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RobertLumley 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)
I'd like to see the raw results of the survey, especially the questions asked. (But not so much so that I am actually going to look up their sources.) I have a hard time believing that 33% of US adults actually don't think that the earth goes around the sun once a year. What seems most likely to me is that these questions were part of a lengthy survey, and were cherry picked because of their responses. Alternatively, a lengthy survey may have led to false responses. Some of these are less surprising. But I'd estimate with only 0.2 probability that at least 33% of US adults actually disagree that the earth goes around the sun once a year. I might assign probability of 0.15 that at least 49% of US adults actually believe that tomatoes don't have genes.
I would assume most of them think the Earth goes around the Sun once per day. Note that the story taught in school often goes: "We used to think the Sun went around the Earth, but after Galileo we know that the Earth goes around the Sun". But the first statement was an explanation for the appearance of the sun going across the sky, so one would assume the second was as well.
Source as .doc
That .doc is actually quite a bit more optimistic than the graphic alone would imply:
The authors conclude that,
Optimistic?
I don't know what is more interesting, the actual paper, or the spin that the referenced graphic puts on it.
From the paper: /* Last year, a cross-national comparison of the acceptance of biological evolution by adults in 34 countries found that Americans ranked 33rd in their acceptance of evolution, followed only by Turkey (Miller, Scott & Okamoto, 2006). Can there be any doubt that Americans are among the least scientifically literate adults in any modern industrial nation? */
And
/* Turning to the principal focus of this analysis, twice as many American adults qualify as scientifically literate as do adults in the European Union (see Figure 2). Using a common metric, 28% of American adults and 14% of European Union adults scored 70 or higher on the Index of Civic Scientific Literacy and may be termed scientifically literate. This result is consistent with earlier analyses of the European Union (then 15 members), Canada, Japan, and the U.S. in the early 1990’s (Miller, Pardo & Niwa, 1997). Japan ranked last among the four national groups compared in the earlier analysis1.
Viewed in terms of individual countries, American adults rank second to only Sweden among the 34 countries from which current data area available, using the same metric and the same cutting point. In 2005, approximately 35% of Swedish adults qualified as civic scientifically literate, significantly higher than the 28% of American adults who qualified as scientifically literate (see Figure 2). On the same metric, 24% of Dutch adults and 22% of adults in Norway, Finland, and Denmark were classified as civic scientific literate. In any ranking of this kind, differences of two or three percentage points do not reflect statistically significant differences. */
So it's just long term fallout from the Snopes thing.
I also disagree with one of the opening statements. /* One of the few issues that the leaders of the European Union and the United States agree on without reservation is that scientific literacy is a good thing and that having more of it would benefit our respective societies. */
I think they say this in public, but either they're lying through their teeth, or they're idiots. Stupidity is more likely than malice in most cases, but I think that having a scientifically literate and numerate (especially stats) society is MUCH harder to rule.
Edited to add: The funny thing is that I seem to have a better grasp on "science" and scientific issues across a broad range than most of the engineers I currently work with (they smoke the shit out of me in their field(s), don't get me wrong), and the last science class I had was in...1983? High school physics. My degree is in Fine Arts, so I didn't even have to take a real math class.
Which is to say this isn't about teaching science. It's about inculcating the desire for the ability to understand the world around us. You do that, and give someone basic math and they'll be fine.
Those who work in the sciences might need more, but wouldn't it be nice if the reporter covering the sciences understood what 20,181 TeraWatt hours really meant? Or why this was funny: http://funcorner.eu/ill-have-some-h2o-too/
Which Snopes thing?
Quotes are achieved with a > at the beginning of a line. It's all in the help link at the bottom corner of the edit field.
Fawk.
s/snopes/Scopes/
The Scopes monkey trail.
Thank you!
-- Having just read that, I find that the source was perhaps somewhat more political than I would have liked. I don't necessarily disagree with any of its statements on the political contribution/detrement to scientific literacy, but it sets off one of my internal "Thar be dragons here!" warning bells.
Another possibility for the bad responses on the earth and sun question is misreading. I have misread that or similar questions several times, but if you asked me to draw a sketch of the solar system I know perfectly well what goes around what.
It's probably more that they don't really understand the subject and thought that's what they were supposed to answer than any positive belief either way. Maybe some think the earth goes around the sun once a day.
I recall reading, a while back, a published poll that had results similar to what you describe. I can't find it now, but I did find a number of references that seem to lead back to this Gallup poll which stated (in 1999) that 79% of Americans knew which object (the Sun or the Earth) orbited the other. (Apparently, this compared favorably to the example it gave of Germany, where only 74% got that 'right'.)