Whoa! Scientific Illiteracy!

Whoa. I knew the guys I work with were "manly men" -- they collect guns and ride motorcycles and stuff -- but a recent discussion also revealed that none of them "believe that evolution crap."

THIS I did not expect. This is not Alabama, this is not 1930.

NoCoPilot wrote:

THIS I did not expect.  This is not Alabama, this is not 1930.

That's what I keep saying!
It's not just down here! You Yankees have got to stop tolerating this Fox Noise bs or you're gonna end up being Alabama II.

I fear we're all doomed. If somebody was to attempt a moon landing these days I'm sure we could not find the moon on a clear night.

When I was growing up my mother used to tell me "they couldn't print it if it wasn't true."

Then grocery store tabloids came along, with tales of alien babies and Elvis sightings. I never understood the entertainment value of reading lies and fabrications, but what the hell, nobody with half a brain would believe that shit.

Then the guy who made his fortune peddling supermarket tabloids, Rupert Murdoch, bought a television network. Thank you Ronald Reagan for overturning the Fairness Doctrine and allowing "entertainment news" to report untruths as news. Oh well, I thought, nobody with half a brain will believe that shit.

I was wrong. My co-workers are college educated high tech workers. These are not dummies.

Needless to say this scares me to death. The truth is no longer sacred. Apparently everybody is entitled to their own version of reality and they're all treated equally.

Some (many?) now even question the existence of one inviolable "truth."

NoCoPilot wrote:

Whoa.  I knew the guys I work with were "manly men" -- they collect guns and ride motorcycles and stuff -- but a recent discussion also revealed that none of them "believe that evolution crap."

Some of them are most likely just parroting the views of their right-wing heroes, whether they agree with validity of evolution or not. That's very common.

When I first got into computer programming, many many years ago, nearly everyone involved was politically left-leaning, and religiously ambivalent or atheist. A great many of us were there just for the newness and the challenge. Now that computers have become commonplace and the business is just commodity production, it's common to find the type of people you speak of. The last place I worked was probably half right-wingers and fundamentalists.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Needless to say this scares me to death. The truth is no longer sacred. Apparently everybody is entitled to their own version of reality and they're all treated equally.

Some (many?) now even question the existence of one inviolable "truth."

Stratification. We satanist types approve of stratification for just this reason. At some point the egalitarianism has to end and facts have to take over but that point is no longer reached in most areas of discussion now. Everyone wants to pick their realities.

Hi-yup.

Quote :

“Science ignorance is pervasive in our society, and these attitudes are reinforced when some of our leaders are openly antagonistic to established facts,” said of the University of California at Berkeley’s Randy Schekman, the 2013 Nobel Prize winner in medicine.

The poll highlights “the iron triangle of science, religion and politics,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

And scientists know they’ve got the smallest side of the triangle.

For the public, “most often values and beliefs trump science” when they conflict, said Alan Leshner, chief executive of the world’s largest scientific society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Political and religious values were closely tied to views on science in the poll, with Democrats more apt than Republicans to express confidence in evolution, the Big Bang, the age of the Earth and climate change.

Confidence in those four areas of science decline sharply as faith in a supreme being rises, according to the poll. Likewise, those who regularly attend religious services or are evangelical Christians express much greater doubts about scientific concepts that they may see as contradictory to their faith.

“When you are putting up facts against faith, facts can’t argue against faith,” said 2012 Nobel Prize–winning biochemistry professor Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University.

We're all doomed, I'm telling ya.