Hmmm … I’ll retract my comments about a conceptual understanding of calculus being part of the basic knowledge of science. I think that I was focusing too much on some aspects of physics.
I will say, though, that I think that the practical aspects of science (as in my sugar/alcohol/vinegar example) are a key component of “basic understanding”. It’s about our everyday experiences.
relevant v. irrelevant
causation v. correlation
I’m failing to see the problem…
Do you know the difference between a set and a proper class? I mean, I expect you to know what the Peano Axioms are, even if you can’t reasonably recite them, and just a glimmering of an inkling of what the Axiom of Choice entails is pretty fundamental as well, but I could perhaps not revile you if you failed to know what a disjoint union is. (See? I’m being reasonable here.)
Most of those concepts go to the heart of how we think, how we come to valid conclusions, because math is our language for being rigorous. Maybe I do set a high bar. I’m not sorry.
I think the best way to teach science is with a more hands-on method than is perhaps possible in most schools. Have the students run experiments as often as possible and encourage thought over results. In fact, encourage them to review each others’ work, and make them all massive skeptics with a desire to see all the evidence. They’ll still make mistakes as adults, but they should at least be more interesting mistakes.
Vaguely. I do seem to recall they’re mutually exclusive, as a sort of dodge around Russel’s Paradox. But that’s the limit of my knowledge.
Yes, I do know what they are. I can only recite the equality relation ones - “equality is reflective, symmetric, transitive and closed”. The rest I’d have to look up, but I know the Axioms are basically the way of deriving the natural numbers.
I know what the axiom is (or at least the plain-language statement). Or I wouldn’t have gotten last year’s Halloween xkcd joke…
I know what that is too. Union of two non-overlapping sets, yes?
*I *think so - but then, I did do some university maths and stats.
Should you be? I’d say no.
Couldn’t agree more. I know my early science education was better than most of my peers because, while we were all getting the same crappy, underfunded Apartheid education, my parents at least were able to buy me a cheap microscope and chemistry set. That, and being able to afford a TV (not a given, in my neigbourhood) to watch Cosmos and Wildlife on One made a lot of difference to my life.
I’ve heard a lot of people say this but they are almost always, sometimes hilariously, wrong. Most doctors couldn’t make that claim, unless we’re setting a real low bar for basic function. As in a bar too low to actually make useful decisions. But I suppose MrDibble might be my first exception.
But this is turning into a derail. In the age of google and wikipedia people can get at least a superficial familiarity with almost anything but I’m not sure I’d call that understanding. Does that count as scientifically literate? I honestly don’t know. I actually find that superficial knowledge much more annoying that true ignorance. The latter are usually easier to convince at least in my experience. The former has a harder time letting go. They read that article on pubmed! Here’s a link!
I am afraid much of our population has lost the concept of seeking evidence. If it fits their world view, it must be valid. More hands on and less memorization could make an difference.
Note, Google happily finds stuff like ‘‘Hexagonal Water’’.
I agree. There’s breadth and depth of knowledge, and I think that breadth is a key consideration in this discussion.
This can be true, but even a superficial and very limited understanding of what is going on is preferable to none. It discourages magical thinking, and allows a person to gradually understand more difficult concepts with effort. Without a very basic understanding, people are far more prone to view junk science, woo, and religion as legitimate fields of pursuit. Remember, your average person does not work in a scientific or technical field. Their interactions with science tend to be in the conceptual or physical products arena rather than the actual work. You don’t have to know how a computer language or a BIOS works to operate a computer, you don’t need to know calculus to watch demonstration of physics. Certainly those who DO know those things are having a more in depth experience, but it is enough for the average person to understand that you are not a sorcerer who has conjoured demons up to do the work for you.
The thing is, if you have a revolutionary/consensus-denying theory and can bring compelling evidence in support of it, you likely will get initial resistance but science will adapt and accept it, as was the case with the quasicrystal guy, and with lots of other original thinkers.
If your qualifications are suspect, your evidence is poor, based heavily on testimonials, justified by allusions to conspiracies that are keeping you down and repeatedly and overwhelmingly debunked, then rejecting it is not the herd picking on poor Galileo*. The consensus that you are a loon and/or denialist in those circumstances is a manifestation of the right way to apply science to public policy.
*It figures that the poster Galileo would show up in this thread. 
That’s more or less what I was trying to (very) concisely say! I’m not a scientist, but the way I see it is that when confronted with the evidence against his ideas and accusations of lunacy, a real scientist would go back to the lab and re-evaluate, while the loons and denialists go about screaming persecution.
I’m not claiming to be able to make medical decisions. But I am saying there’s a certain amount you need to know to contribute meaningfully to discussions. So it depends what you think is “basic function”
But shit like “The kidneys are involved in regulating fluid balance (amongst other things), the pancreas makes insulin (amongst other stuff), the liver does detox and synthesis (amongst other things)”. We did those sketches of the nephron and layers of the skin crap in high school, I had the different kinds of epithelium drilled into me by 15. Is American High School science education worse than that? Because I always thought that I had a pretty shitty science ed. We never even dissected anything!
To me, there’s a noticeable difference in debates between the person who has all this sort of stuff as background, and looks up specifics, versus the person who doesn’t, and just googles cites to support their unscientifically-derived opinions. The former generally knows enough to get a better sense of what makes a good cite, IMO. And enough experience with science in general to know when they might be wrong.
