#scientific illiteracy

[atheostic]

Sh!t Theists Say

“*insert scientific theory here* is just a theory.”

[priyafied]

S.O.S. Earth: The tipping point of no return

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[pillarsalt]

it's funny how y'all can't define what a woman is either. i'd like to see you define what a woman is without excluding ANY cis women. "oh a woman is someone with two x chromosomes ! ☝🏿🤓" uh oh! cis women who have turner syndrome are only born with one x chromosome and cis men who have Klinefelter syndrome have an extra x chromosome! "Someone who can give birth" so we're just gonna ignore the millions of women who can't give birth and now they aren't women anymore? "no,no,no someone who has a euterus!" how about the cis women who get hysterectomies or are born without euteruses? guess they aren't women to you! and then when y'all are all out of options, you say "adult human female." re-read what i said and replace the word "woman" with "female" you're in the same predicament buddy!

[imkeepinit]

[bethanydelleman]

Edit: Turning off reblogs on this post since I've been told it contains misinformation. Also, someone reblogged it with a huge rant and blocked me (as far as I can tell), leaving me unable to reply and with only partial notes and that freaks me out.

So I was telling someone about my boy, Sejong the Great of Joeson, who deserves that title "great" since he was so concerned about illiteracy that he created the easy-to-learn Korean alphabet (Hangul) by himself, but then the nobility got mad about all these reading peasants and tried to ban it. And my friend says, "Oh, I thought illiterate poor people in the past were just lazy."

And I was like, "No, no, you don't want your indentured servants and peasants reading and figuring out how much you are screwing them over. The adapted Chinese characters that Korea had been using took years to learn so it was a natural gatekeeper of knowledge."

And then, because one must be fair, I went on to explain how Europeans locked up their knowledge behind Latin, especially the Bible, and how it was so important that Martin Luther translated it into everyday German, because once you can read the Bible yourself, you can challenge the almost absolute power of the church. Only the rich could afford to learn Latin, so only the rich could read the book that their entire society was allegedly based around.

I do think things are much better today, but why are most scientific papers paywalled and scientists sometimes act as if they should be treated like infallible priests...

Edit: I wanted to end this post on a happy note, but then I started thinking about paywalls and it made me a bit depressed. We still do make our best knowledge less accessible to the average person and I hope we can do more to change that.

[tuurverheydepoetryandprose]

I don’t know if it’s cultural/latent Christianity or just standard media illiteracy, but people need to seriously read up on the nature of mythology in ancient cultures. Like seriously.

So many people treat myths as factual accounts of events. I have never seen any literary scholar, anthropologist or historian make the claim that this was the way the ancients viewed their myths. It’s metaphor. It’s allegory. It’s symbolism. It’s a narrativised ritual. It’s artistic social, political, cultural commentary, instruction or expression. The claim that a myth should be interpreted literally is never made by serious researchers, because it

1) is inherently unprovable and unarguable, which renders it scientifically irrelevant.

2) it blocks off many more salient interpretations that can co-exist with other contradictory non-literal interpretations.

3) it does not seem consistent with the way myth was treated by storytellers and scholars of the time.

Myth is an inherently flexible medium. It’s beautiful and elegant in its manifold meanings. Stop trying to make it a literal account. It isn’t. Never has been. Do your research about the culture, the medium and the traditions you discuss, before making wild statements, before writing ahistorical retellings, or trying to cancel gods or the people who follow them, based on texts that were written (and before that orally handed down) thousands of years ago in a cultural tradition entirely different than ours.

STOP PROJECTING YOUR OWN LITERALISM AND REJECTION OF COMPLEXITY ON OTHER CULTURES.

It’s ignorant, it’s incurious, it’s incorrect and frankly disrespectful, racist and colonialist to insert your misunderstood notion of mythology in a culture that you have barely researched.

Some people need to be a bit less concerned with being seen as perfect paragons of moral righteousness, and a bit more with not spreading misinformation, cultural ignorance and media illiteracy.

