Just thinking… could it be worth doing a website providing interesting parts of settled science for laypeople?
If we take the solid, replicated findings, and remove the ones that laypeople don’t care about (because they have no use for them in everyday life)… how much would be left? Which parts of human knowledge would be covered most?
I imagine a website that would first provide a simple explanation, and then a detailed scientific explanation with references.
Why? Simply to give people idea that this is science that is useful and trustworthy—not the things that are too abstract to understand or use, and not some new hypotheses that will be disproved tomorrow. Science, as a friendly and trustworthy authority. To get some respect for science.
Wikipedia seems close enough to what you’re describing … and improving Wikipedia (plenty of science pages are flagged as “this is hard to understand for non-specialists) seems like the easiest way to move it closer.
The wikipedia contains millions of topics, so the subset of “settled science” is lost among them. Creating a “Settled Science” portal could be an approximation.
As an example of where my idea differs from the wikipedia approach: the wikipedia Science portal displays a link to article about Albert Einstein. Yes, Albert Einstein was an important scientist, but his personal biography is not science. So one difference would be that the “settled science encyclopedia” would not include Einstein or any other scientist (except among the references). Only the knowledge, which could be also used on a different planet with different history and different names and biographies of the scientists.
Also, in wikipedia you have a whole page about a topic. Some parts of the page may be settled science, other parts are not; but both parts are on the same page, in the same encyclopedia. It would be cognitively easier for a reader to know “if it is on SettledScienceEncyclopedia.com″, it is settled science.
EDIT: I agree that improving scientific articles on wikipedia, not just making them more correct but also more accessible to wide public, is a worthy goal.
Take a subject like evolution.The fact that evolution happens is setteled science for a long time.
On the other hand if you take a school book on evolution that was written 30 years ago there a good chance that it has examples of how one species is related to another species that got overturned when we got genome data.
People used to respect Science, as an abstract mysterious force which Scientists could augur and even use to invoke the odd miracle. In a way, people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Scientists in a similar way to how pre-Christian Europe saw priests; you need one on hand when you make a decision, and contradict them at your peril, but ultimately they’re advisers rather than leaders.
That attitude is mostly gone now, but it could be useful to bring it back. Ordinary people are not going to provide useful scientific insights or otherwise helpfully (1) participate in the process, so keeping them out of the way and deferential is going to be more valuable then trying to involve them. There seems to be a J curve between 100% scientific literacy and old-school Science-ism, and it seems to me at least that climbing back up to an elitist position is the option most likely to actually work in our lifetimes.
If anything, the more easily lay people can lay their hands on scientific materials the worse the situation is; the Dunning-Kruger effect and a lack of actual scientific training / mental ability means that laypeople are almost certain to misinterpret what they read in ways which disagree with the actual scientific consensus. Just look at the huge backlash against biology and psychometry these days; most of the people I’ve argued with in person or online have no actual qualifications but feel entitled to opinions on the issues because they stumbled through an article on pub-med and know the word methodology.
People used to respect Science, as an abstract mysterious force which Scientists could augur and even use to invoke the odd miracle. In a way, people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Scientists in a similar way to how pre-Christian Europe saw priests; you need one on hand when you make a decision, and contradict them at your peril, but ultimately they’re advisers rather than leaders.
That attitude is mostly gone now,
Is this true? It pattern matches to a generic things-were-better-in-the-old-days complaint and I’m not sure how one would get a systematic idea of how much people trusted science & scientists 100-200 years ago.
(Looking at the US, for instance, I only find results from surveys going back to the late 1950s. Americans’ confidence in science seems to have fallen quite a lot between 1958 and 1971-2, probably mostly in the late 1960s, then rebounded somewhat before remaining stable for the last 35-40 years. I note that the loss of trust in science that happened in the 1960s wasn’t science-specific, but part of a general loss of confidence experienced by almost all institutions people were polled about.)
but it could be useful to bring it back. Ordinary people are not going to provide useful scientific insights or otherwise helpfully (1) participate in the process, so keeping them out of the way and deferential is going to be more valuable then trying to involve them.
The average science PhD is two standard deviations out from the population mean in terms of intelligence, has spent ~8-10 years learning the fundamental background required to understand their field, and is deeply immersed in the culture of science. And these are the ‘newbs’ of the scientific community; the scrappy up-and-comers who still need to prove themselves as having valuable insights or actual skills.
