
Survey: Most people don’t understand science, want their kids to do it - aarghh
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/03/survey-most-people-dont-understand-science-want-their-kids-to-do-it/
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throwaway2016a
I had an interesting discussion with my wife (a biomedical / robotics
engineer) about the first sentence under the photo "Is robotics science? A lot
of people would apparently say no."

Interestingly "robotics" doesn't appear anywhere else in the article. But as a
computer scientist I couldn't say definitively that the answer to that is
"yes"... even my wife says "it depends"... so the stipulation the article
starts out with that not knowing the answer to that question means the parents
are scientifically illiterate is a false one.

Just like movies and TV shows now often call characters "scientists" that are
clearly doing engineering not science.

I realize there is a huge overlap and it is possible to be both a scientist
and an engineer. But I can't help but to feel this survey and the author don't
realize there is a difference between the two.

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allthenews
I am pretty sure that, given the state of decline that our public schools have
been in for at least 1-2 decades, fewer people are understanding much of
anything these days.

Particularly with growing initiatives that effective hold our best back in a
futile attempt to bring our worse up, with things like integrated classrooms.
We seem to be regressing to a very lukewarm mean. I graduated from high school
in 2007 and already recognized that the signs were there.

I don't know where this country is going, but it seems like our current path
flirts dangerously with ignorance and underachievement in the name of so
called equality. Which, by the way, is too often conflated with equity.