[transmutationisms]

i think virologists & immunologists have done a really shit job communicating to physicians & epidemiologists the ways in which covid is kind of a textbook virus & is causing the kind of textbook health damage you would expect for an immunologically naïve population (which we still are. comparatively speaking. not least because it's mutating) & one consequence is you get this weird dichotomy of public reactions where it's like, either the idea filters down that this is a uniquely threatening virus & nothing else has ever caused these kinds of systemic or long-term sequelae, or else someone pokes like one hole in that narrative & is like, well then i guess public health, inc. is lying or stupid & this is nbd at the end of the day because it's not like anyone was expecting me to react with this much caution to other pathogens previously. & i think both positions fail to account for what are essentially political disputes because in different ways they both presume the only issue at hand is scientific knowledge about the virus, & therefore disagreement is only a matter of scientific ignorance or illiteracy. meanwhile like, basically both of these positions are just invoking different poor understandings of previously identified pathogens & public health responses, & using those to justify what they want to assert now about covid.

[dumpsterrabbitsotherblog]

I personally think Dave would love the scientific side of YouTube, so he could learn tons of cool facts without his illiteracy and maybe severe dyslexia [def me projecting] holding him back.

Unfortunately he would fall for misinformation quite a few times but he'd still love the videos and eventually learn how to spot bad info, hopefully, possible conspiracy theory dave scares me so I won't think of it anymore.

Anyway uh I have a migraine, my brain hurts, night night

[themakeupbrush]

Miss Universe Italy 2023 National Costume

Carmen graces the stage wearing a national costume inspired by the story of Italian scientific evolution, celebrating the brilliance of outstanding female scientists. Every detail, meticulously crafted over 70 hours, narrates the journey from the darkness of illiteracy to the brilliance of scientific enlightenment. From Renaissance to contemporary innovation, each part of the skirt portrays the remarkable contributions of women in advancing Italian science. This dress proudly declares our love for science, innovation, and the pursuit of knowledge as a catalyst for global gender equity.

[redjaybathood]

to all your dostoyevsky enjoyers anywhere

The relationship between literary merit and military power is not a delightful subject for contemplation. I prefer to think that I would have loved Pushkin even if Peter and Catherine the Great hadn’t waged extensive foreign and internal wars, dragging Russia into the European balance of power. But would Pushkin’s work still have been translated into English and stocked in the Barnes & Noble on Route 22 in northern New Jersey—in the world superpower to which my parents came in the seventies, in pursuit of the best scientific equipment? Even if it had been translated, and I had read it, I might not have recognized it as good. Would it have been good?

One editorial in The Spectator, responding to the proposed suspension of a Dostoyevsky lecture series in Milan, called it ironic to “censure” a writer who had himself been “sent to a Siberian labour camp for reading banned books that attacked the Tsarist regime.” As it turns out, being a victim of imperial repression doesn’t make you incapable of perpetuating repressive ideas. One of Dostoyevsky’s fellow-prisoners in Siberia, a Polish nationalist, wrote in his memoirs about Dostoyevsky’s insistence that Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland “had forever been the property of Russia,” and would, without Russia, be mired in “dark illiteracy, barbarism, and abject poverty.”

[anamericangirl]

An egg is not a chicken, a seed is not a flower, an embryo is not a baby

> an egg is not a chicken

Correct. The chicken is inside the egg.

> a seed is not a flower.

Correct. But inside it is the plant that will grow into a flower.

> an embryo is not a baby

Wrong. They are whole living human beings from the moment of conception. Ask any biologist.

The argument of “I can think of some things that aren’t other things so by default that means an embryo isn’t a baby” is a very bad argument because it reeks of scientific illiteracy.

Too bad you can’t use actual science and facts to back up this claim and can only make superficial comparisons that do nothing but expose your ignorance.

[priyafied]

Rethinking Gender Dynamics in Careers

"Men are judged by their potential, while women are judged on their past performance". Tomorrow can only be shaped with small steps starting today.

“Men are judged by their potential, while women are judged on their past performance”. I didn’t say this, but is there truth to this? What do you think? Read the original research here: Overlooked Leadership Potential: The Preference for Leadership Potential in Job Candidates Who Are Men vs. Women (Frontiers in Psychology) Men and women approach their jobs differently. This is a known point, but…

[foxgnomesworld]

This thread and especially the linked dissertation annoyed me so much that I decided to actually post on Tumblr for the first time.

I wanted to give this a fair shot and read the thread. While it acknowledges certain critiques of astrology, it concludes that astrology skeptics are ignorant of developments in the field and need to do more research. So, I went to the linked dissertation to learn more. Link

The problem is that the dissertation is bad. Now, it's clearly an undergraduate essay that has likely never been edited by anyone other than the author. Perhaps it is not fair to expect more. However, since it was linked as a resource, I feel critique is warranted.