I read Sagan’s book many years ago and found it rather tiresome. It took some ideas that would have made a nice magazine article and padded it out to book length. It would have been a much better book if it had been 100 pages instead of 480. Sometimes I think the publishing industry is allergic to short books.
I also found his tone rather off putting. I actually found myself starting to feel sympathetic for the morons he was lambasting.
Frankly for a lot of people, science has become a new dogma. They often accept certain scientific results without understanding the limitations of our knowledge. Science isn’t a body of facts we know, but rather hypotheses that have withstood every attempt to falsify them so far and a huge body of hypotheses that were falsified.
When someone refers to “settled science”, all they are demonstrating is their ignorance. A scientist doesn’t talk about what he knows, but what he believes is true today.
I am also dismayed by people who accept certain aspects of science, but can’t even do even simple algebra to demonstrate certain scientific principles.
I am not even sure some people understand that there is evidence to back some statements. They are like the first graders that found a puppy. They were trying to figure out whether it was a girl or boy. Finally one boy suggested they vote on it.
Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I think the concept of “Scientific illiteracy” doesn’t really work. I don’t think the term “literacy” really maps well to a broad understanding of science.
“Literacy” in the sense of reading is something that can be pretty well defined; we can argue over the precise way of measuring it and where the line is between literate and illiterate, but I think we can generally agree on what we’re aiming at and what more or less constitutes literacy. 99% of all people will clearly be definable as literate or illiterate. If you can read and understand a newspaper, you’re literate. If you can’t read, you’re illiterate.
But with science, it’s just too broad. If a doctor has an excellent command of biology, chemistry, medicine, and psychology, but he sheepishly admits he’s not sure what causes the phases of the moon, is he scientifically illiterate? The word just doesn’t work as well. If I’m just not real clear on what the liver does, am I scientifically illiterate, even though I have a pretty good grasp of everything else I listed? I mean, in what sense am I crippled by that single flaw in my understanding? If I’m illiterate, I CAN’T READ. If I don’t know how the liver works, but I understand the rest of my list - it just doesn’t make sense to me.
Or, to hit a little closer to home… I think economics is obviously, unambiguously a science. But I’m going to wager a lot of the folks on the SDMB who claim to be scientifically literate can’t tell me what “comparative advantage” is without looking it up. That’s Econ 101 stuff; someone who comments on international trade without knowing what comaprative advantage is is like someone who comments on astronomy without knowing what an orbit is. But is someone who can’t define comparative advantage scientifically illiterate? Even I wouldn’t say that and I actually have a degree in that field.
Excellent points!
Perhaps that’s the essence of scientific literacy: knowing enough about science to know that non-scientific approaches cannot answer questions of science. (Although that sounds tautological …)
Enough knowledge about science to know that God-of-the-gaps arguments aren’t necessary.
Enough knowledge about science to know the difference between facts and superstition.
Enough knowledge about science to know that “Nobody knows yet” can be a legitimate and acceptable answer. (And we won’t know the answer after we die because we’ll be … uh … dead. )
The thing is, this is stuff at what I would call a ‘taxonomic’ level of knowledge, detailing how certain things fit into certain groups – important if you want to talk about what groups these things fall into, but not all that high-impact apart from that. What I would rather emphasize is an understanding of fundamental concepts – not memorizing the difference between a cassowary and an emu, but rather, knowing how it comes about that there are these differences, i.e. evolution. The former is the kind of knowledge that you might learn for a test, then forget about; but the latter is the kind of knowledge that actively shapes your worldview, that removes some of the world’s apparent incomprehensibility. You can educate yourself on the difference between two kinds of rock with three minutes of googling, to all the detail the average person is ever likely to need, but the same can’t be said of things like evolution.
Ultimately, I think I would want the baseline scientific knowledge to be of the kind that is likely to be useful, or even beneficial, to a person beyond just conferring the ability of being able to show that they possess some item of knowledge. I want to emphasize understanding over memorization of facts that end up being essentially inert. To me, those pieces of knowledge that allow one to gain some insight into the working of the world are far more essential than those systematizing a description of it.
Understanding the difference between igneous and sedimentary rock isn’t just taxonomic, though - it’s also the understanding that the world around you is shaped by fundamentally different processes, fundamentally different timescales, that the planet is a dynamic system even absent life - these are not trivial concepts just to learn for a test. But they rest on the insight that different kinds of rock were shaped differently, something you do need to be taught.
True and false. The core idea of science is the notion of falsifiable hypotheses, but without the body of facts you cannot generate hypotheses. You don’t know you need the idea of ‘electrons’ until you’ve observed that electrical charge appears to come in discrete units, and you don’t know you need quantum physics until you have probed atoms far enough to realize that electrons exist in ‘orbits’ around nuclei. (If you don’t follow: Without discrete, or quantized, energy levels, assuming the old Bohr model where electrons orbit nuclei like planets orbit suns, you do the math and find out electrons ‘should be’ spiraling into nuclei, emitting hard radiation and destroying all matter as we know it.)
You know, I think the existence of gravity is “settled science” at this point. Do you disagree?
This is because we pound arithmetic into them until they vomit and wonder why they hate math.