My computer is starting to run slow in that way that indicates that either Microsoft has released an important update, or it’s just been on too long without a reboot. Either way, I need to clear some browser tabs before restarting, and there are a bunch of articles that I thought were too interesting to put in a links dump, but where I don’t quite have a clear enough opinion to write a blog post. These split into two rough groups, both of which are concerned with definitions.<\/p>\n
One bunch of posts has to do with the recent poll about science knowledge<\/a>, showing that a majority of Americans are unable to answer surprisingly basic questions about science.<\/p>\n The definitional aspect comes in because a number of bloggers, among them Mark at Cosmic Variance<\/a> and Sheril here at ScienceBlogs<\/a>, have complained (apparently without coordination between them) about media descriptions of this poll as showing a low level of “science literacy.” The argument is, basically, that “scientific literacy” should be more about the process of science and the way scientific decisions are made. This poll shows a lack of knowledge of science trivia, but doesn’t really test science literacy.<\/p>\n I don’t disagree, exactly, but I don’t really see how this makes anything better.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I mean, it’s true that science is more about process than about specific facts, and this survey is testing knowledge of specific facts. But the facts they’re asking about are really basic stuff– “How long does it take the Earth to revolve about the Sun?” was one, which only 53% of people got right. It’s hard to believe that people who can’t answer that correctly are going to have a solid grasp of the scientific method.<\/p>\n The other reason to ask these particular questions is that they’ve been asking these (more or less) repeatedly over the last twenty-odd years. Imperfect as they are, we’ve got records going back a ways, and can check whether the public’s knowledge of these items has changed over time (it hasn’t).<\/p>\n I’d be fine with coming up with some set of questions that really test science-as-process rather than science-as-trivia, and starting to ask those. It’s a tricky proposition, of course– you probably need something like the famous light bulb question at MIT’s graduation<\/a>, and it’s tough to come up with those. But the questions currently being asked are not invalid, and do serve some purpose.<\/p>\n The other big definitional question that’s been rattling around is the question of who gets to call themselves a scientist<\/a>. Scicurious has the first post tying the whole thing together, and Janet provides an exhaustive analysis<\/a> of all the possible ways to take the question.<\/p>\n (This is, in some ways, “Why I Couldn’t Make It as a Philosopher” part 3– I just don’t have the patience for defining things at that length.)<\/p>\n As noted previously<\/a> here, the whole problem is that scientists, unlike doctors, lawyers, and Realtors(tm), do not have a guild system where one must be certified by some central authority to claim membership in the group. Somebody who runs around calling themselves a lawyer without having been admitted to the Bar Association is going to get in trouble, and a doctor who violates professional standards can lose their license to practice medicine, but science doesn’t have any such central authority. There’s nothing stopping raving loonies from calling themselves “Scientists,” and no way to sanction scientists who tip into crankery, provided they avoid outright fraud.<\/p>\n There are a lot of reasons to prefer a more open system for science, but then again, it would simplify this question quite a bit if you had to get a license from the National Academy of Sciences before calling yourself a scientist in public…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My computer is starting to run slow in that way that indicates that either Microsoft has released an important update, or it’s just been on too long without a reboot. Either way, I need to clear some browser tabs before restarting, and there are a bunch of articles that I thought were too interesting to… Continue reading Definitions<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,104,11,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-humanities","category-science","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}