How much science should we expect other people to understand?

Very little of the historical record is eyewitness accounts.

While there are diaries, logs, testimonies and minutes, there are also administrative records, coins, speeches and proclamations, second–and-beyond histories, statues, opinions, maps, archeological sites, plays and other fictiona(ised) writings, copies-of-copies-of-copies, buildings, writing practice, paintings of both real and imagined scenes and beings, predictions, love poems and undecipherable texts.

Your ‘eyewitness’ was not even an eyewitness.

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Quite the opposite. You have spent most of this thread telling us to ignore science and facts.

The problem is that your argument is to ignore facts, calling them not worth believing in or relative. For example,

“All is relative including all your so called facts.”

“If you can not accept that most things are relative if not subjective, your debate will be rigid, dogmatic and serve no purpose outside yourself.”

“Facts today turn into lies tomorrow, like the centre of the universe … is that a fact too?”

“There are thousands if not millions of false “facts” that humans have adopted as true for milenia.
By ignorance, by omission, bias, protecting agenda or interests, you name it, that is man’s history.”

You have been impervious to facts.

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Well my original post was simply a question as to whether I was expecting too much of my friends on Facebook by expecting them to understand the most elementary basics of how science works in general. I gave a few examples of things that I would expect an average person who is approaching these discussions honestly to be able to get a handle on with a short, five minute explanation.

I haven’t the faintest idea what @Marc thinks was offensive about any of what I said. Were some of the examples that I gave so basic and elementary that I came across as patronising? Well they were very simple and elementary, but they were all examples of concepts and principles that I have had some people completely fail to understand even after I’ve tried to explain them in words of one syllable. If he understands those concepts fine, then it’s not him that I’m talking about so there’s no reason why he should find any of them patronising himself.

The main questions I had were (a) are my expectations realistic here, or am I setting them too high, and (b) if my expectations are realistic, then are there any other examples of the most elementary basics of how science, reason, critical thinking and logic work that most people should be able to understand when it’s pointed out to them? I’m still interested if anyone has any more feedback on these questions.

@Marc’s discussion is off topic but it is still interesting nonetheless. I’d think the best thing to do with it would be to extract it out into a separate thread if it’s practical to do so.

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On the strength of that, James, - I took your suggestion. Your topic can be continued here, and I started a new thread with the posts from this thread that were about Dietary / health stuff. Hopefully I parsed the posts accurately as to which ones belonged over there.

So anyone wanting to discuss more about diets/health with Marc, that now has its own thread. This thread can continue to be about James’ OP - How much science should we expect others to know.

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thanks, Merv. In regard to original question, it does bring up the issue of not only what should people know, but how do you approach those who have false assumptions and ideas about science.

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There’s another axis of consideration too. Those harboring the false assumptions and ideas … do they approach life political ideology first, or curiosity / humility first. I do personally know of people in that latter category who have inherited bad ideas and are holding to them innocently enough (I think). They don’t tend to be ones who enter a chatroom or a conversation with guns blazing; but will instead take time to listen to people. They may still convicted on religious grounds to hold on to certain things even in the face of whatever evidence, but … one can still speak to them and relate with them. They keep the partisan toxicity in a kind of quarantine. So while they may still have notions I don’t share in, I still think of them as being in a different category. I don’t worry about their spiritual status because, whatever problematic notions they may still have, God will deal with those when the time is right; just as God has and will continue to do with any of my own problematic or false notions too.

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Something I learned the hard way as a member of our high school wrestling team helping clean up after a flood! Even when the water has become clear, that mud on the bottom is nowhere hear settled.

Especially when the people using the term generally have no actual clue what it means.

I had two math teachers who let me sit in the back of the class reading science fiction until the review was done with. My brother, a year ahead of me, had cleared the way; one day when he was sitting in the back reading something else, the exasperated teacher said, “If you don’t need to listen, why don’t you come up and give this lesson?” – which my brother proceeded to do, picking up exactly where the teacher had left off . . . and making more sense to the class than the teacher had been doing.

