Spreading evolution, science, and reason efficiently

raah!

To say "science is valuable for it's rigour" and "I want people to think rigorously", does not fit with giving people popular science. Those books are not rigourous. So the argument "I want people to think scientifically, therefore they should read this" does not hold, since that's just "I want people to accept the same conclusions they would if they were to speak scientifically". Which is more accurate. A question of "why do you want people to accept those conclusions" could be asked?

b318isp

raah! wrote: »

Those books are not rigorous.

But if the books are summarising rigorously evidenced topics, what is the problem? If you want the detail evidence you can go back to the research.

raah!

Wicknight wrote: »

That implies there is nothing in popular science that goes into the specifics of why science is important. That wouldn't be my experience.

You don't need to do a 4 year course to understand why science is important. It can take like 10 minutes to explain.

I agree that a lot of popular science books are just listing off scientific discoveries with no context as to why they matter and how they are justified. But then a lot of popular science books are **** :pac:

Well, I'd like to ask some further questions (for everyone) with the following premises in place:

-Many popular science books do not present full arguments for their conclusions. In this sense we can say that they do not impart scientific rigour to the thinking of their readers
-The funding from lay people can be easily aquired through such popular presentations. All that is necessary for funding is to tell a person that maybe they can eat/sleep/have sex more easily with the technology this study provides.
-Even if it was a case of those books giving people a full and proper understanding

Why do you want people to understand science? Does it make any difference to you if a man, who already likes richard dawkins, and supports technology monetarily, understands this or that? What difference would it make if the man poured all his energy into number theory? Or poetry? Or something along those lines?

raah!

b318isp wrote: »

But if the books are summarising rigorously evidenced topics, what is the problem? If you want the detail evidence you can go back to the research.

Well summaries do not rigourously justify their contents. Summaries are lists of conclusions. Now it depends on the book, and the topic, but say for example stephen hawking's thing. If I want the detailed evidence I can go back to 4-6 years of study. I read that, book, and while I enjoyed alot of it, even those parts I enjoyed I wasn't close to understanding, and the rest I didn't understand. If you were to give that book to someone without any mathematics, then it would be much longer than 4-6 years.

b318isp

raah! wrote: »

Well summaries do not rigourously justify their contents. Summaries are lists of conclusions. Now it depends on the book, and the topic, but say for example stephen hawking's thing. If I want the detailed evidence I can go back to 4-6 years of study. I read that, book, and while I enjoyed alot of it, even those parts I enjoyed I wasn't close to understanding, and the rest I didn't understand. If you were to give that book to someone without any mathematics, then it would be much longer than 4-6 years.

This may be the difficulty - that of comprehension of details to satisfy a requirement of vigour. However, peer reviewed and repeatable testing gives confidence that conclusions of those very details by experts can be relied upon (or debated, or refuted).

Would you agree that it makes no sense not to use, say, geography or biology books in schools on the basis that they do not rigorously enough establish their contents?

raah!

Well I think we can view school texts as a necessary pre-requisite to a fuller understanding of this or that subject. School texts with their simplified models are also often much more rigourous than a populist text which just presents the full unsimplified current understanding in the field.

Again, if you just want people to accept those conclusions which are good scientific ones, and which are properly understood by other people, then this is not a problem. If you say that you want to spread rigourous thinking, then popular science is not the way to go.

b318isp

raah! wrote: »

If you say that you want to spread rigourous thinking, then popular science is not the way to go.

Perhaps, but it can facilitate it - although this may depend on the person or the book. I'd agree that there is no certainty.

If it succeeds in inspiring in a person a sense of awe and wonder about how science can explain the workings of things around us, then it may do the job.

As an example, my father-in-law has no knowledge of science, but was quote blown away by reading the Bill Bryson book recently. How we know so much is what amazed him - for him, it opened the door a little into the research behind and the evolution of knowledge.

Improbable

raah! wrote: »

Well I think we can view school texts as a necessary pre-requisite to a fuller understanding of this or that subject. School texts with their simplified models are also often much more rigourous than a populist text which just presents the full unsimplified current understanding in the field.

Again, if you just want people to accept those conclusions which are good scientific ones, and which are properly understood by other people, then this is not a problem. If you say that you want to spread rigourous thinking, then popular science is not the way to go.

I suppose it depends on how far you want to take the argument that "you can't just accept presented conclusions". Being a scientist, I've written theses before and even tried my hand at writing material for publishing in proper peer-reviewed scientific papers. The importance of referencing is paramount not only to show that you're not trying to plagiarise someone else's material, but also so that the assumptions you're presenting have a scientific backing. Now obviously you didn't go and do all of those experiments yourself in order to back your hypothesis. And you didn't do yet more experiments to verify those. Science builds off what has been done before. I don't think school texts can be considered rigorous (depending on the way in which you're using that word) for the simple reason that the oversimplification paints a more inaccurate picture of the system in question. A lot of the intermediate steps in reaching a conclusion are left out of textbooks because a) it would take too long to go through them all and b) children of a certain age aren't capable of understanding such complex experimentation.

I read a popular science book a few years back on quantum mechanics. I'm not a physicist so quite a lot of it was way over my head in terms of the equations used and whatnot. And from that perspective, I do agree with you that the average layperson will have a much better chance of understanding the gradual development and the scientific validity of a concept through a schoolbook than they will through a popular science book. But it doesn't just apply to rigorous thinking. You can be the most rigorous thinking person in the world and not know a thing about how the condensation nucleation method of protein folding works for example. In that case, a popular science book on the topic will help a lot more than a textbook which will rely on at least SOME knowledge in the field.

Science isn't about critical thinking. Rather, critical thinking is a tool which scientists use in order to ascertain the truth about various topics.

