23% of Americans say they have seen or “felt” a ghost; 19% believe in witchcraft; 48% accept the idea of extra-sensorial perception; 14% have actually seen a UFO; and of course about 90% believe in a big guy in the sky who follows every movement they make, and is morbidly curious and judgmental about their sexual life. What is a skeptic to do?
These are some of the results of a recent poll conducted by the Associated Press, and there is plenty of empirical evidence to cause a skeptic to despair. Some of the details of the results are intriguing to say the least. Why, for instance, would Catholics, single people and those who never attend religious services be more likely than average to believe in ghosts? And why should it be that 31% of liberals report seeing a ghost, compared to only 17% of conservatives? Surprisingly, belief in witchcraft is more common among urban dwellers (so much for the stereotype of the country bumpkin), although most of these are poor and minorities (themselves among the poorest urban dwellers), and therefore – unfortunately – less educated. ESP, apparently, is more to the taste of sophisticated urbanites, with 51% of people with a college degree believing in it, as opposed to 37% of those with a high school diploma or less.
The very idea that someone can get through college and have about a 50-50 chance of believing plain nonsense is rather depressing, though it does account for the abysmal state of our democracy: presumably, if you are gullible enough to accept telepathy and clairvoyance, then nonexistent weapons of mass destruction are an easy sell. Which is exactly why I think these figures are extremely worrisome: gullibility is what psychologists would call a “portable” characteristics, i.e. it applies to a variety of contexts, so that if you accept one sort of nonsense you are more likely to accept another.
Of course, critical thinking – the antidote to gullibility – is also portable across contexts, which is why one could make the argument that the very point of education ought to be to increase people's ability to think critically, to equip them with the best baloney detector they can muster, to use Carl Sagan's famous image. How is it, then, that highly educated people believe in ghosts and paranormal phenomena? Because most of our education, from elementary school to college, has little to do with critical thinking and much to do with rote learning of mountains of useless facts. Our students and teachers are “accountable” by means of idiotic standardized tests that increasingly waste a lot of valuable educational time while failing to produce the sort of thinking citizens that a vital democracy desperately needs in order not to turn into mob rule or an exercise in sheep herding. Oh, wait, maybe all of this isn't happening by chance after all. Could there be (malevolent) intelligent design behind the failure of our educational system? I better stop there, or I may start believing in conspiracy theories...
Rationally Speaking: an archived blog about science & philosophy, by Massimo Pigliucci
I love Sagan, but I've always heard the "bullshit detector" line in reference to Hemingway.
ReplyDeleteAppropriate, that I would try to correct this, of all things!
Anyway, I really like your blog and have been reading for a while.
Creamsoda
ReplyDeleteYou are right about "the automatic bullshit detector"- it's Hemingway. I heard a sound recording of him expounding it. For him it had to do with authenticity in writing.
It's not a "conspiracy theory" if the evidence is public and widely available. The Republican Party's agenda to undermine and eventually destroy comprehensive and free public education in this country is not really all that well-kept as secrets go. It takes only the most minimal critical thinking and investigative skills to get past the rhetoric and see the concrete negative effects (very predictable in advance) of No Child Left Behind and other Republican education policy follies.
ReplyDeleteI agree -- there's a deep problem here, and No Child Left Behind is only part of it. Critical thinking is hard to learn and hard to teach. It's easier to spew facts at students and force them to regurgitate those facts on tests than it is to develop critical thinking skills.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I have to quibble with one aspect of this post. I don't see a problem with 14% of those polled claiming they've seen a UFO. All that means by itself is that they saw something in the sky that they couldn't identify. No big deal. It hasn't happened to me personally, but I can understand that. Now, if that 14% believes that the UFO they saw landed at their house and aliens abducted them and drilled holes in their damn teeth (sorry, X-Files reference)....well, that's a problem.
" [ ... ] while failing to produce the sort of thinking citizens that a vital democracy desperately needs in order not to turn into mob rule or an exercise in sheep herding." -- Massimo
ReplyDelete"The Republican Party's agenda to undermine and eventually destroy comprehensive and free public education in this country is not really all that well-kept as secrets go." -- g felis
I have for years thought of American schools as "worker factories" whose purpose is NOT to produce an informed electorate but rather to produce the producers. This is not, however, the result of a partisan attack on our educational system as asserted by g felis (shades of a "vast right-wing conspiracy"?) which is indeed, IMHO, a touch paranoiac.
American schools sucjed in the Sixties under Johnson. American schools sucked in the Seventies under Carter, in the Eighties under Reagan and Bush Sr, in the Nineties under Clinton, and in the Aughts under Shrub. You'll notice that, in terms of years in power, both parties are adequately represented.
The problem is not political; it is cultural. Americans typically do not value an education except insofar as it can affect their income. Very few read for pleasure. Why should their children want to do so, in the absence of a good example? Most prefer to vegetate in front of so-called "reality shows." Or take museums. How many per year does the average American visit? I'm betting on a mighty low number.
