Why We Don't Believe in Science
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The problem is that 99% of your average person's interaction with "science" is by way of newspaper articles claiming "scientists say red meat is bad" and then three years later "scientists say red meat may be good". Another three years go by, and they see "scientists say red meat is bad for you after all". In reality, some scientists demonstrated an interesting correlation with a single marker (and often later studies are talking about correlations to something else entirely) that may or may not actually be causative, and either the media is spinning it into "a story" or some public health bureau is playing a numbers game that leads to the behavior "if it has any effect at all we should recommend it".
But, what the public sees is: "scientists say X" followed by "scientists say Y, previous scientists were somehow wrong", followed by "scientists claim that second scientists were wrong and they were right the whole time". We are actively training the public so that when we hear "scientist say X" the response is "engh: they're probably wrong". Hell, this article and my reading it is an interesting example: it's chock full of references to published journal papers and actual psychologists, but I honestly don't even care anymore as every time I've gone and pulled the research articles like this are based on I've come up with tenuous conclusions based on flawed experiments that are being trumpeted as the new truth.
Worse, much of the "science" being cited isn't really science at all: a cohort study, for example, has no controlled experiment and can't really be used to show anything definitive; it is, at best, a way to come up with interesting hypotheses on which to later run actual experiments. However, a good number of the "scientists say X" that people hear are from health research, where controlled experiments in humans are sufficiently rare and tied up in ethical conundrums that many of the statements being made (and almost all of the ones involving diets) come from new cohort studies or meta-analyses of previous cohort studies. It is no wonder, then, that every three years we hear something different. ;P
Now, with that in mind, imagine the average person hearing "scientists claim evolution is true". They often respond with things like "it's just a theory: one of many". I will contend that they do that because to them "scientists claim evolution is true" only has as much evidence behind it as "scientists claim red meat is bad for you" or "scientists now claim salt may not be bad for you after all" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069613) and the result is now that they don't trust us: we can tell them anything we want, but they have no reason to believe us anymore, as we were continually wrong to them every time it mattered to them before.
I will then claim that if we want to be credible, we need to stop reporting every paper that comes out to the public as "scientists say X" and even further be careful about what we call "science" in the first place. It should be that when we claim that something is true, it is because we have sufficiently strong theoretical models and experimental evidence that can really claim "this is knowledge that may be imprecise, but is not inaccurate" in the way that newtonian mechanics is a little imprecise (it doesn't take into account relativistic or quantum effects), but isn't so wildly inaccurate that we should ever expect to see a newspaper headline "scientists report we were wrong all along: objects of greater mass actually repel each other".
There are two reasons I think so. The first is that, as P. W. Anderson pointed out in his essay "More is Different" (published in Science magazine in 1972) reductionism doesn't work. With added complexity comes fundamentally new patterns. Just as chemistry is not just applied physics and biology is not just applied chemistry, I don't think life is just applied science and the real epistemological limits to what science can tell us are very real barriers. Heisenberg does a great job of mapping out these problems in his look at the history of scientific thought ("Physics and Philosophy").
When you look at verbomotor cultures and how they look a the world, their ideas of magic and religion aren't really filling the same roles as science today (see Ong, Walter "Orality and Literacy" and Eliade, Mircea, "Myth and Reality" See also Turner, Victor. "The Ritual Process" and Grimes ed., Ronald "Readings in Ritual Studies"). Instead, in a culture based on spoken discourse instead of writing, everything is based on re-usable patterns that can be flexibly applied. This is something greatly missing in religious thought today. The mystery of a story is not whether it happened in the past but rather how it happens today. From this perspective a story like the Fall from Eden isn't so much about the origins of sin as it is the model of leaving one's parents' house, getting married, having kids, and becoming an adult.
I think these sorts of patterns are likely deeply ingrained in us and it's better for us to accept and use it than fight it in the quest to conform to science. For example, in the article, you have the idea that people naturally think of heat as a substance. This works fine for many applications. One can think of heat exchangers as not being fundamentally different than the system of oxygen exchange in the body or vice versa. They do work the same way on a metaphorical level and these metaphors as Heisenberg shows (again "Physics and Philosophy") are also at the core of the formation of scientific theories. I therefore wonder if we'd have any scientific progress if our scientists had no unscientific beliefs.
