Make People Think Again

Make People Think AGAIN? Did they ever think-critically?

That article was full of interesting paragraphs. My first reaction was to think about all the OTHER areas I wish Americans would ‘think’ about. I mean, its not just Science. Americans dont know shit about Colonialism, Corporotocracy, Propaganda, CIA, NSA, Capitalism, HISTORY, etc, etc.

It aint just that they deny science. Its way worse than that.

Of all the areas they are clueless about, i think Science is the one where there is still hope. I mean, Chomsky used to talk a lot about the fact that the “system” needs to be able to churn out good engineers and scientists and technologist, but at the same time it needs them to be blind about US History, and Corporate-Capitalism, etc. Its only been recently that the interests of Big-Corporations have diverged from that situation. Nowadays, the BigCorpse dont even want the voters to understand science….

On a separate issue, do professors really teach that “science is just another narrative” that might be right or wrong? I mean, in a way it is, but its still the best approach we have for dealing with the day-to-day-physical-world.

“….Those on the left are more inclined to accept the evidentiary conclusions from biological and environmental science but they are not immune to antiscience attitudes themselves. There, scientifically discredited fears that vaccines cause autism have led to a liberal anti-vaccination movement, endangering public health. Fears that GMO (genetically modified) food is unsafe to eat, equally unsupported, propel a national labeling movement. Fears that cell phones cause brain cancer or wi-fi causes health problems or water fluoridation can lower IQ, none supported by science, also largely originate from the political left.

Much of this comes from suspicions of so-called regulatory capture, in which government agencies align themselves with corporate interests, a danger the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, raised in her answer to ScienceDebate.org about vaccination. These suspicions are not always unfounded, and if one can’t trust the impartiality of government safety regulations, the avoidance principle becomes the default position and science is denied on the basis that it’s corporate PR. This was well illustrated by a 2011 battle in San Francisco, where the board of supervisors, all of them Democrats, voted 10–1 to require cell phone shops to warn customers that they may cause brain cancer (an ordinance that was widely criticized and later repealed). The difference is that although those on the left seek to extend regulations based on fears that are not always supported by science, those on the right oppose regulations that are.

Such confirmation bias has been enabled by a generation of university academics who have taught a corrosive brand of postmodernist identity politics that argues truth is relative, and that science is a “meta-narrative”—a story concocted by the ruling white male elite in order to retain power—and therefore suspect. The claims of science, these academics argue, are no more privileged than any other “way of knowing,” such as black truth, female truth or indigenous truth. We can’t know, a Minneapolis professor recently argued, that Earth goes around the sun, for example, because these sorts of worldviews have been dislodged by paradigm shifts throughout history. Thus, each of us constructs our own truth, and the job of an educator or a journalist is to facilitate that process of discovery.

The ideas of postmodernism align well with the identity politics of the left, and they have helped to empower disadvantaged voices, which always adds to the conversation. But what works in this case for political discourse is demonstrably false when applied to science. A scientific statement stands independent of the gender, sexual orientation, ethic background, religion or political identity of the person taking the measurement. That’s the whole point. It’s tied to the object being measured, not the subject doing the measuring….”

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nittany ram wrote:

I don’t know. I haven’t seen that from science professors obviously but I can’t speak to what philosophy and humanities professors might be saying

No, that I know of, no one teaches that “science” is “just another narrative.”

They teach that science is a methodology and is always incomplete.

But then science teaches that too.

Disputing facts (“is GMO stuff good or not”) is not the same as disputing SCIENCE.

The critical thinking issue also made me think of the debate last night. I taped it again and watched most of it — guilty as charged.

What struck me for the zillionth time was how little Trump knows about anything, and how he can appear to use a lot of words to say next to nothing. Even more than Dubya or Palin, he’s normalized ignorance. He’s naturalized it. He’s run his entire campaign on the concept of knowing nothing about anything, other than that everything he does is awesome and the best, and everything the Dems do is the worst.

He’s also normalized and naturalized first-grade levels of discourse. Everything is “the best” or “the worst.” There is no attempt to describe complex situations, policies, ideas, etc. etc. as if they were anything other than “see spot run.” His view is starkly Manichean, devoid of all shades and hues beyond black and white, and it’s more than obvious that he knows nothing about any of the topics he discusses.

But his core audience eats this up.

An analogy with football: It’s as if someone applied to coach to Rams who knew absolutely nothing about the game, the league, the players, the rules, its history, or anything about the job of coaching, but just has this gut feeling that the Rams are “the worst, evah!” This strikes a chord with frustrated fans, who say, “Sign him up!!” They love the way he speaks in black and white terms about the apocalypse happening if Fisher stays . . . and anyone who “tells it like it is” has got to do a thousand times better . . . especially when he keeps insisting that only he can fix things.

He never says how. Just that he will.

Anyway . . . good fact-check of the debate, for anyone interested:

Fact-checking the third Clinton-Trump presidential debate By Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee October 20 at 1:23 AM

Billy_T wrote:

Critical thinking: For the most part — with exceptions — I think the left champions this and the right is highly suspicious — though the center-left is far less robust in this than those further to the left. That said, all parts of the political spectrum have their blind spots, but I think the right blocks grand-canyon views.

One blind spot I’ve see for the center left is the idea of empire. I’ve spoken with countless liberals who refuse to accept the idea that America is an empire, and most take for granted that our wars — with Iraq and Vietnam as possible exceptions — have been just. That our actions in all of those “good wars” have been justified. That we’re pretty much always “the good guys.”

Strangely enough, I’ve spoken with righties who admit to our empire, but they’re happy about it and want it to grow even more powerful. In a sense, on that subject at least, they appear less “naive” and more “realistic” about America than center-lefties. But the disturbing part of their view is they cheer this on and want America to project its power more aggressively, and they all too often seem indifferent to the lives lost and the destruction creating in the wake of that projection.

But on matters of science? I think that’s one of the biggest fault lines between left and right in America. I don’t know how it is in other countries, but it seems that the right is pretty much anti-science and the left supports evidence/fact-based research, etc. etc. Not blindly. But lefties tend to respect the process. Righties tend to think its a conspiracy by “elites” to take control over their lives — as if capitalism hasn’t already done that.

I agree with every bit of that.