I really like the point made here and wish it were made more often. From
Americans Are Smart About Science
And educating them won’t solve political problems by Maggie Koerth-Baker.
Hey, didja hear about those scientifically illiterate Americans? People so dumb, they think the sun revolves around the Earth? People who can’t pass a quiz of basic science facts? People who are getting dumber and whose lack of knowledge leads them to have misguided opinions about science policy?
If you’ve somehow missed those stories, you’re likely to see some similar to them Thursday, as journalists and scientists react to the latest Pew Research survey on Americans’ general scientific knowledge. At a quick glance, the data appear to show that this country has, at best, a so-so relationship with science facts.
But the researchers who conducted that survey, as well as outside scientists who study American scientific knowledge, say that’s not the right takeaway. In reality, Americans have pretty decent scientific literacy. What’s more, even if more of us did score better on quizzes of science facts, that wouldn’t necessarily result in any changes in our beliefs about science.
The Pew results show that a majority of Americans can correctly answer 10 of 11 specific questions about science, some of which require using charts or employing an understanding of the scientific process. The only question a majority of Americans answered incorrectly: only 39 percent of Americans knew antacids were made up of bases. When 60 percent of Americans can correctly identify the need for a control group in drug development research, I can’t consider my compatriots a group that’s scientifically illiterate.
[snip]
Pew isn’t the only organization that does these kinds of surveys. University of Michigan political scientist Jon Miller and the National Science Foundation have, separately, run similar polls going back decades. And all three sets of data — Pew’s, Miller’s and NSF — suggest that our national grasp of scientific fact isn’t too shabby.
“I think we actually do really well,” Miller said about Americans’ science knowledge. His surveys, which aim to assess how many Americans can easily read and understand public science communication of the sort found in the New York Times or PBS documentaries, have found that scientific literacy actually increased in this country over the last 30 years. Granted, that means we’ve gone from about 10 percent of Americans passing Miller’s tests to 28 percent. But, he said, most people don’t delve into the subtleties of scientific facts and concepts in their daily lives.
Why do the popular surveys show Americans ignorant as dirt and the more sophisticated surveys show that Americans are actually reasonably well informed?
The easy answer is that the mainstream media thrives on attention grabbing headlines. The contrast between most of these survey results (Americans know virtually nothing) and the fact that we spend billions on education is newsworthy. So they keep commissioning such surveys because they are reliable attention getters. And as soon as you have grabbed attention, then you are in the middle of advocacy conflict - raise taxes for more education; no, hire better teachers; no, keep schools open longer hours, etc. All because there is an impression that education is not working because Americans are so uninformed as revealed by the surveys.
That is all at least partly true - the impression of ignorance is fostered by the press for its own commercial benefit.
However, I have always thought there were at least a couple of other dynamics in play.
One is class. Or more accurately, educational status. Only 30% or so of Americans complete college and college is where you tend to round out a reasonably wide awareness of many fields of knowledge. You may not know a lot about a particular field but at least you are aware of the 3-5 key elements of a wide range of fields.
And virtually a hundred percent of journalists complete college. I suspect that there is a subtle social climbing and status seeking behind these "Americans are ignorant" surveys. Journalists are college educated; they live in concentrated urban centers where large majorities are college educated (and successful); they deal primarily with other professionals. Journalists live in bubbles and demonstrating that the great unwashed are actually ignorant both sets journalists (with their general range of knowledge arising from college educations) apart from the unwashed and justifies intervening in the lives of the ignorant (another ideological orientation shared by most journalists). Surveys demonstrating ignorance are a common "othering" technique. It appeals to the vanity of journalists and to their authoritarian tendencies (left leaning ideologies).
I think, though, that there is yet another dynamic in play and that is based on the profound ignorance of the average journalist. In general, journalists, based on their reporting, are relatively unversed in logic or numeracy. While they know about a wider range of things, they know relatively little. They have breadth and not depth of knowledge. In addition, they appear to have relatively meager capacity to integrate disparate bodies of knowledge. They are linear story tellers at best, not integrators of disparate knowledge.
