it). This isn't reason to say for sure that the phenomena don't exist - absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - yet, it's still rather good reason to doubt it, IMHO.

Re:So what?

[MMBKG]

I'm honestly a logical man, but I do belive that aliens exist (whether humans have encountered them is a different matter) and that psychic powers are not impossible. Brainwaves will be able to be captured and used as a communication form and as energy, but can the brain do it naturally?

Re:90 percent also believe...

[mcarbone]

I believe that you're wrong. Let me appeal to logic (where "~" = "not"):

Believe(theism) = religious
Believe(~theism) = atheist
~Believe(theism) ^ ~Believe(~theism) = agnostic

So both atheism and religion require a belief, and hence fanatic belief of either is quite irrational. Agnosticism, however, makes no commitment either way, and given the evidence that I've seen, I believe it is the most appropriate.

Re:CNN survey

[scottp1296]

Take a look at Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments [apa.org] for an interesting look at why results like that are to be expected.

Re:READ THE ARTICLE

[young-earth]

You said

evolution and the big bang, but there is plenty of scientific evidence strongly in favor of both of these

which is quite interesting.

What evidence are you citing for evolution? The embryology based "proof" (Haekel's embryos and the like)? Or vestigial organs/structures perhaps? Maybe peppered moths? Perhaps the "chimps have 97% DNA identical to humans"? Could it be the four-winged fruit fly?

All of those are still in current (last couple of years) textbooks, and all have been shown false, most many years ago, all by secular evolutionists.

Why haven't they been replaced? Could it be because there's nothing better yet?

Face it, there are two dominant religious views in vogue now. There's the orthodox one (evolution) and the pesky one (creationism). Both involve major faith, but only one is tax-supported and state-funded.

Additional point: if you believe in the Big Bang, where did physical laws, the original matter/energy, etc. come from? You believe something somehow started all this; which way it started is a religious discussion. But the orthodox one gets tax and state support.

Scientists trust each other(peer review explained)

[No Such Agency]

Human scientific knowledge has grown to such staggering amount since the Renaissance (when, if one is willing to be generous, one person might hope to know the entire scientific body of knowledge in their society), that nobody can verify everything themselves. That's why we have peer review. The peer review publishing process ensures that any study has to be scrutinized by an editorial board of other scientists who ARE experts in the field of study. The well-conducted science with verifiable results gets published, the rest gets discarded or redone properly.

Sure, I suppose the reviewers for a journal could conspire to knowlingly let a fraudulent paper through, or suppress a valid one with interesting results that go against the accepted theories. In the first case, the bad science would inevitably be noticed by the journal's readers (other professional scientists, after all), and the editors would be disgraced. In the second case, some other journal's editors would accept and publish the paper, "scooping" journal #1 and claiming the glory of publishing the groundbreaking new research.

Like all self-policing systems, it has flaws, but by and large it works fantastically well, uncovering charlatans and incompetents, and allowing the dissemination of well-validated new information to the scientific world. It's not physically possible to verify everything in life yourself, which is why you sometimes have to trust others to properly verify things for you. But that trust cannot be blind, nor based on "faith". This holds as true for your doctor or auto mechanic as for the editors of a journal.

When you ask them about God...

[Kashif Shaikh]

Sixty percent of those surveyed believe in ESP, psychic power, and alien abduction

But when you ask them concerning God, they say "pfft. The world was created by billions of particles interacting randomly". Umm, yeah, whatever.

Funny how people would believe all these stories about alien abductions and believe what their Grade 10 Science teacher told them about evolution. Yet when you ask them to look at our world and how on earth do billions of random particles over billions of years == one human race out of a billion species capable of very high level understanding(i.e. we can build skyscrapers but dogs can't even build a dog house). Or if we follow their logic, why create new technology, when all you need to do is throw some random elements in a jar and shake it for a million years. Out will come a missile, a jet, skyscraper, and probably even a brand new Pentium 5. Sound crazy? I thought so.

Only in America..?