So yes, for all practical purposes the barrier to genuine understanding of scientific theories and techniques is high enough that a layman cannot hope to have more than a cursory understanding of the field.
And if we want laymen to trust in a process they cannot understand, the priest is the archetypal example of mysterious authority.
So yes, for all practical purposes the barrier to genuine understanding of scientific theories and techniques is high enough that a layman cannot hope to have more than a cursory understanding of the field.
First, there is no logical connection between your first paragraph and the second one and I don’t see any reason for that “so, yes”.
Second, that claim is, ahem, bullshit. I’ll agree that someone with low IQ “cannot hope to have more than a cursory understanding”, but for such people this statement is true for much more than science. High-IQ laymen are quite capable of understanding the field and, often enough, pointing out new approaches which have not occurred to any established scientists because, after all, that’s not how these things are done.
And if we want laymen to trust in a process they cannot understand
No, I don’t want laymen to trust in a process they cannot understand.
How high is “high-IQ” and how low is “low IQ” in your book?
Someone with an above-average IQ of 115-120, like your average undergrad, visibly struggles with 101 / 201 level work and is deeply resistant to higher-level concepts. Actually getting through grad school takes about a 130 as previously mentioned, and notable scientists tend to be in the 150+ range. So somewhere from 84-98% of the population is disqualified right off the bat, with only the top 2-0.04% capable of doing really valuable work.
And that’s assuming that IQ is the only thing that counts; in actuality, at least in the hard sciences, there is an enormous amount of technical knowledge and skill that a person has to learn to provide real insight. I cannot think of a single example in the last 50 years which fits your narrative of the smart outsider coming in and overturning a well-established scientific principle, although I would love to hear of one if you know any.
No, I don’t want laymen to trust in a process they cannot understand.
So no more trusting chemotherapy to treat your cancer? The internet to download your music, or your iPod to play it? A fixed wing aircraft to transport you safely across the Atlantic? Must be tough even just driving to work, now that your car is mostly computer-controlled and made of materials with names that sound like alphabet soup.
Almost every aspect of modern life, even for a polymathic genius, is going to be at least partially mysterious; the world of our tools and knowledge is far too complex for the human mind to fully grasp.
Someone with an above-average IQ of 115-120, like your average undergrad, visibly struggles with 101 / 201 level work and is deeply resistant to higher-level concepts. Actually getting through grad school takes about a 130 as previously mentioned, and notable scientists tend to be in the 150+ range.
Not reality. 41% of people in the US are enrolled in college (in 2010) Source. If we assumed that the US has representative IQ and use a 15 SD IQ scale, then the top 41% of IQs are all people with IQ of at least 103.41. I calculated that average IQ of a the top 41% of the population on wolfram alpha. (It is easy, because by definition, IQ follows a normal distribution.) I got 114.2.
If US citizens between 18 and 24 are representative of the entire population in terms of IQ, it is literally impossible for the average IQ of an undergrad student to be 115 or higher.
Hmm. I’m not 95% confident of then number I gave, but I haven’t been able to turn up anything disconfirming.
I did a bunch of research on the heritability of IQ last year for a term paper and I repeatedly saw the claim that university students tend to be 1sd above the local population mean, although that may not apply in a place with more liberal admissions practices like the modern US. More research below, and I’ll edit in some extra stuff tomorrow when my brain isn’t fried.
Surprisingly, at least looking at science / engineering / math majors, it looks like people are smarter than I would have guessed; Physics majors had the highest average at 133 with Psychology majors pulling up the rear with 114, and most of them are clustered around 120 − 130. For someone who deals with undergrads, that is frankly shockingly high.
Outside of the sciences, even the “dumbest” major, social work, managed a 103 and a lot of the popular majors are in the 105-115 range. Another big surprise here too; Philosophy majors are really damn bright with a 129 average, right up under Math majors. Never would have guessed that one.
Still, it’s obvious that the 115-120 figure I gave was overly optimistic. Once I look at some more data I will amend my initial post so that it better reflects reality.
Naive hypothesis: Given the Flynn effect, and that college students are younger than the general population, could that explain the difference? That Coscott’s conditional “If US citizens between 18 and 24 are representative of the entire population in terms of IQ” is false?
