I found this funny and true. Do you think our world pays little respect to scientists? The name of the Kardashians new child is more known than the name of the first microwave.
http://cliptank.com/funny/if-you-dont-know-who-these-people-are-science-vs-snooki.php
I could only identify three people (Hawkins, Einstein and Darwin) with certainty. I think Curie is depicted, but solely based on her being a woman in the middle of early 20th century-looking scientific apparatuses. I guess the guy below Einstein might be Pasteur. I have no clue about the others (even though I’ve already seen the third portrait in the third row, I don’t know who this person is).
I’ve no clue who the woman on the right might be, but I’m pretty always totally ignorant about media celebrities (which I assume she is).
Not an impressive score overall. Am I making the world a worst place?
It is the result of the so-called power to the people (by the people, for the people, and so on) - that is, what today’s media understands by democracy. Never mind the fact that people rarely see their power exerted. The problem is that usually the greater the number of people making a choice as a group, the lower the quality of the choice they end up agreeing upon. When people realize that the quality of their life is a better goal than the power they imagine they hold, maybe they will start thinking of a better political, social and economic system.
Most people on this site I believe are intelligent or at least open-minded so no, I wouldn’t say you are making the world a worse place. At least you named some scientists as opposed to knowing who Snooki was and not knowing any scientist.
r/im14andthisisdeep
I’m going to say that if you weren’t aware that people are more interested in entertainment than in, say, science, that that’s always been the case, and will always and forever be, then- well, you are not what’s wrong with the world… but you are not leaving me particularly impressed either.
Are you saying people are innately predisposed to care more about frivolous things that beneficial things? I’m not sure about that. I still think that people can change their mentality.
I’m going to say it’s with in the realm of possibility that you can know ho the scientists are and still manage to be a blight on society.
What does this prove?
OK, I got all of the images on the left except Sagan, Paine and Elion. I know who Paine and Sagan are, but not by sight. I have never heard of Elion, but now I have.
I recognized Tesla, but probably only because that image has been plastered all over Cracked for the last few years. Because I’m British I recognized Freud due to his his facial similarity to his grandson Clement.
So, I’ve heard of all but one of the people on the left. Tesla and Freud I recognized for less than academically pure reasons. Curie was a lucky guess.
Snooki I didn’t get because I guess she doesn’t have that much exposure over here, yet.
Press the scientist/celebrity image randomizer button and my score might have been 0 scientists and 1 celebrity.
The scientists matter for what they did, not who they were. To the extent that Snooki matters, it is for who she is, not what she has done.
It would be a better question to ask what did these scientists do and why does it matter? Tesla, thanks to some shitty books and the internet, is a nearly mythological figure whose real achievements are lost in a sea of bullshit. Freud is mostly considered of historical interest; his ideas are not much taught as currently accepted. Darwin could be identified by hordes of fundies who don’t actually understand what he said. Sagan, whose pores outshine the stars themselves, was better known in his day as media personality popularizer of science than as scientist.
Snooki I know about only from other people talking about her including people here. She is apparently famous for behaving badly. We have always had celebrities like that.
I guess the take-away point here is that I think recognizing any of these people from their pictures, in and of itself, means just about fuck-all.
Which is exactly what I was trying to say, but this says it with far more brevity and bite
I recognized about half the scientists (I guessed on Madame Curie because it was an old photo, and she was a woman in a lab), and I did not recognize the Kardashian. So I guess I am about half of what is wrong with the world, which sounds about right.
Regards,
Shodan
And it’s a good way to put it. I can name a good deal of name reactions in organic chemistry, but in most cases I can’t tell you anything about the chemist the reaction was named after. Not where he worked, not where he studied, not who any students of note he had, nothing. And I sure can’t tell you what he looks or looked like. I’ve never really cared about the whole “academic tree” thing either, thanks to not having a PhD and planning on always working in industry. Does not knowing anything other than the actual reaction conditions and mechanism make me a bad chemist, or just someone who wants to get the job done and go home at the end of the day?
I’m guessing the woman on the right is Snooki, right? If so, yay for the late, great Soup for keeping me atop pop culture. As for the left, I bet even the Snooki folks would get Einstein. I also got Hawking, and I assume Marie Curie. Is one of those Newton? That’s the thing, though–how can you be expected to know how any of these people looked? I’m sure I know of all the scientists on the left, but I couldn’t pick them out in a line-up if my life depended on it. Hell, my college degree was in English literature and I don’t know what 90%+ of the writers I studied looked like, nor did I really care.
I recognized at least five scientist photos but had no idea who the person on the right was (didn’t look plastic enough to be a Kardashian).
As long as people aren’t in active denial of science I don’t care if they can’t recognize scientists’ faces or names.
I have face blindness and I recognized half the people on the left.
I recognized Tesla, Sagan, Curie, Newton, Hawking, Einstein and Darwin. The orange lady looked familiar but I didn’t place her as Snooki immediately.
There’s a huge difference between knowing who a scientist is, and being able to recognize a photograph. For one thing, most of those scientists lived in an era before social media, and even today, scientists aren’t generally known for their pictures. I think a more accurate test would be to compare recognizing entertainment images to recognizing the names of scientists and being able to discuss their achievements. I know about the achievements of Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo and Niels Bohr, but I wouldn’t know any of them if they walked up and introduced themselves.
So who is she? Snooki or Kardashian?
The op implies she’s a Kardashian but everybody else…never mind. I just realized I still don’t care.
That’s what I was going to say. This confuses being able to recognize someone by their picture with knowing who they are and why they’re important.
There are people who are arguably more important than those pictured in the link that I certainly wouldn’t recognize, simply because we don’t have good likenesses/photos of them—for example, Socrates, Aristotle, Archimedes, Confucius, and (popular likenesses notwithstanding) Jesus.
On the other hand, I could easily recognize Alfred E. Neuman.
I agree. The value of science isn’t that it makes scientists into celebrities.
And why is Thomas Paine being included with a group of scientists? That spot should have gone to one of his contemporaries like Joseph Priestley or Antoine Lavoisier.