Additionally you have issues with the quest to be more scientific often eating the tail of, well, science. For example, it is worth noting that countries in Western Europe who use midwives as the routine primary care for childbirth have better outcomes than Western European countries that do not. Yet there is a fear that by doing this in, say, the US, we will be backing away from our commitment to science. Why is following emperical data seen this way though? Is it that we really worship technology in the guise of science?
The problem that I see is the way we frame these discussions. Does the question "do you believe God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years" preclude you from believing in science on any level?? In these discussions we throw everyone into one bin or another - you either believe in evolution or you believe God waves his/her magical hand for everything.
I'd bet if you asked those same people the question "Do you believe God cooked your pop tarts this morning or do you believe the toaster cooked your pop tart through principles of electricity and heat" you'd get a much more interesting set of answers. (No doubt that you'd still get many that answer the former.)
The problem with these questions is that what you are really asking people of faith is "Are you completely faithful to a religion that guides your daily life?" Most people use and come to religion to guide their day to day human interactions rather than using it as a tool to explore the principles of the universe. If we as humans want to make progress we have to stop pushing on the evolution lever - it just causes divisions. What we should be doing is approaching the topic of science for people of faith from a more artificial level meaning "if X causes Y then Z" sort of stuff. In other words we can approach and teach scientific principles without going down the rabbit hole. Some people will say this isn't possible but I just don't think thats true.
This definition of God is certainly compatible with all scientific advances because, by definition, this God is beyond the measure of science.
I happen to find this belief rather boring and derivative of Plato (a natural world and a supernatural world, each separate and uncrossable except that the natural world is really just a poor reflection of the ideal and perfect supernatural world? Where have I heard that before?), but it's certainly not incompatible with science.
"God guided the evolution". "God used the evolution to build the physical form then imbued the bodies with human souls". I could go on, but you get the gist.
People are very irrational, and quite easily believe contradictory things.
And the next step is to realize that things that are neither provable nor disprovable do not have any effect on the universe we live in, and thus can safely be ignored and forgotten.
There's a lot of chance in the world. Which of a million sperm fertilizes the egg that turns into Alexander the Great. I don't particularly believe someone's out there manipulating chance events, but it's not provably false, so I see no reason why it's fundamentally incompatible with science.
- Humans evolved, with God guiding - Humans evolved, but God had no part in process - God created humans in present form
These choices pretty effectively cover the main views: non-theistic, rejection of science, and acceptance of parts of both.
How could I answer this survey with those ridiculous answers that either pigon-hole me a as scientific illiterate, or someone who thinks that the entire universe is deterministic.
There's a middle ground that I feel is wise: Trust the evidence you see, but remain hopeful that there's more to this world than a fleeting life, death, and permeant non-existance.
Any animal is distinctly different from others and even a clone of itself, if that's not a soul maybe some other name would be better.
Science won't disappoint here: we call distinguishing stateful substance a "brain".
The brains of two twins are genetically very similar but different experiences as separate beings means they are unique.
However, for some reason my mind's stubborn refusal to let me believe in the supernatural has not eroded my sense of religious commitment. I think this is because I realized long ago that the crux, and contemporary import, of religion for me (and this is entirely my opinion, and mine alone) is not in instilling belief in any specific historical event or supernatural phenomena, but rather instilling the notion of belief, in the broadest sense, deep within every individual.
This is ultimately what differentiates humanity from all other forms of life that we know of. That is, we are conscious creatures (mostly) capable of lofty pursuits, and there is value in exploring unknown territory and working together with other human beings to achieve great things. These are religious concepts at heart, because they are predicated on the belief that human achievement and the pursuit of knowledge are not merely the means to some material end. The journey itself is the point.
It's a much deeper level of creation than most people consider, partly because the laws of physics are generally taken for granted as simply existing on their own.
God, almost by definition, would know the results for any chaotic system and can set up the defining parameters to produce a particular output. (Note that this is different than a fine-tuned universe as I am referring to fine-tuned laws rather than natural constants).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality#Arguments
As a counter-point: why does America, a liberal western democracy, still believe in God so fervently?
Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Europe have all experience a significant decline in religion over the last 100 years. Why not in the US?
Ironically, the separation of church and state means people can lose faith in the state but not the church.
There are many reasons but the most important one, IIRC, is existential insecurity. The more one fears for one's wealth, health, and life, the stronger and widespread religious beliefs. The thesis goes back to Gregory S. Paul [1] and has been confirmed by others; for instance, by Inglehart and Norris (2004) [2].
See also the summery by Thomas Rees. [3]
[1] http://www.gspaulscienceofreligion.com/ [2] http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Books/Sacred_and_secul... [3] http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/07/why-some-countri...