IQ tests are at least supposed to be normed for the age group in question, in order to eliminate such effects, but I don’t know how it’s done for the estimates in question.
How high is “high-IQ” and how low is “low IQ” in your book?
I don’t have specific ranges in mind, but I think I’d call grad-student level sufficiently high-IQ.
smart outsider coming in and overturning a well-established scientific principle
Not necessarily overturning a principle, but rather opening up new directions to expand into. How about Woz, Jobs, Gates, all that crowd? They were outsiders—all the insiders were at IBM or, at best, at places like Xerox PARC.
Almost every aspect of modern life, even for a polymathic genius, is going to be at least partially mysterious
Of course, but you don’t trust a process you don’t understand. You trust either people or the system built around that process. If your doctor gives you a pill to take, you trust your doctor, not the biochemistry which you don’t understand. If you take a plane across the Atlantic, you trust the system that’s been running commercial aviation for decades with the very low accident rate.
How about Woz, Jobs, Gates, all that crowd? They were outsiders
They were outsiders of business companies, not of science. It’s not like Gates never learned math at school, and then miraculously proved Fermat theorem in his dreams. It’s more like he took mostly some else’s work, made a few smart business decisions, and became extra rich.
It’s impractical for every single person to understand every single scientific theory. Even the domain of ‘settled science’ is far larger than anyone could hope to cover in their lifetime.
It’s true that scientific authority is no substitute for evidence and experiment, but as Elezier pointed out in one of the streams (I can’t find the link right now), it’s not like scientific authority is useless for updating beliefs. If you have to make a decision, and are stuck in choosing between the scientific consensus opinion and a random coin toss, the scientific consensus opinion is a far far better choice, obviously.
‘Trust’, in this context, doesn’t mean 100% infallible trust in scientific authority. If you take the alternative route and demand that everyone be knowledgeable in everything they make choices in, you wind up in situations like the current one we’re having with climate change, where scientists are pretty much screaming at the top of their lungs that something has to be done, but it’s falling on deaf political ears partly because of the FUD spreaded by anti-science groups casting doubt on scientific consensus opinion.
you wind up in situations like the current one we’re having with climate change
Funny that you mention that.
I consider myself a reasonably well educated layman with a few functioning brain cells. I’ve taken an interest in the global warming claims and did a fair amount of digging (which involved reading original papers and other relevant stuff like Climategate materials). I’ll skip through all the bits not relevant to this thread but I’ll point out that the end result is that my respect for “climate science” dropped considerably and I became what you’d probably describe as a “climate sceptic”.
Given the rather sorry state of medical science (see Ioannidis, etc.), another area I have some interest in, I must say that nowadays when people tell me I must blindly trust “science” because I cannot possibly understand the gnostic knowledge of these high priests, well, let’s just say I’m not very receptive to this idea.
Regardless of whether you personally agree with the consensus on climate change, the fact is that most politicians in office are not scientists and do not have the requisite background to even begin reading climate change papers and materials. Yet they must often make decisions on climate change issues. I’d much prefer that they took the consensus scientific opinion rather than making up their own ill-formed beliefs. If the scientific opinion turns out to be wrong, I will pin the full blame on the scientists, not the decision makers.
And, as I’m saying, this generalizes to all sorts of other issues. I feel like I’m repeating myself here, but ultimately a lot of people find themselves in situations where they must make a decision based on limited information and intelligence. In such a scenario, often the best choice is to ‘trust’ scientists. The option to ‘figure it out for yourself’ is not available.
I’d much prefer that they took the consensus scientific opinion
In general I would agree with you. However, as usual, real life is complicated.
The debate about climate has been greatly politicized and commercialized. Many people participating in this debate had and have huge incentives, (political, monetary, professional, etc.) to bend the perceptions in their favor. Many scientists behaved… less than admirably. The cause has been picked up (I might even say “hijacked”) by the environmental movement which desperately needed a new bogeyman, a new fear to keep the money flowing. There has been much confusion—some natural and some deliberately created—over which questions exactly are being asked and answered. Some climate scientists decided they’re experts on economics and public policy and their policy recommendations are “science”.
