As someone who cares deeply about science education, here are some hard truths that many people flinch away from:
“Anti-science” Americans are not less intelligent on average than “pro-science” Americans. It’s simply a difference of who they trust to give them the facts. One group trusts and believes the public health organizations; the other group treats those same organizations with extreme skepticism. No solution to this problem will be effective until trust in the system is rebuilt.
The core problem that no amount of trying to “get through” to people will solve is that America’s public health and science institutions actually are deeply problematic organizations that are politicized and do not always act honestly and in the best interest of the people. The media, meanwhile, has lost all trust with a significant segment of the population who rightly recognize it as a propaganda machine for the ruling elites.
Why should my parents, who are quite intelligent but never received any significant science education, believe what they are told about science by experts that they can clearly recognize as untrustworthy?
You have to recognize and address this before any progress can be made.
Education isn’t deciding which authorities to trust — that is literally authoritarianism. The point of education is to make your own good decisions in unclear contexts.
I have a similar point to make as the other comment. Not everybody has the resources to e.g. verify the germ theory of disease. In fact humanity didn't have the resources to verify that until recent history. The smartest, brightest, and most successful medical practicioners would use to tell you that disease is caused by an imbalance of the humors, or of yin and yang; this was a comparatively obvious and reasonable, but ultimately wrong explanation supported by anatomical evidence, compared to the fanciful explanation of invisible insects infiltrating and attacking your body; a theory that requires extensive institutional knowledge, trust and infrastructure to develop and verify.
So when a government and its politician leaders frequently lie to its constituents, it can be difficult for a rational individual to trust the public health advice coming from the same apparatus.
I agree in principle, but most people do not have the necessary education to make accurate judgments across all fields from first principle reasoning. Eg someone with a PhD in physics probably doesn’t have the knowledge to debunk every argument against the COVID vaccine. In those cases we naturally rely on asking some biologist who does have that knowledge what they think.
The beginning of your post is so insightful, and I've rarely seen it expressed so well. The anti-science Americans are not dumber, and treating them as dummies is part of the problem. (One that I'm guilty of on occasion)
This is the internet, though, so here comes the part where I disagree with something. This is where you lost me:
Why should my parents, who are quite intelligent
but never received any significant science education,
believe what they are told about science by experts
that they can clearly recognize as untrustworthy?
How are they "clearly recognizing" these "experts" as "untrustworthy" without the expertise to recognize which so-called experts are bogus and which ones aren't?
If you said they simply don't know who to trust, because there is a lot of conflicting information (much of it deep domain knowledge) and the government is not always trustworthy or effective, I'd agree, but it seems like you're saying something a bit different?
If public health experts are caught being deceptive in one case, or the media publishes as truth something that ends up being political propaganda- even once - they lose trust and people will correctly choose to treat future information from that source with skepticism.
This isn't realistic in the slightest, and is the diametric opposite of "correct." What information source is one hundred percent accurate?
By this standard, people can't trust literally any source at all. This is an absolutely sick and objectively poor way of thinking and wind up just sort of believing whatever they want to believe. Whatever feels good, or, is the least bad. Or feels bad, but gives them a sort of predictable sort of bad feeling -- rage and an ill defined sort of aggreivement about some sort of ill defined state of affairs that has been denied to them by ill defined people for ill defined reasons -- that is at least preferable to the work of actually knowing things and understanding how anything works.
So are they Fox News people, or have they moved on to the harder stuff?
They are less intelligent, regardless of the country. This anti-establisment-ism is based on a fundamental inability of making logical steps longer than 2, or the inability to generalize. Typical wacko seem one single example of something suspicious, maybe even a fact, then a scammer wraps that suspicious event or a fact in a conspiracy theory, and that person believes it instantly, not questioning this simple and crude world view.
Two most popular examples nowadays:
1. Moon landing. A person sees 1 single moon picture with unexplained details on it, read a conspiracy explanation about it, and then makes a single logical step that a single picture falsifies everything about moon landing. It doesn't enter his mind to think about the other 9999 already explained photos from the Moon, and then to ask that conspiracy guy how do those fit in his theory. It doesn't enter his mind to maybe question his skills at deciphering optical illusions and artifacts and ask for help.