I believe in science, and the belief itself is nothing different from the beliefs in god for some people. Science theories are all about proving older theories wrong, and humans naturally regard those older theories as "intuition".
I don't think it has anything to do with being naive or not. Aristotle thought that bigger object falls faster, force is required to maintain motion, and air is made with one element. These are all great discoveries that hold for over one thousand years. They are science. And I don't think they are naive at all. Aristotle is one of the most intelligent people at his time, and so is Issac Newton, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Yet today we regard the views of the elites as "truths" and all the rest as "naive intuition".
These scientists all did the same thing: prove something wrong by discovering something that explains more things more accurately in more circumstances. The fundamental way they achieved this is empirical observations, which are simply endless. Therefore, there's nothing stopping us from proving Newton's laws or Relativity wrong.
The way we come up with scientific conclusions has very similar characteristics with the way we know God. In school, we can reach conclusions by drawing a graph with 7 data points and observing some linear relationship with an imaginary straight line that somehow connects them. Boom! A conclusion of "truth". One major difference of scientific discoveries is that they involve mathematics, which is a priori by nature, and this makes "science" consistent and stable.
It's perfectly understandable that not many people believe in evolution. It's a fact that evolution theories have more evidence than creationist beliefs, but it's never a human nature to chase the "more evidence". We make irrational and hence suboptimal decisions everyday, yet we humans as a whole are not necessarily disadvantaged by irrationalities. "More evidence" doesn't mean it's right and "less evidence" doesn't mean it's wrong. "More probable" doesn't mean it will happen, and "less probable" doesn't mean it won't happen. You get the idea.
Or is it true that elites (minority of people) have more tenancy to believe in theories with more evidence, accept explanation that covers more circumstances and do things that have more probabilities of success? And everyone else is stuck with emotions, "naive intuition" and irrationalities?
Unfortunately, I never saw the actual derivation, so that idea is basically hearsay.
Edit: Since people don't seem to understand my point, there is more to the theories of celestial mechanics than just path prediction. Our understanding of the path mechanics is derived through our understanding of gravity. To believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth one would have to completely upend our theories of gravity, which have been shown by experiment to agree with predictions in almost all cases.
But the intuitive view referred to in the article is that the sun revolves around the Earth once per day, as observed from Earth. That you cannot make work by fancy maths, without running into conclusions which contradict other observations.
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth#Concave_hollow_Ear...
In one chapter of his book On the Wild Side (1992), Martin Gardner discusses the hollow Earth model articulated by Abdelkader. According to Gardner, this hypothesis posits that light rays travel in circular paths, and slow as they approach the center of the spherical star-filled cavern. No energy can reach the center of the cavern, which corresponds to no point a finite distance away from Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. A drill, Gardner says, would lengthen as it traveled away from the cavern and eventually pass through the "point at infinity" corresponding to the center of the Earth in the widely accepted scientific cosmology. Supposedly no experiment can distinguish between the two cosmologies.
In order to approach science, we must assume that nature is lawful, deterministic and understandable. Of course, we all know that there are certain 'laws' of nature that exist and have been proven beyond doubt, but the majority of science consists of findings that result from studies that rely on an arbitrary probability of 95%+.
Karl Popper actually proposes a nice criterion to distinguish science from non-science. He argues (whether persuasively or no) that scientific claims are falsifiable, where non-scientific claims need not be. That allows us to distinguish between things like astrology, whose claims are generally not falsifiable, and mathematical astronomy, whose claims are falsifiable.
(This would be opposed to a lot of religious beliefs, where you either have faith, or don't. You can't really prove God doesn't exist.)
I'm not sure where philosophy lies. Somewhere between the two, it seems.
Which brings me to an interesting question. If a hypothetical alien civilization develops technology using different types of math than us, different analogies than us (particles/wave, etc.), and different beliefs than us, is it still science? I would argue yes. If they can create sophisticated technology that is predictable, the end effect is the same that we humans have.
Which brings me to my last question. Is string theory science? Again, I would say yes. Because although its predictions are not currently capable of being tested, they are in principle capable of being tested with more sophisticated technology. There is a clear path to developing a test of its predictions.
So I think "science" can best be described as the pursuit of prediction.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
I have no idea what you mean by "an arbitrary probability of 95%+"
I hate to wade into Intelligent Design but I'm feeling grumpy tonight so what the hell.