All in all it was and is a huge and ugly mess. Given this reality, “just follow the scientific consensus” might have been a good prior, but after updating on all the evidence it doesn’t look like a good posterior recommendation in this particular case.
Imagine, you have something like this back in 1900.
Do you remember how settled was that the Universe is slowing down at its expansion? The only thing wasn’t settled was the slowing rate—is it big enough to stop one day and reverse. 20 years ago.
Just now, they discuss Big Bang. Settled long ago.
I am not saying your idea isn’t good. It is, but the controversy is imminent.
Just thinking… could it be worth doing a website providing interesting parts of settled science for laypeople?
If we take the solid, replicated findings, and remove the ones that laypeople don’t care about (because they have no use for them in everyday life)… how much would be left? Which parts of human knowledge would be covered most?
I imagine a website that would first provide a simple explanation, and then a detailed scientific explanation with references.
Why? Simply to give people idea that this is science that is useful and trustworthy—not the things that are too abstract to understand or use, and not some new hypotheses that will be disproved tomorrow. Science, as a friendly and trustworthy authority. To get some respect for science.
Wikipedia seems close enough to what you’re describing … and improving Wikipedia (plenty of science pages are flagged as “this is hard to understand for non-specialists) seems like the easiest way to move it closer.
The wikipedia contains millions of topics, so the subset of “settled science” is lost among them. Creating a “Settled Science” portal could be an approximation.
As an example of where my idea differs from the wikipedia approach: the wikipedia Science portal displays a link to article about Albert Einstein. Yes, Albert Einstein was an important scientist, but his personal biography is not science. So one difference would be that the “settled science encyclopedia” would not include Einstein or any other scientist (except among the references). Only the knowledge, which could be also used on a different planet with different history and different names and biographies of the scientists.
Also, in wikipedia you have a whole page about a topic. Some parts of the page may be settled science, other parts are not; but both parts are on the same page, in the same encyclopedia. It would be cognitively easier for a reader to know “if it is on SettledScienceEncyclopedia.com″, it is settled science.
EDIT: I agree that improving scientific articles on wikipedia, not just making them more correct but also more accessible to wide public, is a worthy goal.
It could be worth doing but it’s a hard task.
Take a subject like evolution.The fact that evolution happens is setteled science for a long time. On the other hand if you take a school book on evolution that was written 30 years ago there a good chance that it has examples of how one species is related to another species that got overturned when we got genome data.
People used to respect Science, as an abstract mysterious force which Scientists could augur and even use to invoke the odd miracle. In a way, people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Scientists in a similar way to how pre-Christian Europe saw priests; you need one on hand when you make a decision, and contradict them at your peril, but ultimately they’re advisers rather than leaders.
That attitude is mostly gone now, but it could be useful to bring it back. Ordinary people are not going to provide useful scientific insights or otherwise helpfully (1) participate in the process, so keeping them out of the way and deferential is going to be more valuable then trying to involve them. There seems to be a J curve between 100% scientific literacy and old-school Science-ism, and it seems to me at least that climbing back up to an elitist position is the option most likely to actually work in our lifetimes.
If anything, the more easily lay people can lay their hands on scientific materials the worse the situation is; the Dunning-Kruger effect and a lack of actual scientific training / mental ability means that laypeople are almost certain to misinterpret what they read in ways which disagree with the actual scientific consensus. Just look at the huge backlash against biology and psychometry these days; most of the people I’ve argued with in person or online have no actual qualifications but feel entitled to opinions on the issues because they stumbled through an article on pub-med and know the word methodology.
Is this true? It pattern matches to a generic things-were-better-in-the-old-days complaint and I’m not sure how one would get a systematic idea of how much people trusted science & scientists 100-200 years ago.
(Looking at the US, for instance, I only find results from surveys going back to the late 1950s. Americans’ confidence in science seems to have fallen quite a lot between 1958 and 1971-2, probably mostly in the late 1960s, then rebounded somewhat before remaining stable for the last 35-40 years. I note that the loss of trust in science that happened in the 1960s wasn’t science-specific, but part of a general loss of confidence experienced by almost all institutions people were polled about.)
Citizen science seems like evidence against this idea.
I disagree. I strongly disapprove of treating scientists as high priests of mystical higher knowledge inaccessible to mere mortals.