Most these "Americans are ignorant" surveys tend to be very badly designed. They are purpose-driven to find ignorance and they do so by asking questions about a sample of domains of knowledge that are covered in college but not necessarily relevant to personal productivity.
That these surveys are clearly missing something is suggested by the fact that while the surveys show great ignorance, the national GDP suggests extraordinary sophistication. The American economy is the most complex, sophisticated, and productive economy in the world. It challenges belief that that can be achieved with the most ignorant workforce in the world.
And of course, it is not true. The American economy is so sophisticated and productive because it has one of the most adaptive, knowledgeable and sophisticated workforces in the world.
The resolution to the conundrum is that workers have deep pertinent knowledge, not broad academic knowledge. They have deep knowledge in narrow domains. They know what they need to know in order to be productive and they do not invest time and money on knowledge domains which are, in the pejorative sense, academic.
When the mainstream media runs these type of broad knowledge domain tests in order to demonstrate ignorance, all they are actually doing is establishing the contrast between people who have narrower but deeper applied knowledge and those who have had the luxury of indulging a wider but shallower and more theoretical knowledge. They are doing a lot of unconscious social signaling.
You can look at the
BLS income statistics and see that in fact the most highly compensated jobs are those which require broad and deep knowledge across many domains of knowledge, or are very deep in a narrow specialty. It has nothing to do with broad and shallow knowledge.
The Pew research is actually trying to tackle something different from the fact that the 30% college educated people have a broad but often shallow knowledge base compared to the 70%.
That’s because these surveys aren’t elaborate pub trivia. Instead, both Pew and NSF conduct them partly as a way of learning more about how differing levels of scientific knowledge correlate with attitudes and beliefs about science. They want to find out whether people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson are right when they blame scientific illiteracy for problems like disbelief in climate change.
“And interesting thing about that,” Besley said. “Turns out the relationship between what people know about science and their attitudes about science … is pretty small.” That is to say, Americans who know more science facts don’t necessarily hold the science policy beliefs actual scientists would prefer, nor do Americans who know the least have the least trust in science. And despite very different ideologies on a number of scientific issues, Republicans and Democrats score about the same on the Pew survey. What’s more, Besley said, experiments that tried to change a belief about a science topic by increasing people’s science education have largely failed.
“Scientists buy heavily into this argument that to know us is to love us,” said Sharon Dunwoody, professor of mass communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But that just isn’t backed up by empirical evidence. The problem with scientific literacy surveys, she and Besley told me, is that they’re often being interpreted by people who are starting from a couple of inaccurate premises: That everyone ought to know a wide variety of science facts, even if those facts don’t affect everyday life; and that the more science facts people know, the friendlier they’ll be toward science. Neither are true, they said. And, ironically, pushing those incorrect beliefs — and the resulting conclusion that Americans are scientifically illiterate — could actually make people less science friendly.
This goes to
Philip Tetlock's work such as
Expert Political Judgment demonstrating that "experts" have no better forecasting capacity than informed general public.
If you want good outcomes, you need a mix of accomplished people in the relevant field (who may or may not be viewed as experts, its the accomplishment which is important) along with accomplished people from other fields who bring a more integrative perspective in order to counter tunnel vision.
Too narrow experts miss context, people with broad but shallow knowledge miss detail.
The economic figures of the national economy speak to a pretty decent mass utilization of useful knowledge and expertise as opposed to tests of theoretical shallow knowledge.
The indulgence in such tests of theoretical shallow knowledge speaks to their economic usefulness to mainstream media commercial interests, to the class bias of journalists othering non-college graduates, and is an indictment of journalists incapacity to think broadly and deeply. It reveals their hidden ignorance and bias. In general. Obviously 538 is a different kettle of fish; at least in this instance.
But there is a whole different ideological dimension to this as well. If you hold the simplistic view that humans are blank slates to be fixed by the state with an infusion of knowledge, it leads to dramatically different policies than if you accept human variability, universal rights, individual accomplishments and accountability and the unpredictable outcomes and emergent order of free markets and free people.
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