Topics: Economy, Education, Politics, STEM, NASA, Space Exploration
This has always fascinated me in the intensity, and frankly the audience it comes from. I saw this cover in the grocery store and bought the magazine. I got the image above from the NatGeo site, and provide the link below. The title of the post came from the magazine cover. As a "hook," it did its job.
I got into an exchange twice individually with two younger men (I presume don't still) believe the moon landing occurred, i.e. it was faked. Even my testimony as a living eyewitness was not enough to dismay or sway their confidence in the Oracle of You Tube. They are in their thirties, and showed considerable sophistication in accessing and using technology otherwise.
The democratization of information has diminished what used to be the arbiters of what is true: The Encyclopedia Britannica; Colleges and Universities; Clergy; Civics; Congress; Engineering; Global Knowledge; Mathematics; Public Discourse; The Public Library, The Military; Professors; Science; Teachers; Technology and NASA. We now confuse "armchair quarterbacks" with actual trained professionals; conspiracy theorists with theoreticians; "millions-of-hits" online with peer review.
We are in the throws of hunted-for confirmation bias and willful (or, willed) ignorance. There is a disdain for deep expertise in any subject area, as if the "University of Google" - with noted "graduate" Jenny McCarthy - equips one fully for any rigorous endeavor. (Experiment: Use the same credentials on a mother giving birth, and see how far that gets you!) We now have Measles in Disneyland, a resurgence of Whooping Cough and Meningitis at Princeton. As we advance technologically, regressive minds in the U.S. and the world over reach back for the "good old days" whose date they can never quite pin down, nor explain with clarity why backwards time travel - a violation of causality and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics - is a rational path to pursue. To quote a part of the article:
In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle that’s what science is for. “Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt, who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal. “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.” But that method doesn’t come naturally to most of us. And so we run into trouble, again and again.
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"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."
"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."
"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense."
National Geographic:
Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science? Joel Achenbach
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