Comment by dwc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwc | Hacker News Reader

Two books I've recently read are The Age of American Unreason by Jacoby [1] and Unscientific America by Mooney & Kirschenbaum [2]. Both are worth reading, but Jacoby gives a deeper and more thoughtful analysis and spends considerable time on historical roots and trends.

This topic is tied heavily to politics, and I hesitate to get into that here. I will say this: science is about exploring, like math is about exploring. Viewing science and math as pragmatic skills reduces them to engineering and accounting. Now there's nothing wrong with engineers and accountants and we desperately need and value their skills. But we also need scientists and research mathematicians who explore mysteries for the sake of discovery. There are a lot of subtle implications of that which are completely lost on people who think of science and math as purely functional, vocational pursuits. The benefits of science and math that have been capitalized on by engineers are spin-offs of people with curiosity exploring for exploration's sake. When exploration for its own sake is devalued, the engineers of the world find once fertile ground growing barren.

1. http://www.amazon.com/Age-American-Unreason-Susan-Jacoby/dp/...

2. http://www.amazon.com/Unscientific-America-Scientific-Illite...

We have a government that generally believes we can legislate our problems away and that most people are incapable of taking care of themselves. When you start from that premise, everything that you do "for the good of society" or "because it's fair" ends up stepping on someone, usually those closer to the top. Alternatively, when you have leadership coming from fields where reason and making things better by creating are valued, you get a different result.

Oddly enough, I'll cite China as an improving example of this and I think it's due to the make up of their leadership:

* In the US, the top of the Obama Administration is mostly lawyers and/or mostly from Harvard. Over half the Senators were/are lawyers. The last President with technical/scientific training past Chem 101 was Herbert Hoover.. 80 years ago.

* On the other hand, China's president was a hydraulic engineer and the Communist Politburo is eight engineers and a lawyer. Their previous president was an electrical engineer.

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/13496638

Which country do you think values scientists and engineering more? Which country do you think understands science and engineering better and pushes to strengthen those fields or at least gets the hell out of the way?

(Now I feel dirty for celebrating something about China's political leadership.)

No, Jimmy Carter was a nuc. Navy, selected by Rickover, etc.

Which just goes to to prove that technical or scientific knowledge is not a good indicator of political effectiveness. Carter's presidency was a disaster.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter#Naval_career

Steven Chu?

It makes sense that Energy Secretaries would have a scientific background.. but then when you look into the past 6 or so, Chu and Bodman are the only ones.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_Ener...

Hoover was our only engineer president... and I wouldn't exactly cite him as an excellent example of presidential leadership.

I didn't say that he was a good example.. just noting that it's been 80 years since any engineer, scientist, etc was in the role. No wonder they're disconnected.

A little more grist for your mill... the former president of India, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._J._Abdul_Kalam , aeronautical engineer.

I would never want an engineer as a president for fear that they would try to engineer our lives.

And pushing to strengthen those fields. That can be really bad. When I read the literature, my default attitude to when I read an article published by a chinese research lab is, "it's probably fraud, if you're dying to believe the result, try at least a simple experiment to make sure it's real first". I am not the only one. China may have a "good reputation" on the face of things, but theirs is not the sort of reputation I would want to have among the people in the know.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8448731.stm

a top-down approach to acting on fraud, in my opinion, just results in people trying to figure out how to game the system to not get caught. To fix fraud, you have to improve the culture, and remove the incentives to fraud. That's really hard when you have people competing for a small number of tenured positions which attract increasing amounts of funding.

From the synopses and the comments of those two books, here is a summary: "It is all the dumb people that won't accept the One Truth of atheism that are to blame!"

I'm not sure where you got that idea[1]. There was a time several decades ago when the Christian proletariat majority widely supported science, read popular periodicals about science, and aspired to educate their children in science and engineering. There was also a time when conservatives were far more pro-science than liberals. This is why it's important to know some of the history here. Today's anti-science sentiment is surely rooted in right wing Christian factions, and that needs to be fought. But there's absolutely no reason to think that conservative Christians can't endorse and value science, since they have in the past.

The acknowledgement of past conservative/religious alignment with science comes from Jacoby. Decrying the current state is not the same as a summary dismissal.

Mooney and Kirschenbaum are what the "New Atheists" call accommodationists. Atheists themselves, they believe in embracing and working with religious people to find common ground. They're looking to bond with the "sane" religious moderate majority and fight the Luddite, anti-science extremists.

EDITED to add:

1. Ok, you got that idea from comments, obviously. Beware comments on such things. They probably say more about the commenter than about the book.

"Where I got the idea" is the synopses and comments of the two books as I said. Your comment seems to confirm that you agree that religion is to blame for science illiteracy.

Perhaps some people will be interested in a study with empirical data regarding the alleged american adult science illiteracy: http://mailer.fsu.edu/~slosh//PCST90578.pdf

I believe my comment took account of the role that some extreme religious viewpoints play, while stating that the moderate majority is capable of accepting science.

It seems no matter what I write you are blaming me for having an extreme stance. I do not. There is no reason for me to give all religion viewpoints a pass. I will not. There's no reason to take criticism of any religious sect as a criticism of all religion. That's not the argument I'm making, nor am I implying it.

I don't know what your stance is and I don't know the book's stance is.

All I know is what the synopsis and the comments state its primary arguments are - that religion is the cause of trouble with scientific literacy of the US public. Beyond that I have made no comments, but I see a lot of downvoting and feather ruffling in response to simple statement of facts. I did show with a link that the premise of the argument, that there is trouble with scientific literacy in the US, is questionable.

I responded to the question "where did you get that idea" and was downvoted when I answered the question. I find that interesting.

Just FYI, I didn't downvote you.

You were downvoted because your response so completely misinterpreted the parent's comment that the most generous interpretation was that you didn't read it carefully. While rational argument is good, one-way arguments are bad.

Thanks for the book recommendations, dwc!

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