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Jayson_Virissimo comments on [Infographic] A reminder as to how far the rationality waterline can climb (at least, for the US). - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (47)
1.) Woohoo! Excellent news!
2.) Scientific literacy isn't really the same thing as rationality.
A few hours later, I find I remain physically pained when attempting to come to terms with the notion that a person could express the belief that only genetically modified tomatoes have genes. The very ability to formulate the statement requires knowledge that contradicts the belief.
Certainly not. But -- would you agree that scientific literacy and cultivated rationality are highly correlated?
A person with no prior knowledge of the subject might read "genetically modified" as "modified to contain genes"
That would require them to understand what a "gene" was in order to know that "genetically modified" is intelligible as "contains genes". That in turn requires a working definition knowledge of what a "gene" is. Feh.
You don't have to have a working definition of a "gene" to answer that question, you have to have the ability to pick an answer out of a lineup. This is called "standardized testing" and is what a lot of western countries base their educational system on.
They aren't writing a paper where they have to explain it, they're responding to a question, so it's very easy for someone who has no knowledge, experience or understanding of science or biology to intuitively assume that "genetically modified tomato" means "tomato modified WITH genes" as opposed to tomato with MODIFIED genes. For someone whose best career option is working a broom, or filing forms at the sheriffs office, genes are a very closed and uninteresting book, but they are also humans, humans who don't like to say "I don't know what that is".
You have to know that "genetically" refers to "genes" which means you need to know of the terms. Knowing of the terms means knowing basically what they are. At the elementary school level they are described as "the building blocks of life" or "why Tommy has brown hair but Susy has blue eyes." Yadda yadda.
If I ask you what time it is in Katmandu you'd have to know three things:
1) Where you were in terms of timezone offset from UTC. 2) Where Katmandu was in terms of timezone offset from UTC. 3) What time it was in either UTC or "here".
Well, alternatively you could happen to have the second timezone on your watch set for Katmandu, which would imply those.
If you did not have those you would say "I have no idea" or ask for information about Katmandu or you'd sit down and think about where Katmandu was and work a timezone offset from that to get a rough idea. Because you think about problems and want to be correct because correctness is useful.
If you asked a random middle of the curve type who didn't like saying "I don't know", they would (and you see this all the time on "man on the street" interviews) make shit up. There are many people in this world who do not care about correctness for the sake of understanding the world, they care about correctness for signaling purposes. They would rather be thought smart than actually be smart as sometimes if you're smart you know things that everyone else things aren't true (see the history of "bacteria causes ulcers" for example).
So no, you do NOT have to know what those words mean to answer the question. You have to know what they mean to understand the question and to answer it correctly.
"Even a blind pig finds a truffle once and a while".
Edited to add:
As to learning it in elementary school--for most of the people in this country that was a LONG time ago and those lessons just weren't relevant to their lives, so they forgot them.
Human beings are a lot closer relatives of parrots than of the kind of reasoner that would have a problem with making a statement just because they lacked the knowledge necessary for formulating it.
I do not find this belief paradoxical. Folk science GMO in one sentence goes like this: you grab a normal tomato, and you add some genes to it, that make this tomato bigger, or less prone to mold, or something. One does not need to comprehend high-school genetics to get this stub of an idea.
High-school genetics? This sort of stuff was elementary-school level where I grew up. |sigh|
Assume "genetically modified" is the teacher's password to them.
Oh, I'm sure it's very similar to "chemicals". But even allowing for that I find it painful. Mostly because, while I find your statement likely, I strongly wish it weren't true. Furthermore, despite living in a rather conservative state (Arizona) I have never encountered a person with such a paucity of understanding. For this to comprise, then, roughly half of the nation?
... Eh. I should know better, I suppose; just the other day I ran into someone who told me in absolute terms that no only didn't she know what a counterfactual was, she had absolutely no interest in learning about them and went on to assert that it was morally wrong of me to attempt to inform her. Such willful ignorance, then, is what's "painful" to me.
Chances are you met one and didn't know it. My father once asked my (high-school-aged) neighbors how long ago the dinosaurs lived. They said they didn't know but guessed about ten thousand years ago. I was surprised, because I knew it was millions of years ago although I didn't remember exactly how many millions it was (but vaguely remembered the number 65 million in connection with dinosaurs).
To admit my ignorance, I only know the particular '65 million years' number because of Jurassic Park.
When I say "encountered" I include the presence of contextual clues, or topical requirements. Talking about GMOs for example, or why there isn't just one "flu shot", etc.
Evolution and its history are intentionally avoided by teachers in public schools: only about 28% of teachers actually teach to the NRC's recommendations.
Genetics on the other hand... has made its way into television commercials. So this confounds me.
This is the part that surprises me. What argument(s) did she give that telling her what a counterfactual was is wrong? Was it just something along the lines of "that's a useless fact and you're wasting my time", or did she actually think that it would be immoral to know that at all?
Not nearly as highly correlated as one would hope.
There is a hard limit to how far you can go as a rationalist without scientific literacy; and there is similarly a hard limit to scientific literacy without cultivated rationality.
But they do not share a 1:1 correlation, certainly.
This is vague and sounds false. I don't know where you're getting the idea of a hard limit - as Desrtopa noted, plenty of scientists more studied than you or I believe in God. I especially don't know what you mean by 'far'.