First, I do not believe in some mythical deity who created the world 7 thousand years ago. Or even last week. I'm agnostic. Those things I do not know about, I do not know about. It is not logical to waste energy either believing or disbelieving in them.
Having said that, we had a great piece on HN a year or two ago from a mathematician showing that we are most likely living in a simulated universe. I don't have the academic chops to comment on it, but I know that it's entirely possible that all of our sensory inputs are being manipulated in ways that mimic the universe we think we live in. When you think of billions of years of intelligence evolving all over the place, we're fairly simple creatures. Just like we could fool an ant into thinking his queen lives somewhere else, I don't think it'd be very difficult at all for some external entity to control us. Maybe as a game. Who knows.
The point is: the idea that our sensory perceptions are fabricated and false in some way is a perfectly self-consistent and logical thing to believe in. Of course, it's a really stupid thing to believe in if you're a scientist, because if you can't trust empirical evidence, science kind of goes out the window. So yes, scientists can't believe that and have any kind of career at all, but there's nothing wrong with Joe SixPack believing it.
I bring that up because of something good the author mentions: This means that science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts
This is true. Much like pilots have to learn not to trust their inner ear when flying, students of science have to unlearn many things they may consider "common sense".
But you end up coming full circle. Even accepting science as the only light mankind has in the darkness, eventually you end back up wondering if the models we have are not just more fancy versions of the Ptolemy's Celestial Spheres[1]. You can take models that don't fit and do all sorts of magic with them to make them work. For a long time.
I am concerned that we are "diagnosing" people as somehow in need of re-education, medication, or intervention simply because they think in a different manner from the rest of us. If my neighbor wants to believe he's living in a Matrix, more power to him. He's not going to be a rocket scientist any time soon. And even if he is, plenty of people manage to have deeply trans-rational beliefs about the way things work and they function just fine in the world in all sorts of intricate, complicated scientific endeavors. We are drawing distinctions where none may be needed.
Science is provisional. In my opinion we should always approach it with humility. What I am seeing more and more is people who somehow feel elevated by science to be better than their peers. That's pretty cool when you're 20 and figure out how awesome it is that calculus and physics go together, but it's a really screwed up way to live your life or influence public policy.
Incidentally, the mathematical construction I believe you are referring to is the Boltzmann Brain.
The cause of a Boltzmann Brain does not act directly, it's merely a random fluctuation that allows an arrangement of particles to form a mind that thinks it's existing. There is no simulation or manipulation or attempt to fool. It just is something so unlikely, you have to wait an unmentionable amount of time to have it occur. Assuming there is nothing in physics that ends up barring such.
The Boltzmann brain argument is one that is hard to swallow and very unlikely by definition. Bostrom's simulation argument puts forward that we are most likely in a simulation and makes a compelling case.
I think anyone who says otherwise is vastly overestimating the capacity of human knowledge. And besides, wouldn't the universe containing a simulated universe be even more complicated?
As an aside, this happens to be my view on religion as well. I suppose though with the possibility of eternal damnation and all, it perhaps matter a bit more than the whole Matrix thing.
But if your observations contradict your logic? Something must be wrong. It could easily be the observations, but the more you have, the less likely it is. I think, at the very limit, deduction would have to give way to induction.
Now, assuming that by "logic" I really mean reasoning without observations, I hope my point becomes more clear. My impression is that philosophers do not really go in for scientific studies and experiments; if an idea proved logically by a philosopher contradicted sufficiently good experimental evidence, for some value of "sufficiently good", I would side with the evidence.
Hopefully my thinking is clearer now. I'm working on improving my writing, so hopefully I'll be less needlessly ambiguous in the future :).
Pascal's Wager? Perhaps the way to avoid that eternal damnation is to not worship $DEITY.
Pascal's Wager is about behaving as if Deity existed even though you're not sure in order to avoid damnation.
Moreover, why do you make Deity a global variable? What if everyone has his or her own's afterlife? If it's global it should probably be a constant anyway, it's one of those things you don't want to mess with…
My thought was this: something that is fundamentally unknowable is also fundamentally irrelevant. Particularly, something only matters if it has some effect. This leads to two cases: it either has an effect, and is therefore measurable, or it does not have an effect and therefore does not matter.
Now, this only applies to problems that are fundamentally undecidable--if it's just practical limitations (say technological shortcomings) then they could have an effect that we just can't reasonably trace.