My mouth dropped open one day when instead of telling an algebra student to “cancel” a term found on both sides I instead said “kill” it. It was like a light went on; he was a devotee of war stories, and when he shifted to thinking of the two sides of an equation in battle terms (which still makes me shudder) everything started to click for him – and if looking at it as capturing everything for “his” side of an equation rather than getting it equal to zero (or one) worked for him, I wasn’t going to challenge it, and if setting two independent equations equal to each other got described as “matching our guys to theirs”, I wasn’t going to quibble.

It’s amazing what can be the trigger that can “turn on the light”: I had labored for three days trying to get the concept of slope across to a class (and my supervising teacher was telling me to move on), and one guy – a football lineman – was possibly more baffled than at the start. Then out in the stands by tjhe football field during lunch he tripped on a step as he sprinted to the top, and came to a halt, stared at his feet, looked at the steps, looked at me with a big grin and said, “Oh! ‘Rise over run!’ Yeah!”
So next period algebra I marched the whole class out to the football field . . . .

Amen!

So is “electrons go around the nucleus”, but both are good starting points.

There’s a name for this fallacy though it escapes me. It’s basically claiming that since a process can’t do everything perfectly it’s worthless – which is like saying that since Einstein showed that Newton was “wrong” then Newton’s equations should be ignored . . .which is ludicrous since NASA has used them to se the paths of every planetary probe they’ve launched.

In the case of the big online “creation ministries”, they aren’t even harmonious with the scriptures, let alone with science.

His list strokes me as equivalent to refusing to pay attention to his wife’s shopping list because she can’t state exactly where every single product is in the store.

Only to an extent similar to what we can see of an iceberg from a small boat. Contrary to popular belief, there are a number of levels of understanding that do not mean that the person can explain a thing to something else – that ability is the part of the iceberg both above water and on whichever side we view it from. Something I had to grasp before I taught remedial reading comprehension to college freshmen is that there is a level of understanding where a person can understand what is being read, but lose that understanding the moment the person looks up from the page (and the same is true of listening to something). In my arrogance I was ready to start out by judging anyone who couldn’t explain a sentence or paragraph to the class as not able to understand that sentence or paragraph; instead I had to learn that there are a number of levels of understanding running from that lowest level all the way up to being able to explain technical material to someone unfamiliar with the particular field!
And unless a student was at one of the top two levels, my ability to assess their level of comprehension was seriously crippled to nonexistent (until I devoured the three thousand pages I had to show understanding of before they let me step up front of the classroom).
So estimating by that class, out of twenty people if by ordinary measures you think on person understands, there’s a good chance that another eight do but they just can’t explain it to your satisfaction . . . and the rest just may not care enough to try.

Those are two ways to measure, but they’re applicable only to the top two levels of understanding. I remember a student who could explain what a sentence meant while he was reading through it word by word but not if he read that sentence ten times and then shut the book – and a student at a slightly better level but who got totally lost if a statement he’d just shown understanding of was given again in different words (a form of this came to light when I started dealing with ancient languages; a large number of students literally could not translate from Greek or Latin unless they arranged the words into a suitable English order first – word order is linked to some levels of understanding for many people [reminds me of a guy who when told Churchill’s statement about “errant nonsense up with which I shall not put” could not understand that phrase no matter how well it was explained; he had to see the words in his accustomed order]).

At a family reunion someone said that about one of our aunts, but then commented that our grandmother had it down to an art – she didn’t even need measuring cups but could, without having made one before, make a new kind of pastry just from a description.

I convinced some people of the value of getting the COVID vaccine by putting it in military terms: sure, your immune system can “dig in” and “man the trenches”, but the vaccine is like reinforcements who have fought this enemy before.

And traffic accidents. My older brother and two other students helped get a conviction of a reckless driver by explaining just how much force was necessary to break a brick wall the driver drove through, then used that number and the mass of the vehicle to establish a minimum speed for the car at the time of impact, then from the manufacturer’s data on acceleration times showed that the driver had most certainly not stopped at the stop sign at the previous intersection.
The fact that they drew it out big and colorful on oversized sheets of newsprint probably helped.

