Comment by imh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imh | Hacker News Reader

Not to detract from the main take-away of "GM food extremists have poor and poorly calibrated knowledge" which seems reasonably robust, but the questions themselves are interesting and knowledge is harder than they give credit.

One of the questions was "the oxygen we breathe comes from plants" (true). This one gave me pause and sent me down a google rabbit hole. I know a huge amount (most?) of the oxygen we breathe comes from the oceans and algae, but I don't know if those are considered plants. Googling around, it's still unclear. Some sources group it all under the term "marine plants," but those sources mostly seem to group cyanobacteria under the term "plants" which is stretching it, so they aren't quite trustworthy. What about green algae? Well they aren't part of Plantae either, but sources seem even more conflicted there.

I feel like I'm more likely to get this question "wrong" the more I know, or the more precisely and scientifically I treat the statement. Elementary school me would think I'm sure of the answer they're looking for, and I'd probably get it marked right. Current me? I know the answer they're probably looking for, but don't know the right answer.

Knowledge is weird.

The big question surrounding GM food, I would argue, is in fact the most interesting of all questions facing human civilization, drilling down to our core identity: is intelligent design a long term sustainable strategy? Is the nature of the universe even capable of supporting life intelligent enough not to wipe itself out shortly after discovering a technology like fossil fuels or is the nature of biological life such that all intelligent species will be destroyed by an insatiable hunger for growth? Hell, is the universe capable of producing life intelligent enough to even grasp a fraction of the knowledge required for long term (approaching heat death of the universe) survival?

It's unfortunate that the interesting debate/study of whether or not we should play god and whether we are capable of dealing with the long term consequences is subsumed by pseudoscience.

Plant is a vague polysemic word. In this context I would take ti to mean as not animal or mineral, as it's not uncommon to divide things into those three categories.

Here's wikipedia's take from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant:

> Historically, plants were treated as one of two kingdoms including all living things that were not animals, and all algae and fungi were treated as plants. However, all current definitions of Plantae exclude the fungi and some algae, as well as the prokaryotes (the archaea and bacteria).

I totally agree that it's often used as you describe, but on a test of scientific knowledge, yours is probably not the relevant definition, especially one with questions about bacteria and viruses. In this case, it was though!

I don't think scientific definition strictly matters, in this context.

We're not meticulously trying to catalogue life on Earth.

You know... It's a case of is tomato a fruit or a vegetable.

I also paused. I was thinking that oxygen is coming from previous stars exploding.

there's oxygen atoms, and there's O_2, which is a gas also called oxygen.

the atoms came from stars (hand wave). those atoms have probably been recently recombined to form the diatomic gas, by plants.

Do you have a pointer to the questions? I've wondered how I would fare but none of the articles I've read seem to link to them.

Yup. For the record, after writing this comment, I read the rest of the questions and either they're more clear cut, or I'm ignorant of the ways they may not be.

Here's the paper, which isn't linked from most journalists reporting on it: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0520-3

Google "sci-hub" if you want open access to it, using it's doi https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0520-3

Here's one of the surveys they used. It appears they all had the same science questions. https://osf.io/9gztf/ (Study1 Survey.pdf)

Here are the questions:

The center of the earth is very hot: True

The oxygen we breathe comes from plants: True

Antibiotics kills viruses as well as bacteria: False

All radioactivity is man made: False

Almost all food energy for living organisms comes originally from sunlight: True

All insects have eight legs: False

The earth orbits the sun: True

Men and women normally have the same number of chromosomes: True

The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move: True

Lasers work by focusing sound waves: False

Electrons are smaller than atoms: True

All plants and animals have DNA: True

Humans share a majority of their genes with chimpanzees: True

It is the father’s genes that decide whether the baby is a boy or a girl: True

Electrons are smaller than atoms: True

This depends on what exactly you mean by "smaller than". My first thought is to consider the delocalized particle cloud, in which case this is false in the case of valence electrons.

Earth orbits the sun is not true. They orbit each other around the barycenter of the system.

Energy “originally” from sunlight even more “orginally” comes from the strong force.

The antibiotic neomycin has been shown to have therapeutic effect against multiple viruses.

It’s the father’s genes that decide whether the baby is a boy or a girl is not true if you are talking about “boy” and “girl” as self-determined gender identity rather than biological sex. Might have been clearer to frame this as male or female baby.

This type of pedantry is what gets you posted to /r/iamverysmart

Yeah, we all know what's ACKCHYUALLY [0] true, but given the context and elementary wording of the questions, you know the correct answer.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/jDBr2RI.png

I thought it was understood in this subthread we're playing a game. Yes, we all know what the intended correct answers are.

"It is the father’s genes that decide whether the baby is a boy or a girl: True" that one seems a bit inaccurate as a father can have both daughters and sons while his DNA does not change. I know what they actually mean and how it works but their wording is a bit strange.

Well, let's see: One could argue that, compared to the solar system average, the center of the earth is quite cold, since nearly all the mass is in the sun. The energy didn't originally come from the sun, it originally came from the big bang. Since wings are appendages of propulsion rather than manipulation, they should count as legs. Yeah, sure, that brings the total to 10 since they have 2 pairs of wings, but the question doesn't say exactly 8 legs, and something with 10 legs also has 8 legs. Earth only has the appearance of great age but it was actually created just 6000 years ago. If a single change in a gene makes it count as a different gene, it is not true that humans share a majority of genes with chimps. Chromosomes don't determine gender, self-identification does. Since in general is just a tool of patriarchal oppression.

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