And of course, us skeptics have been calling for classes in critical thinking for a while now; these cries have been ignored by both Republican and Democratic school boards. God swings both ways, you see.
My point: turning this into a political finger pointing session only fosters further disagreement, which leads to further stagnation. Accept that ALL paarties in this fiasco have been delinquent, and focus on constructing convincing arguments which play even to the other side of the aisle.
"Americans typically do not value an education except insofar as it can affect their income."
ReplyDeleteAnd surely the professors that teach the up and coming teachers have not a thing to do with the materialism that they have advocated for the last 44 years. In as much as it is not the profs job to necessarily give their student their own values, the lack of meaning behind the pusuit of knowledge is a fairly huge factor here. I can't imagine a president being directly responsible for the seclarization of the universities. I think it has been by far more so the aim of the global community.
If you can create a situation so that people (the workforce or whathave you) do not care any longer, you can get them to overlook the most incredible things.
for instance, another example from Germany
I listened to a story the other evening about a church that presently operates in an anti-semetic part of Gemany. The university (which is also very anti-semetic) begins with "T". Forget what it was.
This church organized a "walk for life" for all the human beings whose rights were thoroungly trampled on 60 some years ago. There was a story of a man who was born in a concentration camp after his mother was sent there. I think Dauchu At some point she must realize that she is not going to make it and hands him off quickly one day to another woman while she is being transported somewhere outside of the camp. The woman who gets the baby is only able to care for this little boy for a few years before he is taken away by the Germans to one of their "research facilities" (north Germany) where children are routinly experimented in various unthinkable ways, including frequent rapes wehn they were not being experimented on. So much so, that this young man has to have several rectal surgeries by the time he is 14!
Do you not think that most of the people who ran the research facilities were well educated?
I think that they were. And why did education fail there?
Knowledege of "the facts" but no awareness of God and therefore reasons (authority behind) for ethics.
If you have no good reason for people to study and not cheat, without reasons for morality and fainess everything else crumbles around the educational institution.
cal
gosh, I didn't get to spellcheck or edit that last comment the least little bit. It went straight to post instead of preview.
ReplyDeleteyikes. what a mess.
cal
I have noticed that popular author Sam Harris has slight leanings in the direction of X-files-like properties of mind. He has suggested that research into past lives, ESP, et cetera are "unfairly stigmatized".
ReplyDeleteNobody likes unfair stigmas, of course, but one must question why Sam Harris is being so selective. Where is his objection to Holocaust denial? Perhaps research into the truth of the Holocaust is being unfairly stigmatized! Perhaps we shouldn't so quickly dismiss claims that God heals the crippled, because we might be unfairly dismissing those claims as well.
What I'm getting at is this: some sorts of research have stigmas that they deserve. Many straddle the line between research and blind faith, and many others are clearly past it. While it is much more immoral to deny the Holocaust than it is to believe that aliens are manipulating our politics, both are viewed as forms of crankery for good reasons. The vast majority (perhaps I mean "all") of Holocaust-deniers, UFO chasers, and past-life regressionists rely on pseudoscientific research and obviously faulty reasoning. Some do not even pretend to care about evidence at all. Therefore, I have absolutely no qualms about saying this: if something looks, sounds, smells, and tastes like pseudoscience, it is, and it is not dogmatic to say so. As Richard Dawkins puts it, lets be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Dr. Pigliucci, I am curious as to whether or not you agree with me. While I enjoyed The End of Faith, the more that I considered Harris' statements regarding spirituality, the more that I found them to be absurd, and the more that I came to wonder just what Harris' concept of science and rationality really is. Clearly, Eastern religions hav some things to say about the mind that are at least half-true, but it is dubious to praise Buddhist leaders as though they are the pioneers of some sort of "contemplative science".
Obligatory Richard Dawkins moment.
ReplyDeletehttp://youtube.com/watch?v=gqz85sF9k1w
These type of surveys never end up looking good. I don't think I'll ever see a postive result (in the United States) in my lifetime.
ReplyDeleteHow does the US fare compared to Europe on the gulliblity factor? Anybody know?
In the UK, when Frank Dobson was eeducation secretary about nine years ago, a reporter suggested improving the teaching of critical thinking in schools, and Dobson flew into a rage and roared that the purpose of education was to turn out people to suit the needs of industry. Like the Japanese school system, which teaches no critical thinking, its objective being to turn out a compliant workforce for manufacturing. In that context, people who ask hard questions would be downright counterproductive.
ReplyDeleteGuys,
ReplyDeleteI was referring to Sagan's "baloney detector," as described in "The Demon Haunted World."
"And surely the professors that teach the up and coming teachers have not a thing to do with the materialism that they have advocated for the last 44 years. In as much as it is not the profs job to necessarily give their student their own values, the lack of meaning behind the pusuit of knowledge is a fairly huge factor here." -- Cal
ReplyDeleteY'know, Cal, if you regard learning as meaningless, then we truly ought to have no more exchanges, you and I. Learning is no more pure materialism than car-manufacturing is the simple mining of iron. Learning happens on spiritual, mental, emotional, intellectual, and epistemological grounds, and I sure Massimo, Sheldon, and the others can add numerous other categories to my brief list.