Oh – they were interested because after smashing through that brick wall the car jumped a flower bed and smashed in a window in a girls’ dorm, sending glass and other stuff flying into the room while people were in it. They heard the guy tell the cop he was only doing 25mph, and one of them said, “Like h*ll”; the cop heard it and after the guy was gone asked if they could substantiate that assertion, so they went to work, angry at the idea that someone might get off when he had endangered fellow students.

This brought to mind the first job my cousin the nuclear engineer had after graduation: bolstering and improving the safety measures for the plutonium reactor at Hanford. At a backyard BBQ gathering someone made the mistake of asking, “Whats so hard about that?” My cousin started off with, “Well, consider this one…” and spent the next five minutes in talk a lot like what you wrote.

Just for fun: one improvement was to a last-ditch emergency measure if the reactor started doing a Chernobyl (though this was before that cluster-mess-up), which was a miles-long culvert that would dump water from the Columbia River to flood the entire reactor compound. It had been set up so that if the reactor stopped producing power, an emergency generator would kick in and open the gate to that long culvert so the water would flow. He made it simpler: they connected the gate to an electromagnet that held the culvert closed, and connected that to power from the reactor, so that if the reactor failed the magnet would go off and the river would pour through.

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It never ceases to amaze me that this is the same way that linguistics works for ancient languages when dealing with an obscure phrase or word.

No kidding. I watched a physics grad student tackle the issue of changing out the gas filter in his car by systematically analyzing it like any lab problem.
He successfully demonstrated that a scientific approach can deal with practical problems quite nicely. He also demonstrated why any scientist with good sense would call roadside assistance: what took him three hours to do applying great concentration could have been done in ten minutes by a mechanic who could also carry on a conversation with the car owner while keeping an eye on traffic.

Adam should contemplate the situation of Richard Dawkins, who thinks exactly the way Adam did in his post above: Dawkins has the attitude that because he is an expert in his field then he is competent to talk about a collection of ancient literature written in languages he has never studied.

I know a guy who maintains that the right wing in the U.S. wants wages kept low so that people at the end of the day are just too tired to bother thinking critically and so will believe whatever is said by someone who “resonates” with them. Having observed that very end-of-day phenomenon, it’s a thought I’ve pondered.

I’ve observed the birth of two new theological journals that were founded because people thought that the existing journals were prejudiced against certain viewpoints. If it happens in theology, it must certainly happen in science!

Or as I encounter all too frequently, people claiming to debunk evolution and then spend twenty or more minutes failing to even talk about evolution!

This is a problem that was discussed in an education course I took. It was addressed in terms of how to communicate with high school students, but it applies everywhere!

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I’m reminded of an anecdote from one of my education profs. He told of a mother who managed to corner him and proceeded to complain that her daughter was thinking of so many things differently since she’d been at university.
He waited patiently and congratulated the mother on being such a successful parent: she’d turned out a daughter who could clearly think for herself; job well done!

My older brother the mathematician confessed to the same problem – except that if the numbers came with dollar signs there was no difficulty.

(His wife later confirmed that this was not a joke!)

He could do triple integration in his head but couldn’t manage simple arithmetic.

Well put.

There’s always the risk that just studying the scriptures honestly will bring results that go against traditional interpretation! This is especially true in the case of discovering what phrases actually meant at the time they were written, e.g. saying creature was made from the dust was an idiom meaning the creature was mortal (that was one that had me thinking, "But . . . " for years before I realized that I was setting tradition over scripture).

You keep saying that but by the standards you use the novels of Tom Clancy and John Grisham qualify as history – which is more than enough to show that your standards are in error, even if you refuse to recognize that you are claiming something that the normal use of language does not support.

But the entire YEC enterprise is contrary to the Gospel because it encourages a modern Gnosticism with its insistence that special knowledge can be had without actually studying, and that this special knowledge is necessary for the Gospel.

The trouble is that it is YEC that insists the Bible has to conform to modern science, and that is what gets argued about while consideration of the text itself is ignored. From the point of view of the scriptures, YEC and TE are engaging in the same error of pushing a false worldview onto the text.

