Teach the Controversy

[Inigo_Montoya]

@Tethered_Kite

@Inigo_Montoya

It would be better, I think, to nurture critical thinking skills and the humility to admit, "The science here is beyond my comprehension and it’s clear I don’t understand and so I amunqualified to opine.

Amunqualified?

Yikes. Is that how the pyramids were erected?

Not exactly, but the slaves who worked on them did have to attend special stone-cutting and stacking courses where they would be Amunqualified.

[Chronos]

The biggest problem is that the BS so vastly outnumbers the legitimate material. You could spend an entire semester just listing all of the incorrect, unproven, or unscientific hypotheses, and you’d still piss some folks off for omitting their pet idea.

[Nzinga_Seated]

@Voyager

So, teach the controversy, if there is time, but don’t pretend both sides are equally respectable.

I wonder if there would be a slippery slope. How many crazy ideas would be jockying for a place in the text books.

Inigo, I see now that you already clarified the Elvis shirt. I don’t know how I missed that, because I ususally niotce all of your posts. My mistake.

[Voyager]

@Nzinga_Seated

@Voyager

So, teach the controversy, if there is time, but don’t pretend both sides are equally respectable.

I wonder if there would be a slippery slope. How many crazy ideas would be jockying for a place in the text books.

Like I said, if there is time - and space. My wife ghost-wrote part of a high school biology textbook. Because of the publisher wanting to both meet all state requirements and keep the size and thus cost down, there wasn’t space for the real stuff, let alone controversial stuff. If critical thinking became required that would change, but I’m trying to imagine politicians supporting a critical thinking topic that would go against the fantasies of their constituents, and am failing miserably.

[Voyager]

@Tethered_Kite

@Inigo_Montoya

It would be better, I think, to nurture critical thinking skills and the humility to admit, "The science here is beyond my comprehension and it’s clear I don’t understand and so I amunqualified to opine.

Amunqualified?

Yikes. Is that how the pyramids were erected?

The little boys trying to sell you all sorts of crap around the pyramids should start selling UFO pendants.

[Napier]

Bpelta, I must disagree. A course that teaches science would be improper if it included material that was understood to be false, as part of a controversy. There IS no controversy about flat-earthism and your other examples in the sciences. The only people who see controversy in these subjects are outside of the science.

A course that teaches, say, about mass hysteria could no doubt use these things. Whether it would be more entertaining is best left to the beholder.

I think following your suggestion amounts to the end of classes that teach science, a terrible loss for humankind.

[TriPolar]

You can explain what some of the BS is by name, if it’s ubiquitous, and might be accepted by the uniformed (I wouldn’t count Flat Earth theories in that category, but maybe Intelligent Design).

You can explain why particular cases are nonsense, and how to debunk nonsense in general.

You can also teach critical thinking by challenging both nonsense and accepted science. You learn different things from each type of subject.

You can encourage innovation by challenging accepted science. But it serves no purpose by using BS as the subject there.

[Bpelta]

@Fretful_Porpentine

Ever notice how much more fascinating Shakespearian analysis becomes when suddenly the question is on the table that Bacon was the man?

As a Shakespeare professor, I respectfully disagree. The reason why I don’t normally spend time in class on The Authorship Question is that a) there are many, many more interesting things to talk about in a Shakespeare class; and b) part of my job is demonstrating how professional literary critics think, and most of the time, that means focusing on the text (and to a lesser extent, the broader social and historical conditions under which the text was produced), rather than the author.

I’ll answer questions about authorship if students ask them, and I do give a brief opening-day lecture on Shakespeare’s life and what his contemporaries had to say about him, but most of the time I want their attention to be on the words they’re reading or hearing.

Appreciate all the comments here so far, just wanted to note that Fretful Porpetine is right. After reading his comment, I’m gonna retract the line about Shakespeare (even though I think it should at least be addressed in a class. One of my professors had “heard in hallways at grad school” about anti-Stratfordianism, but was generally clueless about it.). I see many others think I’m wrong about the rest of what I wrote too (and maybe Fretful falls in that category, I dunno) but I hold fast to the general thesis of the OP.

[Bpelta]

@Chessic_Sense

I agree with the OP. Like it or not, people fall for bullshit over and over. If we are to educate the populace, we need to teach why these things aren’t true. Propaganda requires anti-propaganda. If we don’t teach kids about, say, creationism, then we’re leaving them defenseless when they wander though the internets and come across creationist websites.

It’s not like it’s particularly easy to refute bullshit on your own. For example, I don’t know at what temperature steel melts, nor how hot jet fuel burns. So if a Truther tells me that the fuel isn’t hot enough, I might believe them. Even with a skeptical mind, I might hop over to wikipedia to look it up, and find- by gum- they’re right! So even then I might buy into it.

