The most frightening thing isn’t that 14% of Americans think sound travels faster than light. The most frightening thing is that if you flipped a coin to decide whether to believe that statement or its converse, you’d land on ‘speed: sound > light’ half the time, in which case zero evidence impinges on the decision… which means you could just as easily have randomly believed ‘speed: light > sound’.
Thus, at least 28% of Americans have no clue.
It gets worse when, rather than being a binary choice, there are several “choices” of alternative beliefs.
I’m not sure this quite follows, as it isn’t clear that the 14% were guessing randomly… they might have been operating from some systematically wrong model. But I agree that it’s likely.
To be fair, I also often wonder whether the people who take these tests are just picking random answers because they aren’t at all invested in the test. Back when I was taking neuropsych evaluations after my stroke, there were a number of questions intended to detect malingering; I would like to believe that tests like those cited here have similar “checksum” questions built in and that reported results would take that into account, but in fact I don’t.
Yeah—good point. I did realize that people probably do operate from a systematically wrong model—why not? But I figured that there are probably at least as many operating from a systematically wrong model that just happens to give them the right answer. I figured that if you were just guessing, with minimal information or reasoning (as opposed to none), it would more likely be biased towards the right answer.
The most frightening thing isn’t that 14% of Americans think sound travels faster than light. The most frightening thing is that if you flipped a coin to decide whether to believe that statement or its converse, you’d land on ‘speed: sound > light’ half the time, in which case zero evidence impinges on the decision… which means you could just as easily have randomly believed ‘speed: light > sound’.
Thus, at least 28% of Americans have no clue.
It gets worse when, rather than being a binary choice, there are several “choices” of alternative beliefs.
I’m not sure this quite follows, as it isn’t clear that the 14% were guessing randomly… they might have been operating from some systematically wrong model. But I agree that it’s likely.
To be fair, I also often wonder whether the people who take these tests are just picking random answers because they aren’t at all invested in the test. Back when I was taking neuropsych evaluations after my stroke, there were a number of questions intended to detect malingering; I would like to believe that tests like those cited here have similar “checksum” questions built in and that reported results would take that into account, but in fact I don’t.
Yeah—good point. I did realize that people probably do operate from a systematically wrong model—why not? But I figured that there are probably at least as many operating from a systematically wrong model that just happens to give them the right answer. I figured that if you were just guessing, with minimal information or reasoning (as opposed to none), it would more likely be biased towards the right answer.