First off, if you're hoping the essay addresses any of what was mentioned in the thread, you're out of luck. Notably, there is no mention of how astrologers are addressing the many concerns of skeptics.

The essay itself is poorly argued. There are many claims made with little evidence, e.g. that the practice of astrology has changed profoundly since the 70s. Obviously it's online now (just like everything else), but that doesn't prove there have been fundamental shifts in the field.

The author's claims are not explained and lack underlying logic, as in this section of the essay:

How exactly does astrology validate a person and their experiences? What if the chart contradicts a person's own perceptions? If the goal is to understand the self, why use astrology at all?

An underlying tension in the essay is the unwillingness to engage with the question of whether astrology is "real." Do the planets actually have an impact on behavior? This is critical to address. After all, why should astrology be embraced if it is based on falsehoods and might make people more willing to believe in other pseudo-scientific ideas? Self-understanding and validation are valuable. However, there are ways of attaining them that do not rely on pseudoscience.

Instead, the author fails to understand criticism, or to engage with it in good faith, as you can see here:

1) Evaluating whether people "believe" in a field is entirely separate from the question of whether or not it is empirically valid.

2) Whether a skeptic believes in astrology or not is irrelevant. The question is how the practitioners conceptualize their own field. Surely, the people who position themselves as astrological experts should be able to communicate their thoughts on how the field functions, and why their practice can reveal truth!

This leads to the most troubling part of the essay. One of the claims in the thread is that astrologers have been addressing critiques about the dangers of astrology. Fake promises of good health were given as a specific example.

Yet in the essay, the author takes a very different stance. A critic who is concerned about the growing popularity of various pseudosciences and how this might affect scientific literacy is treated with scorn and mockery.

Read that highlighted section. Do the quotes provided say anything about "doom" and "irremediable societal downfall"? No, not at all. The author's defensiveness toward criticism of astrology is on full display. There is no genuine engagement with the topic: the danger of a population that doesn't value science or critical thinking.

Instead, the critic is mischaracterized, and the author gives incredibly weak defenses. She states that astrology never negatively affected society in the past (a claim she doesn't even try to defend). Worse, she writes that people make irrational decisions anyway, so what does it matter if they believe pseudoscience?

Finally, there is this: "Never mind […] that correlation does not equal causation."

This quote is damning. It is nonsense. It showcases the scientific illiteracy of the author. In the critique given, there are simply no mentions of correlations, or claims of causation. This cute line is meant to convince you that the author understands science, but it actually betrays her lack of statistical reasoning.

Such a phrase has an actual meaning and utility. It can be employed when a researcher tries to assert a causal connection between two pieces of data that mathematically correlate, yet lacks evidence to prove one trend drives another. In this context, though, it means nothing, because the reader has been shown no statistical claims.

Frankly, I am disappointed. I did not expect the essay would change my mind about astrology as a whole. However, I had hoped from the thread that it would shed some light on why people find it compelling, and how astrologers are addressing potential problems and criticisms. Neither is true. The essay gives the obvious answer about astrology's popularity: life sucks now, so people (often marginalized) turn to things that promise them truth.

However, that alone does not mean that the rise of astrology is positive or even neutral. Rather, to someone like me, this shows that it is indeed a field that targets the most vulnerable. It convinces them to dedicate their time and energy to a practice that relies on magical thinking and might lead them to believe further pseudoscience.

Finally, if you need proof that astrology is still used to judge and insult others, look no further than the quote tweets on the post:

The original critic of astrology is unfairly labeled as someone who just hates her astrological sign, and insinuated to be a "sensitive crybaby." All of her thoughtful commentary is dismissed by these strangers in favor of making assumptions about her character and motivations based solely on her sun sign.

The most damning evidence against astrology as a liberatory practice is to simply look at the attitudes and behaviors of people who believe in it.

[nerdylizj]

Ms Stem anon here. I received my BS in Biology. As you can imagine the past couple of years have been… fun (is it really when people think you’re part of a big conspiracy, but jokes on them because have they EVER been part of a group project?) Now after working and volunteering for the past 3ish years I’m going back for, hopefully, family therapy. I like helping people face to face. And a lot of my volunteering involved pointing disenfranchised communities and those affected by C19 to resources and services they would otherwise be unaware of. The program I volunteered through also participated in fairs, provided vaccine clinics/gave vouchers, provided testing, amongst other services. My work with children involved a lot of guiding them on how to self regulate and validating their emotions/experiences while also helping them find ways to deal with them in a healthier manners. A big part of it is guiding them towards the safer choices but making sure they feel as if they came to that choice all on their own. It can be mentally taxing at times due to some having some bad home lives but it’s overall very satisfying.