Eliot Rosewater

Improbable wrote: »

Science isn't about critical thinking. Rather, critical thinking is a tool which scientists use in order to ascertain the truth about various topics.

But clearly the OP considers science to be synonymous with critical thinking: he is advocating the promotion of science and reason, and clearly sees these things as interlinked.

Of course, he trips over himself almost immediately:

MonkeyBalls wrote: »

Fact spreading is next to useless in opening minds and changing opinions. The solution is to engage people's emotions, and that's the key to spreading evolution, reason, and science to the masses.

He is saying that the only way we can spread reason is by making appeals to emotion, which is rather silly. One would presumably do this by telling people about black holes and such and awakening wonder. But you may as well be teaching people about the loaves and the fishes. The conclusions of physics have nothing to do with the reasonable scientific method behind them, and are not, in isolation, reasonable. That time slows down as you speed up, if taken merely as an interesting conclusion (and this is the method of communication proposed by the OP) is no more reasonable than the story of how Jesus turned two loaves of bread into forty. It can only be made reasonable by explaining how that conclusion comes about, and thus giving it some more credence over Bible stories. But, once again, the OP does not want to do this.

In a more general way, I don't understand this atheistic fetishism towards reason. There are plenty of good things in this life that are not reasonable. Is it reasonable that one feels like crying when listening to Adagio for Strings? Is it reasonable that one would stay up all night because the fretting over a beautiful women means one can't go to sleep? Is it reasonable that one has an emotional attachment to mountains and rivers and grass?

No, these things are not reasonable. But that does lessen them in any way. The only people who are insecure about emotion in this way are, in my experiance, those atheists who, ironically, need an alternative to God, and blindly grasp at science and reason to provide it.

liamw

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

In a more general way, I don't understand this atheistic fetishism towards reason. There are plenty of good things in this life that are not reasonable. Is it reasonable that one feels like crying when listening to Adagio for Strings? Is it reasonable that one would stay up all night because the fretting over a beautiful women means one can't go to sleep? Is it reasonable that one has an emotional attachment to mountains and rivers and grass?

No, these things are not reasonable. But that does lessen them in any way. The only people who are insecure about emotion in this way are, in my experiance, those atheists who, ironically, need an alternative to God, and blindly grasp at science and reason to provide it.

What do you mean they are 'not reasonable'? You mean in the intuitive sense right? I'm pretty sure all those phenomena could be scientifically reasoned in terms of brain neurology, evolutionary psychology etc.

Why do you think anyone is insecure about emotion and what do you mean by 'insecure'?

Eliot Rosewater

liamw wrote: »

What do you mean they are 'not reasonable'? You mean in the intuitive sense right?

No. I mean that the conclusions, in isolation, are not reasonable in the sense that the OP uses the word reason. For example, take the sentence (describing special relativity) "the faster you travel the slower time takes to elapse." That's just a statement, and by itself is not scientific or reasonable. It is no more reasonable than the sentence "there was a man called Jesus, and he turned two loaves of bread into forty". What makes the former sentence more reasonable is that behind it there exists a strong scientific explanation and lots of experimental data to corroborate it. The point I'm making is that it is only made reasonable when one considers its background and justification with it; that the sentence by itself is no more reasonable or scientific than extracts from the Bible.

The OP is suggesting that we excite people by spreading conclusions. By argument is that such a campaign would not be more pro-science than a door-to-door campaign by Jesuits. It can only be scientific if we intrinsically combine the conclusions with the scientific reasoning and experimental data behind it.

liamw wrote: »

Why do you think anyone is insecure about emotion and what do you mean by 'insecure'?

It think people are insecure because they feel the need to create a false reason-emotion dichotomy, of which the science-religion dichotomy is a special case. The dichotomy is created so as to establish reason as some god-like entity which can be worshipped and promoted. I.e., people are troubled by the absence of God, and need reason to fill the void. I would probably see it as part of a larger human tenancy to idolise certain things, be it a religion, a soccer team, a political party, a nation or whatever.

liamw

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

It think people are insecure because they feel the need to create a false reason-emotion dichotomy, of which the science-religion dichotomy is a special case. The dichotomy is created so as to establish reason as some god-like entity which can be worshipped and promoted. I.e., people are troubled by the absence of God, and need reason to fill the void. I would probably see it as part of a larger human tenancy to idolise certain things, be it a religion, a soccer team, a political party, a nation or whatever.

I agree with the first paragraph you wrote so I won't quote it. I'm not really sure if the OP is suggesting to ignore the reasoning and experimental data behind the scientific conclusions but I guess he can respond.

I don't think there's a reason-emotion dichotomy... I don't even see the connection really apart from the fact that we humans generally use different parts of our brain to process these. I can't speak on behalf of all atheists obviously, but I tend to think that people generally overvalue emotions when it comes to discovering an objective truth. Emotions are subjective but can obviously be used as a tool in discovering an objective truth just like our other senses. I don't see how I am 'lessening' the power or value of human emotion by stating this.

Eliot Rosewater

liamw wrote: »

I don't think there's a reason-emotion dichotomy... I don't even see the connection really apart from the fact that we humans generally use different parts of our brain to process these. I can't speak on behalf of all atheists obviously, but I tend to think that people generally overvalue emotions when it comes to discovering an objective truth. Emotions are subjective but can obviously be used as a tool in discovering an objective truth just like our other senses. I don't see how I am 'lessening' the power or value of human emotion by stating this.

I don't think people are criticising emotions because they taint the journey to objective fact. They are putting up reason as the way to live your life, and emotion seems to have no place. My argument isn't so much that subjective emotion has a role in scientific discourse, but that subjective emotion has a huge role in appreciating the world you live in and in attaining a contented fuller life.