But the idea of living in a perfect simulation that behaves just like the universe? From our perspective, that is not different from the just living in the universe at all. Now, if we could measure a difference, it could be important, but lets take the premise that we can't: now thinking about the universe as is or as a simulation of the universe as is is equivalent. So in either case the simpler model--no simulation--is, in essence, correct.
The same applies to a religious straw man--the god who does not affect the world at all. If the god just makes the world behave exactly the way it behaves, it may as well be taken out of the picture, mathematically cancelled (in a sense).
Anyhow, just a thought.
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object
Other than Pierce, there are other thinkers who were pragmatists of one variety or the other that had a big influence on american thinking like Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr and William James.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmaticism#Pragmatic_maxim
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism#A_list_of_pragmatist...
You might have some fun reading the wikipedia page on Solipsism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism)
Scientifically, discovering that a god created the universe and let it be (the disinterested watchmaker) has no bearing on any future experiments.
Psychologically/sociologically, discovering that some god exists would change humanity forever. Even if the god couldn't be interacted with, the level of religious fervor would rise to unimaginable heights.
Discovering we are simulations living in a matrix [every neutrino has a serial number on it!] might drive people to drastically different behavior (suicide, risk taking, etc.) even there may not be a measurable difference in the simulated and virtual reality.
Basically,
human society with irrelevant knowledge of universe != human society sans knowledge
In other words "knowledge of the universe" == "knowledge" and there is no irrelevant knowledge as the universe is everything.
This is wrong, because a deity would have profound implications for the laws that govern reality, which is what science is always concerned with.
However, I was only really thinking of fundamentally unknowable things. That is, my argument is basically (in mathy notation) `∀x: ¬disoverable(x) → ¬matters(x)`. That is, if you can know x, I've said nothing about it. All I'm saying is that if you cannot discover something to be true, it cannot have any effect on you.
The contrapositive is also very important: `∀x: matters(x) → disoverable(x)`. That is, if something could have an effect (like your examples) then it has to be discoverable.
Since your main premise is that disoverable(x) is true--e.g. we can somehow find this out--my statement does not apply (or, rather, thanks to the way implication works, it's true regardless of what effect x does or does not have).
Now, if we fundamentally can't prove whether we're living in a simulation or not, somebody could still convince the human population that we are and cause the same effects you're mentioning. However, the beautiful thing here is that this could happen regardless of whether we actually are in a simulation or not (since the premise is that we can't tell), so the truth of the fact doesn't actually matter.
The problem is that the premise is demonstrably not true. We take action all the time based on things that have nothing to do with science at all. You watch a movie about dogs and decide to buy a dog. I tell you a story about a starving kid in Africa and you decide to send him some money. Science enters not into the picture one bit. Humans are not robots.
Here's a thought experiment. Let's say you are living six thousand years ago and about to go die in some epic battle. I am able to visit you from the future, but only you, and only appearing as somebody of your time. I tell you something like "Yep, you're all probably going to die today, but I'm from the future and I want you to know that your death has major meaning and changes the future for mankind in ways that are tremendously good. Thank you."
So you go out into battle motivated and kill a few more of the enemy. Perhaps before the battle you stand up on a rock and tell everybody you know that people from the future will one day remember their names in glory and that what they do here today is a tremendous victory for mankind. You have received information and are acting on it that is completely outside your ability to verify. It's completely outside the ability of your entire culture to make sense of or verify. Yet it has a major, positive impact. The people listening to you, based on science, should not accept what you say. Yet this is not the way it plays out.
Let's run through the scenario again, only this time I lie to you. In actuality your death means nothing. Perhaps I'm not even from the future. Perhaps I came from across the valley. The thing is, it makes no difference at all. The fact that it had an emotional and very real physical impact on the world means that it is something worthy of our consideration as humans -- not as scientists, but as humans.
You might feel like I am going down the road of "religion may not be true, but it has emotional impact on people, therefore it is good." but I am not. What I'm saying is that there is a class of information exchange and reasoning that has nothing to do with science yet is useful and irreplaceable in our lives. How you choose to go about dealing with that class of information and reasoning is your own business, but for me at least I've found the chain of reasoning that sounds like "things I cannot scientifically prove are not worthy of my time" to be unworthy of pursuit. It seems woefully incomplete when compared to what really happens in the world. And perhaps a bit naive. Or at least blinkered.