2. Vaccines. Antivax crowd prides themselves in finding some negative cases for any given vaccine, be they fake or real. But even in the case of real deaths for example, they intellectually unable to take a second step and apply statistics, to understand how much more good a vaccine brings to the humans compared to the bad.
They can't really reason logically, aside from simple "single fact" -> "decision". Anything more complex is no go.
Denying the moon landing has also become popular recently, I've noticed. I personally have had to explain the evidence to multiple family members. The occasional coworker as well. It's always some tweet with tons of interactions from people with the USA flag in their profile name complaining about how the govt lies about everything. There seems to be a huge market on social media for selling people the idea that they are being lied to. The article is right that the people making multi-hour documentaries that explain something like the moon landing aren't reaching people the same way a 12 second "look at this clip of a guy on the moon. jk its a soundstage. what else are they lying about???" video is. I really don't like where any of this is going.
There are people that are "anti science." These are people that say the earth is flat, that say the earth is 6000 years old or whatever else. Trying to paint all the rest of people with the same brush, use guilt by association, the CIA came up with the term "conspiracy theorist" to discredit people saying things we all take for granted as true today. Of course, this is the old game and it's effectiveness is waning. Fail to see this at your peril.
The truth is, people asking you to accept the word of others because they have a credential are anti science. The rest of us just want to understand rather than just be told. I'll leave with a quote from the father of modern optics, Ibn al-Hathayam:
> The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them," the first scientist wrote, "but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.
> “People feel that science is this powerful source that is jerking them around and telling them what to do and making them feel stupid.”
> More than half of Americans get their health information from social media, with Facebook especially popular in rural communities.
> “If you take those same topics and you try to be straight about it, you’re going to immediately turn off a lot of people,” Flanary said. Truth is often more boring than misinformation
My take on this: most americans actually are stupid.
I mean, how else can trailpark denizens think that a billionaire brat child slum lord is going to improve their economic situation?
This is why we had a thing called "public education", and it's why that thing has been under siege, pretty much ever since it was instituted.
It seems that emo, irrational content is largely attributed to the woke-nuts, but I would argue that emo manipulation has been the power of the wing-nuts for decades (since the southern strategy at least).
NOTE: woke-nut-ism is NOT left politics, and wing-nut-ism is NOT right wing. These are both misinformation echo chambers guided by invoking a sense of "identity" among the participants.
This is why the power brokers of the right have always attacked public education. Their power primarily derives from an uninformed populous, incapable of rational analysis.
No one anywhere sees that situation improving anytime soon. This is only going to get worse as more people consider some meme illiterate influenza as an authority figurine.
I wouldn't really consider myself "above" them, just more inclined to exercise rational thought.
Stupid is almost never a result of physical disability, or even lack of ability, it's almost always a willful lack of mental discipline.
A multi-decade career in electronic h/w and s/w dev and debug required facing the difference between theory and reality. This required getting over preconceived ideas and facing the facts. Most people never have such experiences, and don't care to.
Also worth noting: The difference between theory and reality, is that in theory they're the same, but in reality they're not...
p.s. I did spellcheck this reply before posting...
“Anti-science” Americans are not less intelligent on average than “pro-science” Americans. It’s simply a difference of who they trust to give them the facts. One group trusts and believes the public health organizations; the other group treats those same organizations with extreme skepticism. No solution to this problem will be effective until trust in the system is rebuilt.
The core problem that no amount of trying to “get through” to people will solve is that America’s public health and science institutions actually are deeply problematic organizations that are politicized and do not always act honestly and in the best interest of the people. The media, meanwhile, has lost all trust with a significant segment of the population who rightly recognize it as a propaganda machine for the ruling elites.
Why should my parents, who are quite intelligent but never received any significant science education, believe what they are told about science by experts that they can clearly recognize as untrustworthy?
You have to recognize and address this before any progress can be made.
reply