Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: [Phys-l] frizzi



Very good science is available on the NET, but... People reinforce their
beliefs by looking for a topic and then collecting any number of sites that
refute what they don't want to hear. And often there are many more bad
sites than good ones. So they are convinced because 9 out of 10 sites agree
with their misconceptions. Maybe "authoritative" encyclopedias were not
that bad.

This is why Eric Mazur is vary careful to make sure he has a good number of
students who answered his concep questions correctly. If you get a critical
mass of bad answers, the students go with the bad answers rather than
thinking logically.

Stories have a great power to convince, and stories where the ending was
changed to suit the desired conclusion are a specialty of many politicians,
especially Reagan who was a powerful story teller. Actually actors are very
good at this and from my own personal experience they are also good at
getting into a persona and situations. So they can easily be convinced that
something happened when in reality it did not. Of course the old school
actors did not do this, they acted things consciously without the
Stanislavsky method of getting into it. Alec Guinness was an old school
actor and asked why a fellow actor had to stay up all night to act the part
of a sleep deprived person. He told him to just act it, and Guinness was
superb at acting it without believing it. Guinness said he had no idea of
the motivation in Bridge over the River Kwai, yet he made a compelling
performance.

Again, we all are swayed by catch phrases of the type that politicians use.
So while we can sometimes be very smug thinking we are rational, the
cognitive scientists have shown that even very rational people in one realm,
can be very irrational in another. The current crop of would be presidents
appears to be unaware of this and actually believe a lot of what they are
saying.

Getting back to the net, some politicians will tell you they have 100 sites
which refute global warming, or 20,000 scientist signatures against it. But
when you look at the evidence the sites are not very legitimate, and the
signatures have few PhDs and practically no climatologists. One of the
differences between the middle ages (which were not dark for the Germans)
and now is that in the middle ages you went by authority, while now many
people judge truth by how many people say it. This latter (democratic?)
paradigm is particularly American, while Europeans and even more so Asiatics
tend to look more to authority. But the religious right uses both authority
(the Bible), and majority rules to reinforce their ideas. But at present
the majority is slowly moving away from the religious right's ideas, so that
has consolidated them to prevent further erosion. It is illogical that
parents who would deny "everyone is doing it" as reasoning while engaging in
that type of reasoning themselves. Apparently there has been erosion among
the young people in many religious right communities, and this is actually
been expressed by members of those communities.

The big concern is that among the current 3 top runners in the Republican
sweep stakes 2 of them espouse teaching creationism in science classes, and
are also anthropogenic global warming deniers. The third admits to global
warming belief, and probably would not push creationism. They have been
even more outspoken about this than the Bush Jr. This sort of thing didn't
happen during the fabled "golden age" of the '50s. I certainly do not want
the 50s back with its head in the sand outlook, and Jim Crow in the South,
but perhaps some of its civility might be welcome along with more respect
for teachers, scientists, and science.

I would enjoy one of JDs bumper stickers, but I don't display political or
religious slogans on my vehicles to prevent being shot. Actually I find
most of them trite, but I did one have an "Folk Dance for Fun" sticker.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

John M. Clement
Houston, TX




Science is used during the internet age, it hardly rules.
Few politicians use it to help make decisions. They undermine
or deny it while making their speeches.