Just my thoughts. Thanks for sharing yours! :)
EDIT: Just to clarify, when I say "It is not logical to waste energy either believing or disbelieving in them." in the GP, I mean not worthy of my emotional energy. To me, it's perfectly normal to act in as rational a manner as possible, and to enjoy myth, being human, superstition, awe of the unknown, and creative speculation when I need to. I do not spend all of my time in either system, and it's not worth a big emotional investment to try to debate things between two such fundamentally different paradigms. I do not understand why people keep trying to do so.
You seem to be making an odd distinction here. I find the idea that humans are easily fooled and one shouldn't believe things until you have evidence, rigorously checked by other people and with techniques based on hundreds of years of experience in how human beings fool themselves and get things wrong, to be very humble.
I don't see more and more people feeling elevated by science and becoming condescending or superior. I do see people get that way when the idea of evidence is casually dismissed because of some gut feeling. That condescending response isn't helpful and doesn't do the scientific or intellectual community any good but it's because of the incredible arrogance behind the cavalier dismissal of all that experience in searching for what's true.
> Science is provisional
That's quite the statement. Scientific findings are provisional. At this point, it's really hard to argue that science itself is. The idea that one is most likely to be right if they don't believe things without evidence and the enormous philosophical machine humanity has built that turns hard work into facts isn't provisional. It's the only thing we've ever discovered or built that works.
As to the simulated universe: What if the universe where the beings who simulate our universe is also simulated in another 3rd universe, and that one in a 4th universe and so on up until you get to 7. Then it stops.
That's just as likely as 2 nested universes or that the universe is the dream of giant inter-dimensional turtle or that your own mind is the only thing that exists and the rest of the universe is a hallucination.
All these things are possible, and impossible to be disproved, but even if they are true, science is still the only working method for figuring out what the rules are to the simulation/dream/hallucination. So go ahead and believe we are in the matrix, I will still have the same simulated contempt for other simulated people who decide that thousands of years of work by human beings attempting to learn about the matrix is worth the same as what they "feel" should be true. That's incredible arrogance.
That's the atheist position: An atheist (like me) simply accepts evidence and comes to conclusions based on that. My disbelief in deities is the same as my disbelief that my bank account currently contains one million dollars US: The best I can do based on my current knowledge.
Agnosticism is a belief that we can't know some things, which I do not have.
> but there's nothing wrong with Joe SixPack believing it.
Fine, unless his belief in it means he kills his family and himself so they can escape the Matrix. Beliefs have consequences.
> This means that science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts
This I fully agree with.
No matter how convincing the argument that we're living in a simulated universe is, or how much a person truly believes in God, until it has a measurable effect on the real world, such a belief has no place in the arena of public policy.
Also, if somebody can share that simulation piece by the Mathematician, it will be really very good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#Hume.27s_.22Science_...
Humans mostly understand counting intuitively, logic perhaps less so. But how can we make inductive statements about natural numbers if they’re merely a by-product of how our brains work? How could we use the “pure” language of mathematics to communicate with extraterrestrials if our understanding of mathematics is based on entirely different principles?
As a pragmatist, I mostly just keep my head down and say “numbers and Booleans may not be anything, but we can use them to do things, and that’s good enough”.
And this relates to a problem I've run into whenever you try to talk to an expert about something. People come up to me with fanciful ideas about physics and you have to stop them every five seconds to clear up what they mean by "power" or "energy". Or (as a favor) just listen all the way through and see if you can get a notion of what they mean so you can discuss their idea.
Same thing happens when I try to ask lawyers about something. I'm always getting asked, "Do you mean a law, or a statute?" or having things like "well, that's a legal term-of-art" given back to me.
The point being that it's hard to jump into thinking about anything that others have spent a long time considering and carefully defining.
I think I might have more trouble with the question "does the sun move across the sky" because when I look up I don't see any movement.
It's not about the intuitiveness of a belief. It's about whether the right or wrong theory got to the child first. You internalize first good enough theory you hear not the one that's most intuitive or the one that explains all the data best.
The counterexample to this tidy situation is quantum mechanics. Its implications are confusing even to experts. We have so much experience with macro-level phenomena that runs counter to what QM says. It's hard to imagine a world where this mismatch could be averted at an early age.
It you described it more as fuzzy, wavey things reshaping and interacting you might give people better intuition.
It's not harder to explain and it's no less attractive especially when you have things like computer graphics and touch screens now.
I'd love to see "What's it all built of" for iPad and Android that's highly interactive and doesn't involve drawing single sharp circle.
You could explain it to a 4 year old. But for that you have to know and believe that it's the Earth that actually moves. Otherwise you'll plant false idea and intuition into member of next generation.
