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Barry_Cotter comments on Do people think Less Wrong rationality is parochial? - Less Wrong
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Vladimir_M, what makes you think that elite universities have the desire and money/power to proselytize their "output"? I mean, you surely know about the trouble they are having trying to win the propaganda fight against creationism, and against global warming denial. And then there's anti-vaccination and the moon landing conspiracy.
In fact the statement that I quoted seems to so obviously deserve the answer "yes, they are unable to spread the word" that I wonder whether I am missing something.
Perhaps you were thinking that elite universities only need to spread the word amongst, say, the smartest 10% of the country for it to matter. But even in that demographic, I think you will find that few people know about this stuff. Perhaps with the release of books such as Predictably Irrational things have improved. But still, such books seem somewhat inadequate since they don't aim to cleanly teach rationality, rather they aim to give a few cute rationality-flavoured anecdotes. If someone reads Predictably Irrational I doubt that they would be able to perform a solid analysis of the Allais Paradox (because Predictably Irrational doesn't teach decision theory in a formal way) and I doubt that their calibration would improve (because Predictably Irrational doesn't make them play calibration games).
There are very, very few people employed at universities whose job description is "make the public understand science". As far as I am aware there is literally no-one in the world whose job title is "make the public understand cognitive-biases-style rationality"
I reversed a downvote to this because other people should also suffer by seeing a question this stupid. Fifteen members of the 111th Congress earned bachelor's degrees from Harvard, 11 current congressmen called Stanford home during their undergraduate days, ten members of Congress got their bachelors from Yale. This includes neither MBAs nor JDs Source here
So? There are powerful people with degrees from prestigious universities. That doesn't necessarily imply that those people care about spreading scientific knowledge and that they're willing to use their power to accomplish that goal. Nor does it imply that the universities themselves care about spreading scientific knowledge in an accessible way (just publishing academic papers doesn't count).
Also, don't insult people.
But as I said in my comment, there are numerous issues (creationism, moon landing hoax, antivax, global warming denial, and I should add theism) where a large amount of public opinion is highly divergent from the opinions of the vast majority of academics. So clearly the elite universities are not actually that good at proselytizing their output.
Perhaps it has been downvoted because people see elite universities with large endowments and lots of alumni in congress? But still, that money cannot be spent on proselytizing. And how exactly is a politician who went to Stanford or Harvard supposed to have the means and motive to come out against a popular falsehood? Somehow science is not doing so well against creationism. As an example, Rick Santorum went to Penn State (a Public Ivy), but then expressed the view that humans were not evolved from "monkeys". Newt Gingrich actually was a lecturer, and said intelligent design should be taught at school.
EDIT: Also, Yes, I am stupid in an absolute sense. If I were smart, I would be rich & happy ;-0