From Boy Geniuses to Mad Scientists: Americans and Science (2017)

>You can see this phenomenon when the media goes wild for any child who makes a significant scientific breakthrough. Onion thinks the pressure on kids to hit on a groundbreaking discovery is not only unrealistic but also contrary to how most advances in science happen.

“We tend to see science as this mystical beast living in the sky that, somehow, children see more clearly because they haven’t been clouded,” Onion says.

Does anyone really see science or children that way? Kids make the news for science because science has a reputation for being hard and children have a reputation for not being very organized or driven compared to adults.

It's an interesting article, albeit somewhat incoherent. And much of it could be summarized as "America has always been fundamentally racist, sexist and borderline anti-intellectual". That's surely an exaggeration. And it's not as bad as it was some decades ago. Just maybe a little worse, just now.

But anyway, the Heinlein references remind me how much I love Joe Haldeman and John Scalzi.

> While researching her American Studies master’s thesis, Onion noticed that at the turn of the 20th century, children were portrayed as having a particular affinity for animals and the natural world in general, whether they’re catching fireflies, climbing trees, or digging in the dirt. At other times—say, 2017—children are thought to intuitively understand very unnatural modern technology like smartphones and laptops. “At different times in our history, people were invested in the ideas of children as being modern or as being anti-modern, which is a weird paradox I find fascinating,” Onion says.

It may be that the 'paradox' in our ideas of children being modern or anti-modern at different times is just due to to the fact that at the turn of the 20th century children were often playing outside, and now they are often playing with technology. I think generally when an academic misses something as obvious as that, it's because they're straining to fit the data into a probably not very good theory.

> “And then it came to me: Science is the link that connects man-made technology and the primitive natural world.” After all, scientists have to use microscopes to view and fully understand organic cells and microbes.

I had to laugh out loud here. Someone for whom it's a revelation that science is the link between the natural world and technology is maybe not the best person to attempt making the grand characterizations put forth in the article.

> The vast social project of science is ignored in favor of celebrity scientists mythologized as stubborn individuals—similar to cowboys on the frontier—who strike out on their own and discover unexplored territory. We see Thomas Edison as a relentless, pioneering entrepreneur and Albert Einstein as an out-of-the-box thinker. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Gates were the swaggering “pirates of Silicon Valley” who created personal computing as we know it in their garages.

You could maybe say we focus on Edison, Einstein, et al over your typical scientist—but 1) It's obvious that we would do that—we admire the greats over the regulars in every field 2) The phrasing of 'We see X as Y' is implying that the attribution of Y to X is mistaken. But in all of those cases the attributes given are uncontroversially accurate. It makes more sense in the next sentence—but really, we only "see" Einstein as an "out-of-the-box thinker"?

> Upper-middle-class white Victorians started to view childhood as a sacred time instead of seeing their kids as little adults who were put to work as soon as they could walk. Wealthier adults became smitten with images of cute white kids and chubby-cheeked cherubs. Black children, meanwhile, were depicted in ads and pop culture as wild, innately criminal, and precociously sexual.

While that is very unfortunate, it also bears zero connection to the article.

It appears that the quality bar on that site is appallingly low.