Just because they know science don’t mean they like it.
[Michael Lind](Sounds like the average Fox News fan, doesn’t it?
) is probably right that the TPers are not nearly as crazy nor ignorant as others commonly assume. Nevertheless, many of them do seem to have the kind of minds that obstinately and persistently substitute their own reality for reality. They have brains, they just won’t use them to engage the facts, but only to invent and rationalize their own.
“The Communist and the Catholic are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.”
– George Orwell
If he were alive and in America today, he would add “Tea Partier” to the list. In fact, I think they’re a prime example of what Orwell called “nationalists” in his 1945 essay, “Notes on Nationalism”.
So were the respondents asked to answer factual questions to demonstrate they knew scientific information? Or where they just asked if, in their opinion, they were informed about science? There’s obviously a major possible difference between a group of people being well versed in science and a group of people who believe they are well versed in science.
Because he reports that p = 0.05, I strongly suspect that he rounded the p-value estimate. It could’ve easily been something like 0.049 < 0.05. But rather than messing with the criterion for statistical significance I’d much prefer some meaningful interpretation of the results. This is almost contentless:
A small positive correlation between a binary identifier for party affiliation and a categorical indicator for “science comprehension”? Well, okay, how’m I supposed to interpret that? Exactly what do the results predict about how a tea partier would respond differently (and to what questions)? Then we can talk about whether the results have any practical significance.
Since I could not readily find details of what parameters of science these people were quizzed about, I am reserving judgment. It does seem unlikely that tea partiers are more science literate than the rest of the population, given the reported prevalence of evolution and climate change denial among this population.
And were the left-leaners quizzed specifically about biotechnology (irrational anti-GMO sentiments tend to occur disproportionately among left-wingers)?
As for antivaccine sentiment, I’d expect it to be a wash, with some antivaxers comprising a more affluent left-leaning group decrying “toxins” and “non-natural” medicine, while more rightist/libertarian antivaxers are hung up on “autonomy” and preserving their precious bodily fluids from government incursion (and both sides seeing corporate and Establishment conspiracies all over the place).
I’d suspect that basic science knowledge is higher among Tea Partiers, because they disproportionately went to college.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t delusional and unthinking now.
Anecdote: I know an older man who has a master’s degree in chemistry. He knows evolution is real. But he is all mixed up about teaching it school. He wants them to “teach both sides” and gets upset when you ask him to justify that.
He isn’t stupid, or even ignorant, it’s just that he’s lost, on that topic, the ability to reason because of how emotionally inflamed he is by his RW ideology and misinformation.
Anecdotal, obviously. But I am member of the Tea Party, and consider myself well versed in the basics of physical science. (Not that it matters a great deal, but I do teach SCI 101 for a local college in the evenings.)
As other said, I’m not really sure this means anything. If you pick a fairly large group, like liberals or conservatives, chances are you’re going to get something pretty close to the mean, or at least something fairly close to what you’d expect for that population. The issue here is that “Tea Party” is almost a proper subset of “Conservative”, so you are basically getting a smaller sample within the larger one thus, even if there is no difference, you’ll get more variability just from having a smaller set.
That said, if we assume it is ultimately accurate, it’s not really that surprising, and it doesn’t necessarily mean what the results might naively imply. At least in my observations, generally as a population is closer to a moderate position, they seem to tend toward the middle in terms of most other measurements, because it’s got the broadest appeal. As you get to more extreme positions, whether to the right or left, it’s more likely to be made up of the people on the tails. This intuitively makes sense because more intelligent people will tend to get attached to more complex and wild ideas that they’ve over-intellectualized, and less intelligent people can easily get sucked into an extreme idea, but not really have a grasp of why.
This follows from my observations of the Tea Party particularly, because I have met a number of very bright Tea Party people, highly educated, and they’ll say that we need to lower taxes and justify it, rightly or wrongly, because of the Laffer Curve or various other economic principles. And then I’ll talk to a fairly dull Tea Party person who says we need to lower taxes because taxes are bad and so-and-so said it was better.
So, given that it seems these populations are quite possibly of a somewhat more even or perhaps even inverse bell-curve, all it really takes is a small imbalance in the population to have an affect on the mean. And none of this has to appeal to a nefarious motive of duping the public or whatever that some others have postulated.
I hang around a lot of “patriot” types. The ones I know are very normal, sane, and educated. Yet most of them also believe in government conspiracy theories. I just roll my eyes and try to change the subject when they bring one up.
It also depends on what parts of science are being tested. Engineers tend to believe that evolution is false a hell of a lot higher than you’d expect for people with a heft amount of “science” education. Just because they know whatever bit of engineering they know doesn’t mean they aren’t dumb for thinking evolution is fake.
Totally agree. I’m an engineer at a nationally-renowned R&D lab, and some of the engineers I work with are considered to be #1 or #2 in the world in their area of expertise. (Not me. I’m just a lab rat.) And even they believe in some… strange stuff. One of them is a Christian fundamentalist, and seriously believes Obama is Satan and actively trying to destroy the U.S.
I wonder if there’s also a racial component to it. I know there are a few black politicians and pundits who identify with the Tea Party, but at the grassroots level it seems to be a largely white movement. And of course white people are more likely to have gone to college than other races in the US.
Let’s accept the data at face value and make the reasonable assumption that Tea-Party identifiers are a subset of conservatives.* We know that for “scientific knowledge”
Liberals > conservatives & Tea Party > not Tea Party
From which we can conclude Liberals >> conservatives not in Tea Party
But we can make no conclusion at all about Liberals vs. Tea party members. That depends on by how much the previous >> holds. That would require more data than given on the blob though presumably available in the original study.
Also note that 37% of those identifying as conservative are also identified as Tea Party members. That sounds very high. If it’s not very high, then Tea Party is not a fringe of conservatives and presumably not a fringe of the Republican party.
*Recall that when the Tea Party was formed it was strongly proclaimed it was not a conservative organization, but attracted people from both sides of the spectrum; nevertheless, I think the assumption is valid.
I was about to start writing a post about how multiple comparisons will dredge up any fact you want if you look hard enough, particularly in the realm of 0.01 < p < 0.05. But a correlation that weak isn’t worth another sentence from me.
If I read the blog post correctly, the author analyzed the relationship between pairs of variables. What I would like to see is science knowledge as a function of education and ideology. I suspect that what we’re seeing here is a confounding effect: higher education leads to greater knowledge of science. Tea Partiers tend to be better educated than other conservatives and other broad groups. So they know a little more about science. But that’s education affecting matters, not their world view. There are standard statistical techniques that can sort this out. Heck, even Excel can run multivariate OLS.
Put another way, David Koch sponsored Nova for a while. He still props anti-science groups.
0.25% of the reason why someone is science-literate or not is explained by their Tea Party “membership.” ~99.75% can be explained by other factors.
And then the sentence after:
His words after are a bit vague, though I get the sense that he’s not blown away that the TP is so smart, but surprised that they aren’t as dumb as he thought.
ETA: and please read his last sentence, which acknowledges lazybratsche’s point.