[stereoroid]

For the past 2 years I've lived in Ireland, where the state TV broadcaster (RTÉ [www.rte.ie])can be seen doing the following:

• Every weekday, at 6PM, they have "The Angelus". I have never seen an official explanation of what this is, but it appears to be a Catholicism-inspired "minute of silence", featuring images of crosses and the "virgin mary", interspersed with shots of people oberdiantly stopping whatever they're doing, even crossing the street.
• This is followed by the News, after which they show commercials for "psychic" hotlines.
• Sometimes, not just on Sundays, they will have programs about some old catholic fart carrying some saint's jawbone around Ireland, or swanning off to Lourdes on a pilgrimage. Last night I saw about 10 seconds of some missionary dragging women out of Bangkok brothels and preaching at them, after which (I presume) they carried on as before - this guy is a hero worthy of endorsement by a state broadcaster!

You want my opinion? Three words: Education, Education, Education! The Irish Constitution [www.gov.ie], like the US Constitution [house.gov], mandates freedom of religion, and I take that to mean that people are free to do without religion. So, why are schoolchildren taught to believe in unprovable assertions? From theistic religion to aliens and ESP is but a short step, if you do not have a grounding in scientific principles.

The Demon-Haunted World

[stereoroid]

This was one of Carl Sagan's last books, which IMHO does a very good job of educating the reader in the ways of "bullshit detection" (not his choice of words!). In response to some previous comments, he also uses some good examples to explain the difference between a) allowing that something is possible, and b) believing people who tell you it's actually happening, and who will enlighten you (for a few dollars more).

(I'm not going to post a link to one bookstore and thus give it more hits - your own favorite bookstore should have it.) Alternatively, if your attention span doesn't allow for the absorption of an entire book, at least go and rent "Contact". After all, if there weren't other civilizations out there, it would be an awful waste of space...

Re:Public Crap Versus Scientific Crap

[HiThere]

Actually, this is a reasonable request. The way you explain quicksort without math is to build a physical model, and then do a walk-through of hwo the code would execute. To you, with the way you think, that might be clumsy. But it would communicate in a way than an innumerate person could understand.

I have found that I need to accept that about 1/4 of all people are basically, rather than just functionally, innumerate. That the only way that they can handle numbers is with a sort of kinethetic muscle twitch reasoning. This can be more accurate than one would expect, remember our basic idea of how numbers work comes from babylonians who did arithemetic by juggling weights on a balance (which is what the "=" represents: a pair of scales). But it doesn't deal exactly with large numbers. OTOH, it's a lot quicker, which often more than repays for the loss of exactness.

Gyroscopes are a more difficult problem, I admit. OTOH, it's been so long since I worked out the exact way that a gyroscope stabilized itself, that I probably don't know any more. So that's probably why I can't imagine how to create a useful physical model.

N.B.: Models won't reach everyone. But they will reach almost all people who are innumerate. (The ones who are both innumerate and not reachable by models probably aren't interested in gyroscopes anyway. They would be more interested in motivating people to achieve goals. And it you wanted to explain gyroscopes to them it would need to be in terms of motivations and goals... I couldn't do that, as that an area where I am quite weak myself.)

Also: patterns of thought are independant of intelligence. Some innumerate folk are quite intelligent. And some quite intelligent people are totally incapable of motivating other people. People have a strong tendency to only notice the kinds of intelligence that are commensurate with their own, but there's always at least one variety that isn't. (It's the invisible bedrock on which ones own mind is built. Picture a hand trying to bandage itself, or an eye trying to see itself. Now imagine an axiom trying to justify itself... [no circular reasoning!]
The language depends on the compiler (or interpreter).
The compiler depends on the bootstrap compiler.
The bootstrap compiler depends on the assembler...
But at some point we must switch from logic to hardware.

Re:Theory vs Science Fact

[dacetone]

*Uh, not true - as the "explanation" states this is mearly popular scientific theory and NOT a fact.

The word 'theory' is misused by the general population. In common use, it's used as a synonym for 'hypothesis' or 'good guess'. In a scientific context, 'A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena' is the definition.

These 'theories' are as close to 'fact' as it gets.