Thursday, February 13, 2014
Despondency is a rational reaction...
Despondency is a rational reaction... Fifty eight percent of American young adults (18 - 24) believe that astrology is either “scientific” or “sort of scientific” (see page 7-26). In China, it's only eight percent of the entire population, and it's even less in their young adults...
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I'm not sure it makes me feel any better, but I'm wondering if this survey result is the result of bad reading skills, rather than bad science knowledge. I really suspect that many of the survey population, especially the younger ones, don't actually know what the word "astrology" means. "Astro-something - sounds scientific."
ReplyDeleteFunny you should say that - we were with some friends earlier today who made exactly the same observation about reading skills, and then we mutually decided that even if that were the case, we were still feeling despondent about it :) This morning we ate breakfast in an excellent restaurant in Logan, Utah - and our "server", a junior at Utah State University, told us about the many students in his "science survey" class (a sort of general introduction to the whole idea of science) who had utterly no idea about standard scientific concepts like reproducibility, theory and proof, and so on. These are people who graduated from high school with good enough grades to get into a school like USU, and then made it through two years of college. He was as appalled as we were, but estimated that it was about 2/3 of his class in that situation...
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