But of course, I should be inured by now to your injecting your deity into every damned issue. Hmph.
Thumpalumpacus said:
ReplyDelete"turning this into a political finger pointing session only fosters further disagreement, which leads to further stagnation."
Actually, it leads to pointless, counterproductive programs. No Child's Behind Left Untested is supposed to introduce accountability, but what it really introduces is a way to blame teachers when the kids just don't care.
Consider; each year, scores are supposed to increase. But it's a new group of kids each year. Why should this years kids be any smarter then their predecessors? This only makes sense if the assumption is that the only reason the little darlings don't all get perfect scores is that the teachers aren't doing their job right.
The kids are the product of a system that passes them through no matter what. How are they supposed to react? Even the good kids won't put any effort forth under those conditions.
The reason we aren't chimps is the struggle for existence. There is no struggle for existence in school. The average kid does not much more than show up, and gets a diploma. If the average kid had to work, and work hard to get through, they would have to learn something.
But then we would have to come to grips with the fact that some kids are smarter than others.
Knowledege of "the facts" but no awareness of God and therefore reasons (authority behind) for ethics.
ReplyDeleteMy BS detector went off right there. Fictional sky faeries have no more to do with ethics than soda cans do. Massimo, Sagan, Randi, Shermer, Dawkins, et. al. prove it.
thump: "Y'know, Cal, if you regard learning as meaningless,.."
ReplyDeleteWhile it is clear that you have misrepresented the context of what I believe & have said,...
"Learning is no more pure materialism than car-manufacturing is the simple mining of iron. Learning happens on spiritual, mental, emotional, intellectual, and epistemological grounds.."
..it is TRUE that one cannot separate the material from the immaterial as Greek dualism might suggest could be done.
It can't be done.
Nor can one in fact separate church from state (Greek dualist thinking) science from beliefs, and so on...
So altho you are more than welcome to say what you just said about materialism, you ought to seriously consider the necessity of taking it on to its true and logical conclusion.
cal
Dr. Pigliucci,
ReplyDeleteI just finished "The Assault on Reason" and he addresses some of the issues you raise here. I can't wait to hear your thoughts on that book.
Love your blog!
It may be as gfelis put it but if we are to consider all sides of the myriad, a conspiracy theory does not seem as a ridiculous possibility.
ReplyDelete"Nor can one in fact separate church from state (Greek dualist thinking) science from beliefs, and so on..."
ReplyDeleteCal,
You have been invoking some high minded abstract philosophical concepts like "materialism", "dualism" etc., but in such a way that one suspects that you really don't know what you are talking about.
So let us bring it down to less abstract issues, putting aside "greek dualism", and please tell us exactly why church and state can not be maintained as separate?
Seems to me that despite the efforts of theocrats, church and state have been maintained as separate institutions here in the U.S. and elsewhere.
I currently do research in undergrad science ed (background and PhD in Geology). Turns out that a decent amount of research demonstrates (including some we're doing) that even when explicitly taught "critical thinking" or "scientific reasoning", the vast majority of undergrads do NOT see these skills or principles as relevant outside the context in which they've been taught. Courses in critical thinking have been tried, but are not found to be very effective. Somehow students aren't making the connections, particularly if the desired connections are not made explicit to them.
ReplyDeleteYet, you talk with most folks teaching undergraduate non-science majors, and they say these are the most important things they want their students to learn - a major disjunct between what students are actually learning and what profs want them to learn. Clearly some of this has to do with HOW science is taught, but even "best practice" doesn't achieve as much as you might think...we have a lot to learn yet on how to effectively teach this.
Cal,
ReplyDeleteYou have been invoking some high minded abstract philosophical concepts like "materialism", "dualism" etc., but in such a way that one suspects that you really don't know what you are talking about.
BINGO! :O)
Massimo, what would be a good way to teach someone (an adult) to think critically? Is it a matter of trial & error and poking around or is there a surefire way?
ReplyDeleteValera,
ReplyDeleteno surefire way to teach critical thinking, I'm afraid. It's a matter of training over a long period of time, the earlier one starts (like, elementary school) the better. Part of the problem is that c.t. doesn't come natural, and another issue is that it comes with a social cost (it's not easy to be the skeptic of the village...).
Dr. Pigliucci,
ReplyDeleteSeveral months ago in these forums you promised me more about your opinions on the subject of UFOs in an upcoming book. It took me awhile, but I bought the book, read it, and decided to post a few words on your treatment of the subject. I'm sure to be "shredded" by the skeptical community here, but that is a price I am willing to pay as I believe the topic deserves more than a cursory chapter in a very wise philosopher's treatise on pseudoscience. I did enjoyed the book, thank you!
Good luck and may God, I mean.... someone... do something!
James
http://averageamerican-james.blogspot.com/2011/01/on-science-and-ufos.html