The average science PhD is two standard deviations out from the population mean in terms of intelligence, has spent ~8-10 years learning the fundamental background required to understand their field, and is deeply immersed in the culture of science. And these are the ‘newbs’ of the scientific community; the scrappy up-and-comers who still need to prove themselves as having valuable insights or actual skills.
So yes, for all practical purposes the barrier to genuine understanding of scientific theories and techniques is high enough that a layman cannot hope to have more than a cursory understanding of the field.
And if we want laymen to trust in a process they cannot understand, the priest is the archetypal example of mysterious authority.
First, there is no logical connection between your first paragraph and the second one and I don’t see any reason for that “so, yes”.
Second, that claim is, ahem, bullshit. I’ll agree that someone with low IQ “cannot hope to have more than a cursory understanding”, but for such people this statement is true for much more than science. High-IQ laymen are quite capable of understanding the field and, often enough, pointing out new approaches which have not occurred to any established scientists because, after all, that’s not how these things are done.
No, I don’t want laymen to trust in a process they cannot understand.
How high is “high-IQ” and how low is “low IQ” in your book?
Someone with an above-average IQ of 115-120, like your average undergrad, visibly struggles with 101 / 201 level work and is deeply resistant to higher-level concepts. Actually getting through grad school takes about a 130 as previously mentioned, and notable scientists tend to be in the 150+ range. So somewhere from 84-98% of the population is disqualified right off the bat, with only the top 2-0.04% capable of doing really valuable work.
And that’s assuming that IQ is the only thing that counts; in actuality, at least in the hard sciences, there is an enormous amount of technical knowledge and skill that a person has to learn to provide real insight. I cannot think of a single example in the last 50 years which fits your narrative of the smart outsider coming in and overturning a well-established scientific principle, although I would love to hear of one if you know any.
So no more trusting chemotherapy to treat your cancer? The internet to download your music, or your iPod to play it? A fixed wing aircraft to transport you safely across the Atlantic? Must be tough even just driving to work, now that your car is mostly computer-controlled and made of materials with names that sound like alphabet soup.
Almost every aspect of modern life, even for a polymathic genius, is going to be at least partially mysterious; the world of our tools and knowledge is far too complex for the human mind to fully grasp.
Where did you get those numbers?
Not reality. 41% of people in the US are enrolled in college (in 2010) Source. If we assumed that the US has representative IQ and use a 15 SD IQ scale, then the top 41% of IQs are all people with IQ of at least 103.41. I calculated that average IQ of a the top 41% of the population on wolfram alpha. (It is easy, because by definition, IQ follows a normal distribution.) I got 114.2.
If US citizens between 18 and 24 are representative of the entire population in terms of IQ, it is literally impossible for the average IQ of an undergrad student to be 115 or higher.
Hmm. I’m not 95% confident of then number I gave, but I haven’t been able to turn up anything disconfirming.
I did a bunch of research on the heritability of IQ last year for a term paper and I repeatedly saw the claim that university students tend to be 1sd above the local population mean, although that may not apply in a place with more liberal admissions practices like the modern US. More research below, and I’ll edit in some extra stuff tomorrow when my brain isn’t fried.
Some actual data here (IQs estimated from SAT scores, ETS data as of 2013)
Surprisingly, at least looking at science / engineering / math majors, it looks like people are smarter than I would have guessed; Physics majors had the highest average at 133 with Psychology majors pulling up the rear with 114, and most of them are clustered around 120 − 130. For someone who deals with undergrads, that is frankly shockingly high.
Outside of the sciences, even the “dumbest” major, social work, managed a 103 and a lot of the popular majors are in the 105-115 range. Another big surprise here too; Philosophy majors are really damn bright with a 129 average, right up under Math majors. Never would have guessed that one.
Still, it’s obvious that the 115-120 figure I gave was overly optimistic. Once I look at some more data I will amend my initial post so that it better reflects reality.
Naive hypothesis: Given the Flynn effect, and that college students are younger than the general population, could that explain the difference? That Coscott’s conditional “If US citizens between 18 and 24 are representative of the entire population in terms of IQ” is false?
IQ tests are at least supposed to be normed for the age group in question, in order to eliminate such effects, but I don’t know how it’s done for the estimates in question.
I think that is likely.