Many religions have concept of sun being born at dawn, travel through the sky and die at dusk and stay dead through the night.
Our brains surely have the idea that Earth is flat built in. But I don't think that anyone has to suppress that ingrained theory when answering "is the Earth round or flat?"
This is because we all as children, when we were for the first time curious what shape the world has, were told that it's round and were shown pictures. That's first sensible theory we got and that's the one we internalized.
That's an unfounded assumption; perhaps we pause at that question as much as we pause about questions about the movement of the sun. Certainly the character of the question is the same.
"In 1982, forty-four per cent of Americans held strictly creationist views, a statistically insignificant difference from 2012."
Incorrect use of the term "statistically insignificant" and other stat terms needs to stop.
It's not human thing. It's USA thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Views_on_Evolution.svg
If you don't know Tim Minchin you might enjoy his take on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9uIMR8yCPg
I wonder if religion is really the issue. Is there some political imperative that is served by keeping the voting population ignorant about science? Perhaps business, politics and media have worked to create a society turned away from science and then those people turn to religion to fill the gaps.
Certainly there is. Maybe not in an evil way like "hey! let's keep all the people ignorant so we can control the world", but mainly to keep the status quo.
Consider this: Science teaches to question everything, so you can understand the rationale about how and why something happens the way it does.
But... having a bunch of people questioning everything, even the very fabric of our society, is usually not something very amusing to the ones that happen to be the current rulers. That's why, from the ancient world to this days, the higher studies where reserved to the elites... the less likely part of the population that would turn against the current structure of society. For example, during the Dark Ages, the church saw science as the works of the devil (and sadly, some of them still do [1]).... or more specifically, something that would make people question about their doings, their position it society, and so on...
And usually, things doesn't go so nice to the people in power, when more and more people starts questioning their world. Look at what happened to Luis XVI, Nicholas II, or more recently in the Middle East. Or looking even closer... the anti-globalist movements and the environmental movements, as (not-so-extreme) examples of people questioning the status quo.
Finally, in some countries it's very public that some politicians think and say that is much easier to handle an ignorant population, than a well educated one.
[Edit: Added] [1] A few years ago, when I asked a very religious fellow student about the existence of fossils, his answer was that some where the remains of the animals that lived before the great flood, and the older ones where there just to "test our faith".
Because some scientific ideas are constantly derided and publicly ridiculed by moral, cultural and political leaders and institutions. If the church and half the country (still) held that heliocentricity were preposterous, it may still be as 'hard to believe in' as evolution is, decades after science considered it 'settled'.
I would say that it's exclusively an American problem :) I get rather annoyed stumbling on the creationist articles. It's like reading on flat earth in 2012. What's even more entertaining is that people try to explain it in A.C.C. and D.L.P.F.C. terms. Just "get your shit together", folks :)
Because humans reason inductively and not deductively. We use short cuts, quick heuristics, analogies and similes. We anthropomorphize, we look for direct causes and effects over linear time scales. That's just the tip of the ice berg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases - That's a pretty comprehensive list. Memorize and comprehend all of those, and even then you won't get a handle around how badly humans reason - because you are human yourself!
It's also why humans find programming difficult (logic is very unnatural to a inductive reasoner). All swans are white programmers will quickly smash into the error caused by unpredictbale black swans coming into the system. Hence that's why you need exceptions, conditionals and containers to deal with the most absurd inputs (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-ch...).
Humans are animals, with a bunch of neurons in their heads that look for and extract statistically significant patterns from correlated data over short term linear time scales. We mistake correlation for causation thanks to all the mental shortcuts that were used to keep us alive in a less complex world.
Why don't we believe in science? The same reason we eat food, drink water and socialize with our peers - to stay alive. Science is deduction from first principles (backed by evidence of course). And that is very, very unnatural.
Note: Proud reductionist here!
The article begins with three paragraphs discussing the widespread belief in creationism. It appears to the reader (that is to say, me--I clarify just whom I'm speaking for, unlike the author) that this is intended at least as a prominent example of "us not believing in science". In fact, this appears to be the focus of the article.
However, the author talks as though he sees creationism as obviously false, calling the 46% statistic "a stark blow to high-school science teachers everywhere", and asking, "What makes the human mind so resistant to [...] facts [...] buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?" Furthermore, the author does not provide any arguments against creationism, instead proceeding as though it were obviously false to his audience as well.
