Banning plastic straws, asserting that men should compete against women in sports if they identify as women, and eliminating SAT scores doesn't seem like a science-driven approach, but more of a faith-based science-denialism.
Edit: I know that paper straws are a pain to drink through, my question was more: why is banning plastic straws an example of "faith-based science denialism"?
Paper straws break down relatively quickly and can lose suction effectiveness as a result. Reusable metal straws can cause chipped teeth or gum damage if bitten down on by someone with poor fine motor control. No straws at all can leave an individual unable to ingest liquids entirely. Reusable soft plastic straws would be ideal, but the tradeoff is that now we've placed yet an extra burden on an impaired person (or their caretakers) in our society because now they'll need to maintain a supply of clean, reusable straws that they need to transport with them. Disposable plastic straws are "soft" enough to not damage someone's teeth or gums too severely when bitten down on, but are more durable than paper straws to ensure reliable suction over time, and they do not require any upkeep or maintenance for proper hygiene due to their disposable nature.
This quote really stood out to me:
> and they [disposable plastic straws] do not require any upkeep or maintenance for proper hygiene due to their disposable nature.
It's a rather bright example of the problem our global society has put itself into: there's still a need to deal with these items, but that need is no longer on the person using the item; it has been outsourced to the rubbish bin and, thus, to society and the environment at large.
We've done this to ourselves in myriad ways. Expanding public transport is "unfair" to people who have different needs because perhaps some people cannot quickly or easily board transit vehicles, or those trips do not go to the front door of where some people need to go. We cannot eliminate or shrink parking requirements or availability for the same reason.
Politically, we stop at "well, can't do that" without considering "OK, how could we do almost all of that with modifications for people who have other needs?"
We've fallen into the perfect must be the only outcome otherwise why bother. Some of that is genuinely not knowing, but large parts of opposition to the changes we know we need to make--both individually and on the companies and businesses supplying us in environmentally-poor ways--are disingenuously hiding behind those arguments simply to obstruct.
That's frustrating.
The push to ban plastic straws was nearly entirely based on misinformation or lack of information. Most of the debate was propelled to the highest levels by a 4th grader that literally made the data up[1], but that data was used to prescribe a "science and data driven ban".
Turns out, plastic straws really were never a big problem. Sure, single-use-plastic is a problem in general, but the ban of plastic straws has had nearly zero impact on the environment - or it could be argued it's had a negative impact since companies like Starbucks started using "multi-use" recyclable lids which in reality end up being single-use and are often thrown into the trash instead of recycling bin, and use more plastic material than dozens of straws combined.
The plastic bag ban is the same way too... turns out those reusable cotton tote bags consume way more energy to produce than thin plastic bags, causing dramatic increases in GHG releases, energy consumption, etc[2][3]. We now know plastic bags and straws are not a major contributor (or at all, really) to that massive plastic dump in the Pacific Ocean, which is mostly from fishing vessel waste tossed overboard. Good intentions with poor consequences unfortunately.
It's this sort of "theater" that puts people off...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/business/plastic-straws-b...
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.org/media/sustainable-shoppin...
[3] https://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotto...
[4] https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/great-pacifi...
> Noninstructional factors explain most of the variance among test scores when schools or districts are compared. A study of math results on the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that the combination of four such variables (number of parents living at home, parents' educational background, type of community, and poverty rate) accounted for a whopping 89 percent of the differences in state scores
from https://alfiekohn.org/teaching/pdf/Standardized%20Testing%20... if you really want I can dig up the old study.
We need to change education itself so it is not a tool of systemic racism. Which currently, based on that study, it is. In a sense you are right: yes, it does its job if the job is to be the canary in the coal mine. But we did away with canaries in the coal mines and made the mines more secure.
Only if you are deliberately framing these points that way. I'll try to explain how these points can actually be explained as science-driven
> Banning plastic straws
In the US alone, 500M straws were used per day (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/news-...). Given that many of these end up in the environment as consumers simply discard the container wherever they are walking, this is a serious reduction in litter.
> asserting that men should compete against women in sports if they identify as women
This one is a really hard debate, however... hormone distribution varies enormously between the two major biological genders so we're already (effectively) selecting athletes with the "best" ratios. Add to that people with intergender bodies (e.g. XY chromosome set but fully presenting as "female", XX chromosomes but have "male" body parts), and it becomes a real mess to define what is a male, what is a female and where a specific individual should be allowed to compete in - even if you're only going by purely biological metrics (hormone levels, appearance of gender-specific body parts). Add to that the "faith-based" stuff aka social gender norms and gender equality/anti-discrimination, and it gets very messy very soon.
tl;dr: for this point, there cannot ever be a "scientific consent" on what's correct and what's wrong. Personally I'd argue for a body-weight differentiation in sports (as it's done in boxing) instead of gender-based, since that way you have at least some common factor that is closely linked with physical strength.
> and eliminating SAT scores
Scoring of almost all kinds has provable issues - and especially in education:
- social background has massive effects on scores: rich parents can afford a lot of things closely linked to higher educational outcome such as private tutors, each child having their own room from a young age, send their children to well-funded public or private schools, or offering a stress-free environment for the child in general whereas poor parents are stuck with whatever the public school system offers, children often not having their own rooms which means they can't effectively learn if their baby sibling is crying in "their" room, and parents passing on their stress (poverty, overcrowding, homelessness, messy divorces, domestic violence) onto their children
- ethnic background: children of minorities have been proven to be discriminated against by teachers even at a young age, not to mention stuff like systemic under-funding of schools in geographic areas where school funding is based on the taxable income of the people living in this area, which is (again) closely linked to ethnic background as a result of segregation and gentrification
- government background: additionally to that, public schools may differ wildly in quality of teaching based on the funding priorities of county and state
- scoring leads to teachers "teaching for the test" aka "bulimia learning" instead of actual long-lasting knowledge transfer. This is something tests aren't primarily at fault for, but nevertheless play an important role
- scoring disproportionally affects students with mental health problems (e.g. test phobia), with dyslexia / dyscalculia and other learning impediments, and also those whose talents are outside of language and math
tl;dr: scoring is deeply flawed as a concept, where especially children from poor backgrounds (no matter if the family or the government is poor) suffer from massive discrimination.