But since I’ve heard this garbage before- since I’ve been educated on it- it’s easy for me to retort “Steel doesn’t have to melt for a buildnig to fall down.” Bam. Ignorance avoided.

I don’t know why we’re not refuting CTs in public schools. When you’re sick, you go to a doctor. You don’t pretend that the sickness doesn’t exist just because you don’t want to dignify it with a response. I don’t know why that attitude prevails in our education system.

I also wanted to note that I really really appreciate the above comment.

Also, just a thought:
People have attacked my proposal as possibly leading to a slippery slope where science just isn’t taught. Ladies and gentlemen, when all the slopes are slippery, mountains don’t get climbed. Take a look at polls regarding public knowledge of evolution and beliefs in woo sometime. When we don’t realize that there is an entire exciting world of crazy out there for bored students to go to, we don’t address it and the populace goes wild.

[Yumblie]

What is there to teach, anyway? That’s the problem. Most conspiracy theories don’t actually have any foundation, they’re built on nit-picking already existing theories.

I agree that dedicating too much time to them would grant them an aura of legitimacy that would be detrimental to learning. Wingnuts would see the fact that a wacky theory wasn’t brought up in class as evidence of subjugation and whatnot. But if it were brought up in a lecture, otherwise reasonable people might conclude that if it’s relevant enough to be brought up in a classroom environment, then there must be some kind of real controversy.

For example, why should young earth creationism be brought up in geology class? There is absolutely no geology to the theory, it’s all religion. But if a professor dedicated a lecture to it, some people might mistake it for real geology, even if the professor says it’s wrong.

[AClockworkMelon]

@purplehorseshoe

Is there … a question here?

I’ve seen this kind of comment before (once in a relationship thread I started). Since when are threads exclusively for asking questions? Who says he has to have a question at all?

[Sitnam]

@AClockworkMelon

@purplehorseshoe

Is there … a question here?

I’ve seen this kind of comment before (once in a relationship thread I started). Since when are threads exclusively for asking questions? Who says he has to have a question at all?

He doesn’t, but then perhaps he should start a blog. What purplehorseshoe was really asking was ‘why the hell should we care what you’re thinking?’ but in a more positive way.

[Jackmannii]

I’m fine with using conspiracy theories and pseudoscience as examples of poor critical thinking skills, referring to (and demolishing) them as a sidebar to the main subject you’re discussing - or in more detail in a course devoted to critical thinking skills (realizing that such courses probably are rare to nonexistent, unfortunately).

What I object to regarding “teach the controversy”, is that advocates of this, notably in the realm of “intelligent design” want their woo given equal weight with science, as part of a “well, some say this and some say otherwise” wishy-washy approach that won’t offend anyone. Pleasing everybody is not the role of educators.

[BigT]

@Sitnam

@AClockworkMelon

I’ve seen this kind of comment before (once in a relationship thread I started). Since when are threads exclusively for asking questions? Who says he has to have a question at all?

He doesn’t, but then perhaps he should start a blog. What purplehorseshoe was really asking was ‘why the hell should we care what you’re thinking?’ but in a more positive way.

But why respond in such a way that makes it seem like you are incapable of parsing the OP and understanding what the implied question is? If I state my opinion on a topic in a forum that is specifically for getting other people’s opinions, what do you think the expected reply is?

If you want to say that the topic is stupid, or even just best covered in a blog, why not just say that, instead using passive aggressive snark that’s not even well formed?

[GIGObuster]

@Bpelta

Also, just a thought:
People have attacked my proposal as possibly leading to a slippery slope where science just isn’t taught. Ladies and gentlemen, when all the slopes are slippery, mountains don’t get climbed. Take a look at polls regarding public knowledge of evolution and beliefs in woo sometime. When we don’t realize that there is an entire exciting world of crazy out there for bored students to go to, we don’t address it and the populace goes wild.

My experience in a local school showed me that teaching the controversy became the main focus of the lesson, the theory of evolution got the short end of it.

The reality is that many students already got the “controversy” in them, high school is the time when many of them actually encounter for the first time what the science actually say.

So there is the reality that one has to fight against the already ignorant “controversy” but the big problem is: there isn’t any.

http://www.talkdesign.org/cs/node/42

Where exactly can I find this controversy again?
…

The best reason not to teach the “origins controversy” is that it simply is nowhere to be found. Genuine scientific controversies – the important and useful ones – take up a huge volume of space in the scientific literature. Even the controversies sparked by wrong ideas can be tracked as they generate discussion among the members of the scientific community. If no-one is talking about it, it’s not controversial.