Well, if neither the author nor his intended audience is a creationist (when evolutionary alternatives to creationism appear to be the "Science" that "We Don't Believe In"), then just who is "we"? The word seems quite inappropriate.
All the article manages to establish about "we" is that, when we're processing and reasoning about physical systems, if they don't map well to visceral intuition, then we use an extra part of our brains; and that this appears to cost some kind of effort and slow us down. I expect even that last effect could be mitigated with practice or by developing a certain mindset; but ignoring that, all it would establish is "We Think More Slowly About [Certain Kinds of] Science", not "We Don't Believe In [Certain Kinds of] Science". Just learn to think slowly and carefully in certain situations; I think I, for one, have that reflex built into my bones. Anyway, it being difficult to think about something is clearly insufficient explanation by itself--how many people "don't believe in integral calculus"?
If you actually want to know why the people who believe in creationism believe in creationism, then you should probably investigate them. Let's see. We have idea A (creationism--really this refers to a category of many specific beliefs), and competing idea B (human evolutionary theory). Both ideas are sufficiently complex and detailed that it is unlikely that many of the people we're interested in came up with it on their own. So let's see when and how they're exposed to both ideas, and how they reason about the ideas on their own after exposure.
At this point, for a journalistic article worth publishing, you would probably want to present some research. Find some creationists, ask them some questions about their background, figure out some patterns, do some large-scale sampling to see if you've found all the common patterns, and do detailed interviews of a few representative people from each pattern.
(Probably the biggest pattern is "grows up in a religious, creationist family; is exposed to human evolutionary theory either not at all, or just a little in high school, and is told by parents and priests or other authorities that it's all bunk, and accepts this; takes a career path that doesn't involve studying human genetics or biology in detail; and doesn't find a need to seriously question creationism at any point in the rest of their life."
If evolution were easier to reason about, it might increase the rate at which people decided on their own--after having been exposed to evolutionary theory--that humans evolved. But... I find evolution easy to understand and reason about--at least in simple cases of obvious improvements to an organism; the evolution of behaviors that are useful only in a group or in a family with certain structure is much more difficult, because it's hard to know what hominid societies were like; but most of the obvious changes between humans and more primitive mammals--getting taller and more dexterous and brainy--are easy to at least decide to be plausible. I think it really just doesn't come up often in these people's lives, except as something like "Another godless rant from a misguided intellectual", which is easily dismissed. I conclude that the scientific content of this article--the studies involving observing how people and their brains respond to "nonintuitive" physical situations--is probably in fact irrelevant to the stuff about creationists.)
Once you've learned why creationists are the way they are, then you might learn what might be good ideas for how to change them. But! Any moral principle that justifies you using any means to try to change them can justify them using the same means to try to change you. Anyone who advocates compulsory, tax-funded public schooling, and then complains about the fact that they're being forced to send their kids to be taught anti-science and to pay for the same disservice to be done to other kids--I consider you to have brought your problems upon yourself and I have no sympathy for you. (Nor do I sympathize with creationists in favor of compulsory public education. A plague on all your houses, dammit!) If you feel the need, then put your efforts into civil, reasoned argument, hopefully in a not-annoying way.
This result about people apparently having to "push back against their instincts" is an interesting thing. I'd be interested to hear more detailed and careful investigation on the subject: can you establish exactly what things are hard to reason about? does it vary from person to person? can you improve by thinking about such situations more, and would this make it hard to do repeated measurements with the same people? etc. This would have been good as a standalone science article. Unfortunately, it was cast as an article about evolution vs creationism, with an annoyingly incorrect (and possibly condescending) title and a probably misleading conclusion.
On the other hand, it'll probably attract a lot of traffic. If that is the author's job, he's probably done it well. I want to go live in a private little world now...
Well, I don't know. Maybe backlash from people like me can have some effect. There's probably a reason they don't put up even more linkbait-y stuff. Some people would decide to read other stuff. Even those who eat up the linkbait, they're probably not discriminating, and they could easily switch to another linkbait source that might happen to give them better content once, or be more convenient once. I guess maybe I can hope for competition and a race to the bottom to wipe out stuff like this. (Come to think of it, that is happening. But this newspaper probably has some highbrow content as well, neh? Hmm... It's possible that an editor (with detailed observation of readers), or the author, might figure out that linkbait eventually loses readers and reputation, and eliminate the column from the paper, or the technique from his writing repertoire. Possible. For now, I'm still going to my private little world.)