{"id":25,"date":"2006-08-16T17:01:31","date_gmt":"2006-08-17T00:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.flascience.org\/wp\/?p=25"},"modified":"2008-08-05T10:22:18","modified_gmt":"2008-08-05T14:22:18","slug":"fighting-pseudoscience-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=25","title":{"rendered":"Fighting pseudoscience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is a thought-provoking article<\/a> offering an explanation for why pseudoscience is so widely accepted by the general public. The basic lesson to take away from this article is one that I’ve believed for many years: people need to be taught how to think. No, not what<\/em> to think, but how<\/em> to think. Our senses and our untrained minds are highly fallible. Students need to be shown this fact and then they need to be trained how to overcome humans’ shortcomings. I completely agree with the writer’s assessment that science courses shouldn’t be taught as a bunch of unrelated facts. Instead, students need intensive courses on what, exactly, science is and does first. They need to know how to question and investigate. Only once future generations are schooled in basic critical thinking will pseudoscience fade away. Until then, it is here to stay … and even grow.<\/p>\n

Indeed, to win the long-term battle against pseudoscience, scientists must look beyond the narrow battles against ID. The real war they must wage is in the classroom. Specifically, scientists need to effect a sea-change in how science is taught at the junior high, high school, and college levels. They must teach students not merely the core knowledge of their subject matter, but also an understanding of why researchers developed scientific methods in the first place, namely as an essential safeguard against human error.<\/p>\n

To do so, they must inculcate in students a profound sense of humility regarding their own perceptions and interpretations of the world. They should teach students about optical illusions, which demonstrate that our perceptions can mislead us. They should show students how their common sense notions regarding the movements of physical objects, like the trajectory of a ball emerging from a spiral, are often incorrect. They should teach students that even highly confident eyewitness reports are frequently inaccurate. Most broadly, they must counteract what Stanford psychologist Lee Ross calls “na\u00c3\u00afve realism”-the deeply ingrained notion that what we see invariably reflects the true state of nature (Ross and Ward 1996). Scientists may well emerge victorious from the current ID battles. Given that the research evidence is overwhelmingly on their side, they certainly deserve to. Yet as Dawkins (1993) reminds us, ideas can mutate at least as readily as genes. Unless scientists institute a fundamental change in how science is taught, it may be only a matter of time before a new and even more virulent variant of Intelligent Design emerges. Then scientists will again be surprised at the public’s uncritical embrace of it, while shaking their heads in disbelief at the average American’s lack of common sense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is a thought-provoking article offering an explanation for why pseudoscience is so widely accepted by the general public. The basic lesson to take away from this article is one that I’ve believed for many years: people need to be … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcZNLl-p","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=9","url_meta":{"origin":25,"position":0},"title":"Fighting pseudoscience","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"August 16, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Here is a thought-provoking article offering an explanation for why pseudoscience is so widely accepted by the general public. The basic lesson to take away from this article is one that I've believed for many years: people need to be taught how to think. No, not what to think, but\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Analysis\/Commentary"","block_context":{"text":"Analysis\/Commentary","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?cat=4"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":333,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=333","url_meta":{"origin":25,"position":1},"title":"Science teachers need more than pay; they need guts!","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"December 3, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"This news article in the St. Petersburg Times provides a decent analysis of one possible reason Florida's students do so poorly in science: shortage of qualified teachers. I like the nod the reporter made to the draft of the new science standards. He slipped in a mention of evolution's inclusion\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "In the Classroom"","block_context":{"text":"In the Classroom","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?cat=2"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2343,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=2343","url_meta":{"origin":25,"position":2},"title":"Unintelligent Design","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"August 5, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Lynn University in Boca Raton has a series of courses called Dialogues of Learning that tackle the main topic of Belief and Reason. One of the courses offered in the Dialogues series is Unintelligent Design. The course description says: Ever since its original publication, the Theory of Evolution by Natural\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":768,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=768","url_meta":{"origin":25,"position":3},"title":"UFOs","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"November 5, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"There is some controversy going on concerning an exhibit and talk going on at The Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science. I'll let Dr. Paul Cottle tell you all about it via his letter to the editor: Brogan should give up UFO 'pseudoscience' Florida's scientists and science educators recently\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Antiscience nonsense"","block_context":{"text":"Antiscience nonsense","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?cat=21"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1774,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1774","url_meta":{"origin":25,"position":4},"title":"What is and isn’t a scientific debate","author":"Jonathan Smith","date":"December 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"One thing that seems to crop up regularly in both bad science journalism and in pseudoscience and non-science is the idea of a scientific debate.The implication in each case is that there is a genuine split in the scientific community over the relevant issue, and that perhaps one might go\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1225,"url":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1225","url_meta":{"origin":25,"position":5},"title":"A fusion of creation science and hip hop","author":"Brandon Haught","date":"September 14, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"You know it was bound to happen. It was just a matter of time. Bad science meets bad music. I give you Destiny Lab: \"Our music is a fusion of creation science and hip hop.\" Here's a lyrics sample from their song Remembered As Dragons. Sorry to do this to\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 3 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 3 comments","link":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/?p=1225#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.flascience.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}