And no-one in the scientific literature is talking about “irrecducible complexity” or “complex specified information”. A recent search on “irreducible complexity” in the Science Citation Index yielded seven instances of papers using this term (two of these were direct responses from Behe to criticism of his work.) For comparison, the term “face on mars” yielded three papers discussing the proposition that an advanced Martian civilization had built edifices with human features.

But it gets worse.

A comprehensive examination of biology databases in which both ID terms and authors were used in queries yielded the following:

                                         BIOSIS                    PubMed
Search term                              hits..directly related    hits....directly related
"Intelligent Design".....................20....9..................324....3
"Complex Specified Information"..........0.....0..................111....1
"Specified Complexity"...................1.....0..................152....1
"Irreducible Complexity".................5.....5..................10....3
Any term.................................23....11.................162....6

This is to say that in all of PubMed, only six papers appear in which one of the four terms listed is used as a key phrase.

In comparison, REAL controversies have a substantially larger presence in the literature.

........................................BIOSIS...........PubMed

"Group Selection".......................530...261........148....58
"Endosymbiosis".........................574...249........182....120
"Punctuated Equilibrium"................195...190........38....31

ID may be claimed as a “new science” (though it’s neither), so it may be argued that its anemic presence in the literature indicates the early stages of a controversy. (In which case it’s too early to be mandating its teaching in science classes. But whatever.)

How do ID citations look over time, as compared to genuine controversies? Sometimes the source of an idea can be traced to a particular publication. Most often the publication will be a scientific paper, but it can just as well be a scientific or even a popular book. If the idea generates interest, scientists will respond to it in the literature, and cite the seminal publication in their own work. The “citation impact” or the number of publications that cite a particular work, thus gives a reasonable approximation to the importance of the work in the literature.

…

It’s clear that the “seminal” ID works have all peaked in their citation impact. They’re not just not ready for prime-time, they’re past their sell-by date.

**What this means is that if there is to be a scientific “origins controversy,” it will not be able to depend on these texts already written. That is to say, the founding text of a scientific “origins controversy” has not yet been written.

Which makes “teaching the controversy” a difficult proposition.**

[Bpelta]

@BigT

@Sitnam

He doesn’t, but then perhaps he should start a blog. What purplehorseshoe was really asking was ‘why the hell should we care what you’re thinking?’ but in a more positive way.

But why respond in such a way that makes it seem like you are incapable of parsing the OP and understanding what the implied question is? If I state my opinion on a topic in a forum that is specifically for getting other people’s opinions, what do you think the expected reply is?

If you want to say that the topic is stupid, or even just best covered in a blog, why not just say that, instead using passive aggressive snark that’s not even well formed?

So true. I never have patience for dealing with this stuff, so thanks.

[DianaG]

There is no controversy. There’s science, and there’s stupid shit that people make up to score political points. I’d say the farthest any discussion of the latter should go is to make a list, distribute it to the students, and let them know that anyone who brings these things up to them is either full of shit, or in thrall to people who are full of shit.

[Muffin]

Teaching ignorance is a bad thing.

[TriPolar]

Bill Beatyhas a great science hobbyist site, with links to fringe science sites also. His articles on electricity are great, but I’ve known people to end up on the fringe pages and not realize what they were looking at. He seems to want to expose the nonsense, while leaving room to investigate the alternatives. It’s hard to be critical of this approach considering the internet as a whole doesn’t distinquish between fact or fiction.

[Superfluous_Parentheses]

@Gagundathar

@E.Thorp

Topic conveniently explained on t-shirts here.

I have seen a few of these floating around ‘out there’, but some of these were difficult to interpret (for me that is.)

Top left to bottom right:

Devil burying dinosaur bones to “test our faith”.
Mythological animals: flying monkey(?) Nessy, Yeti, Jackalope.
5 classical elements periodic table.
ALIENS BUILT THE PYRAMIDS!
Young Earth.
Dinosaurs and humans living at the same time.
Flat Earth + World-Turtle + Elephants (Hindu legend).
Geocentrism.
Russel’s Teapot.
Stork Theory of Reproduction.
Atlantis!
Illuminati!
Cuthulhu mythos.
Astrology.
Paul Bunyan (who I know nothing about).
Scientology / Xenu.
2012 = End of the World.
Lead -> Gold; alchemy.
One of the more popular perpetual motion schemes.
Poltergeists!
Time Cube (not clear to me, but then, if Time Cube is anything, it’s certainly not clear).
Demon Theory of Disease.
Adam’s Rib.
Dowsing (for beer, apparently)
Fountain of youth.
Lizard people control the world.
Hollow Earth.
4 Humours.
ESP cards.
Invisible Unicorn.
Sun Scarab! (I love that one).
Elvis Lives!