I keep thinking of the time that a friend thought that H2O2 was close enough to H2O and was going to use it to rinse a pet’s eyes. Happily her boyfriend took it away from her and handed her a bottle of distilled water!

Kind of like if anyone could just walk into the woods and shoot a deer, we wouldn’t call it hunting, we’d call it “shopping”.

I wasn’t surprised; looking for new standard candles is a constant. But I was delighted that this one makes good sense!

This is one reason I really appreciate that a number of my science professors required us to write papers in a format as though we were submitting to a journal for publication – that quickly shoves opinion into the little corner where it belongs!

That’s certainly how academic papers treat it.

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I’m not sure either if there is some formal or Latin name for such a fallacy. But one way I’ve heard it expressed is: “Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” I suppose “romanticization” or “idealizing” might be less technical concepts for a similar way of thinking.

It’s also an unwise rejection of accomodation as nothing more than error. What?!!! Surely God wouldn’t have used ancient language and concepts to speak to ancient people because we all just know God would have used 21st century science terminology from the get-go, given that we’ve arrived at the final state of knowledge for all times and places! (Or so the modern fundamentalist delusion subconsciously runs.)

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That’s the Nirvana Fallacy. It does not seem to have a Latin name.

The two liquids are radically different (chemistry pun).

My science professors did the same. It really helped me get my head around the scientific process. What was hardest for me at the time was figuring out what went into the Results section and what went into the Discussion. It really helped me to understand the difference between facts and conclusions, and helped clarify the difference between model and reality.

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It’s interesting. Scientists wanting people to understand science and then claiming their knowledge is not enough.
In terms of understanding it is normally the reverse that is expected. The complex or technical is put into layman’s language (understanding)
Being able to explain something in your own words without referencing complex data and diagrams is another expectation of learning.
Being able to understand and analogise a principle should also be a requirement.

How much science should we expect from the common (hu)man? Absolutely none. it is not a requirement for living. You do not need to understand the science to use it.

In point of fact The acceptance or rejection of Evolution has no baring on everyday living. it is of intellectual value. “Oh yes” is the usual reaction to pieces of useless information. Making it more than it is would seem to be a power play.(Superiority- i know more than you do)

Sometimes I think a little humility would go a long way, but that applies to all walks of life not just science.

Richard

I don’t expect a random person off the street to understand the science of any given field. What I hope they understand is the basics of the scientific method that they were taught in school, as well as concepts such as facts and conclusions and how they differ.

That goes both ways. If someone is not familiar with the science then I would hope they wouldn’t think that millions of knowledgeable scientists over the last 150 years have got it all wrong.

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So does that mean we shouldn’t expect people to understand their times tables, how to use Google, the mere fact that measurement is a thing, or how to speak English?

Because that is what “Absolutely none” means. We don’t have to expect them to understand differential equations, lambda calculus, quantum mechanics or genetic sequencing. But we do need to expect them to understand something. If we didn’t, then we wouldn’t even be able to communicate with them at all.

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I am sorry, but you are not getting it.

Scinece underpins much of life but that does not mean we have to understand it to use it. You do not need programing language to google. In fact th Internet has reduced the need for specialist knowledge. You just look it up on Youtube, or price it up on Ebay or Amazon… Our knowledge is only to know who to ask or where to get it repaired.

Even now we cannot guarantee a levvel of learning, especially in the older generations.

No, you just use the imagery or examples that they do understand, (Just as Jesus did)

Having said that, why do you want people to understand science at all?

That as a low shot and not even accurate. I do not clam that evolutionary have got it all wrong, they just haven’t got it as right as they think they have.

Vanity, vanity,

Ad hominum.

And any other Latin phrase you want to show off with.

There is an underlining pride that insists that their learning makes them both superior and unimpeachable. Yeah.

Richard

And you do so without the knowledge of the science in the field.

Physician, heal thyself.

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Which field is that?

Physiology? Ecology, Biology? Or just ToE.

ANd I know more than you give me credit (And have the qualifications to prove it)

Ad hominum?

You are talking to the wrong Christian.