Having a bio degree allows me to better advocate for myself and others medically as well as being able to better understand/scrutinize media reports on research. While I understand why there is a barrier to reading studies to avoid people without the background to misconstrue it, we also allow for misinformation to persist as there is significant scientific illiteracy going on. There should be a way to better communicate with those lacking the education and training we receive.

Spiel aside… the babies will continue to suffer and I support… it makes me a well rounded individual. I’m excited to see what will ultimately happen with them. There are a lot of implications for their, and kids, future. Not only did girly pop marry and procreate with the enemy, he is technically heir to the thrown as will be her children. But hey maybe one day they’ll have all their memories and remember that they were into each other pre-brainwashing. What with their awkward flirting and katara “keeping an eye on him.”

Ooh I did read the fic that inspired yours. Hopefully one day that one will be continued (i hope the author is doing, and does, well regardless of whether they do or don’t continue it).

omg you’ve done so much meaningful work <333 i don’t think the General Public really understands just how hard covid hit already-disenfranchised people/those who experience health disparities. and it still is hitting hard!!! btw one of my besties is a family therapist (liv, tell me i'm right..) and i always admire her tenacity to provide meaningful sessions to her clients even when she’s burnt out or compassion fatigued <3 it is not easy work

i’ll be honest i’m not a fan of (doing the) research but at least i can read and interpret it 😭💞 imho, it is a privilege to be health/scientific literate. i agree with you 100% about misinformation... health and scientific illiteracy is a hugely multi-faceted, societal problem that will take generations to truly change (and a lot of work). not to mention that there are valid concerns for some communities to distrust medicine/science

i think zk may need ur counseling services, a feelings wheel, and time/space to process... too bad there’s a war going on and they are both so dumb JKFEFVJKNMEO

i love catie_writes_things’ fic soo much. i hadn’t read a memory loss fic before so it haunted me many a nights after i first read it. then the zk ghoul took hold of me and here i am... like 220k+ later 😭😭😭😭

I love that you’re considering this career, i wish you all the best of luck in ur grad school apps 💗

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

“Any God who would sentence you to an eternity of torture by fire for not believing in him, yet refuses to provide unambiguous, tangible evidence of his existence, is not a God.

It is either a myth or a an insecure, pathetic bully.”

Xians like to insist that their religion is responsible for science. This is unambiguously false, of course -- the Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Greeks were using scientific principles millennia before the Catholic Church was burning Giordano Bruno and imprisoning Galileo.

But let’s not just put that aside, let’s actually grant it. Purely for argument’s sake.

So, we are to believe that god’s people created a process. Let’s even grant that god himself inspired this process. We are, after all, regularly told that god works through doctors and scientists. This process provides a way for humans to know the world, to discover everything that this god made for us that’s possible to be discovered and known, through evidence and reason. A process so successful, it has resulted in doubling the human life expectancy, the transition of the majority of the planet’s population out of extreme poverty, an inversion of the ratio of literacy to illiteracy, and has put robots on another planet and a spacecraft out beyond the boundaries of the solar system. A process so useful and reliable that this god’s people want to make sure we’re aware of who gave it to us, and to credit them appropriately.

And yet, despite all of this, not only can this transformative process, gifted to us by Xianity, not find this same religion’s god anywhere, in any capacity, we are told that it’s unreasonable to, and that one must use the very worst, least reliable process of all: faith.

The great epistemological gift that Xianity bequeathed to us all, and their own god is completely immune to it.

That seems... unlikely.

[realjaysumlin]

The Dangers of Scientific Illiteracy | Psychology Today

Pseudoscientific ideas coined the minds of the world even though real science can explain how our world came into existence but we have a lot of scientists who still use pseudoscientific ideologies to promote religious beliefs and racism even though real science refutes these myths.

No one in their right minds can argue against fossil records but they still do in the same manner they believe that evolution is false and the earth is flat. People will always find a way to believe in anything no matter what evidence proves or debunks.

One thing is certain is the disheartening truth that people are just scientifically illiterate and this is dangerous and often deadly especially if you are Black.