I don’t have specific ranges in mind, but I think I’d call grad-student level sufficiently high-IQ.
Not necessarily overturning a principle, but rather opening up new directions to expand into. How about Woz, Jobs, Gates, all that crowd? They were outsiders—all the insiders were at IBM or, at best, at places like Xerox PARC.
Of course, but you don’t trust a process you don’t understand. You trust either people or the system built around that process. If your doctor gives you a pill to take, you trust your doctor, not the biochemistry which you don’t understand. If you take a plane across the Atlantic, you trust the system that’s been running commercial aviation for decades with the very low accident rate.
They were outsiders of business companies, not of science. It’s not like Gates never learned math at school, and then miraculously proved Fermat theorem in his dreams. It’s more like he took mostly some else’s work, made a few smart business decisions, and became extra rich.
It’s impractical for every single person to understand every single scientific theory. Even the domain of ‘settled science’ is far larger than anyone could hope to cover in their lifetime.
It’s true that scientific authority is no substitute for evidence and experiment, but as Elezier pointed out in one of the streams (I can’t find the link right now), it’s not like scientific authority is useless for updating beliefs. If you have to make a decision, and are stuck in choosing between the scientific consensus opinion and a random coin toss, the scientific consensus opinion is a far far better choice, obviously.
‘Trust’, in this context, doesn’t mean 100% infallible trust in scientific authority. If you take the alternative route and demand that everyone be knowledgeable in everything they make choices in, you wind up in situations like the current one we’re having with climate change, where scientists are pretty much screaming at the top of their lungs that something has to be done, but it’s falling on deaf political ears partly because of the FUD spreaded by anti-science groups casting doubt on scientific consensus opinion.
Funny that you mention that.
I consider myself a reasonably well educated layman with a few functioning brain cells. I’ve taken an interest in the global warming claims and did a fair amount of digging (which involved reading original papers and other relevant stuff like Climategate materials). I’ll skip through all the bits not relevant to this thread but I’ll point out that the end result is that my respect for “climate science” dropped considerably and I became what you’d probably describe as a “climate sceptic”.
Given the rather sorry state of medical science (see Ioannidis, etc.), another area I have some interest in, I must say that nowadays when people tell me I must blindly trust “science” because I cannot possibly understand the gnostic knowledge of these high priests, well, let’s just say I’m not very receptive to this idea.
Regardless of whether you personally agree with the consensus on climate change, the fact is that most politicians in office are not scientists and do not have the requisite background to even begin reading climate change papers and materials. Yet they must often make decisions on climate change issues. I’d much prefer that they took the consensus scientific opinion rather than making up their own ill-formed beliefs. If the scientific opinion turns out to be wrong, I will pin the full blame on the scientists, not the decision makers.
And, as I’m saying, this generalizes to all sorts of other issues. I feel like I’m repeating myself here, but ultimately a lot of people find themselves in situations where they must make a decision based on limited information and intelligence. In such a scenario, often the best choice is to ‘trust’ scientists. The option to ‘figure it out for yourself’ is not available.
In general I would agree with you. However, as usual, real life is complicated.
The debate about climate has been greatly politicized and commercialized. Many people participating in this debate had and have huge incentives, (political, monetary, professional, etc.) to bend the perceptions in their favor. Many scientists behaved… less than admirably. The cause has been picked up (I might even say “hijacked”) by the environmental movement which desperately needed a new bogeyman, a new fear to keep the money flowing. There has been much confusion—some natural and some deliberately created—over which questions exactly are being asked and answered. Some climate scientists decided they’re experts on economics and public policy and their policy recommendations are “science”.
All in all it was and is a huge and ugly mess. Given this reality, “just follow the scientific consensus” might have been a good prior, but after updating on all the evidence it doesn’t look like a good posterior recommendation in this particular case.
Imagine, you have something like this back in 1900.
Do you remember how settled was that the Universe is slowing down at its expansion? The only thing wasn’t settled was the slowing rate—is it big enough to stop one day and reverse. 20 years ago.
Just now, they discuss Big Bang. Settled long ago.
I am not saying your idea isn’t good. It is, but the controversy is imminent.
What would this do that Wikipedia and encyclopaedias don’t do?
Wikipedia contains plenty of scientific claims that are open to be overturned by new experiments.