Richard

This applies also to the study of the scriptures: YECers don’t realize just how much study goes into understanding just the opening Creation story because they operate on the assumption that what it looks like in English to them is what it must be. The amount of facts involved in actually understanding just that chapter is sufficient to fill a (very long) shelf’s space of books, but they have no interest in actually learning because they’ve been taught they don’t need to learn.

One would hope, and that’s true also of actually studying the scriptures. In both science and textual study it is critical to learn to set aside engrained suppositions and just deal with the data, but there’s an obstacle prior to that: recognizing that one even has presuppositions! That set of engrained concepts is what constitutes a worldview, and I have yet to encounter a YECer who actually grasps either what a worldview is or that he has one.

I’m reminded of a statement by a church Father in a letter to a friend interested in understanding the Gospel, to the effect of “set aside all that you have known or think you know for you are seeking a (radically) different realm”. The YEC approach to the Bible completely ignores this truth, preferring instead to hold onto their ideas and force them on the text rather than letting the text be what it is.

That’s not true in geology, so I presume it isn’t true in biology. As an example, on a cape near where I live there is a place where the layers found in part of the local formation are inverted. By your view that is meaningless unless we know how thy got inverted, but that is not true: by the fact that they are inverted we know that some seriously energetic event separated a huge chunk of local strata, flipped it over, and dropped it into another part of the formation entirely at a time sufficiently long after the original deposition because the layers were solid enough to remain intact while being flipped.
How did it flip? Last I knew no one had yet come up with a reasonable explanation, including the grad student who discovered this anomaly during his thesis research, nor his advisors, nor anyone in the geology department at that university, nor anyone in the geology departments of at east two other nearby universities, nor anyone in the area’s government geology agency. But that is irrelevant to the reality that we know a lot more about that cape’s geological history just from knowing that this inverted section of strata did in fact get flipped.

Having dealt with a number of papers in the area of ANE languages, this makes me laugh: even in that small area of academic activity it is possible to go for years without realizing that a certain subject has been addressed by someone (though thanks to the internet it’s easier to avoid) even when trying to keep up with current work. Given how much (astronomically) larger the realm of evolutionary studies is, that has to be even more the case than in ANE studies.

Which just means that as a layman in biology, your claim that “no one is actually trying to do so” is so beyond laughable it’s shocking: if the experts have trouble keeping up, someone not actively working in the field and perusing numerous journals monthly isn’t remotely qualified as to make a judgment about what “no one” is doing.

The truth is that your view of evolution turns God into a deceiver in the very same way that the YEC view does: both require that God deliberately made things appear to be one way while insisting that those appearances are false.

. . . as anyone who has played Super Mastermind would know; even that relatively simple coding challenge relies on the “numbers game”.

Which is astounding given how clumsy a denial of common ancestry makes God look! Here we see an elegant system for generating more and more diversity in living things, yet someone insists that God didn’t use that system, instead kludging out each species separately while making it appear as though He actually used that elegant system. Such a Creator must be either incompetent or deliberately deceptive.

Including weather forecasts!

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Sorry, it don’t

Let’s not go down the road of theistic geology again.

Well they are not prominent and judging by what i see they would be considered fringe.

The focus either microbiology or fossil hunting and analysis. Though there does seem to be an emphasis on trying to convince the world that birds came from dinosaurs.
I guess that not every scientist is published so who knows, however the material tat is published just glosses over physiology and ecology with the phrase “It had millions of years” Or *It evolved slowly." Thereby showing little or no understanding of basic mechanics or physiology.

Whether the scientific world in general can answer me or not you can’t, and neither can anyone else here. The data does not seem available, unless you can find a non avian fossil with honeycomb bones, or how birds shrunk from Archaeopteryx to a Wren or humming bird. Or how a socking big gliding half breed learned the complexities of avian flight…

To quote Jimmu Cricket “and there’s more.”

But there isn’t enough space on this forum for it

It’s all in the details. And you have millions of years of data missing.

Richard

PS And I am still not convinced you know enough abut the workings of endotherms and ectotherms to see why they are completely incompatible and it would be virtually impossible to change from one to the other. Let alone the specialisation of Avian systems.