I don't need no book learnin'

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by James R, Oct 3, 2012.

  1. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    39,397
    There was an interesting discussion to be had in another thread, which unfortunately was closed. So, I thought I'd take it up here.

    It's not unusual to read this kind of thing on sciforums, and more generally on any forum that has both experts and non-experts. Almost invariably, these kinds of comments come from people who are uneducated. I would like to discuss the motivations of those who make these kinds of comments.

    Let's unpack the statement a bit. What claims are being made?

    1. The scientific community (read community of experts) is not telling "us" the truth.
    2. Getting an education essentially involves learning how to "bullshit" other people.
    3. Educated people are defensive and need to close ranks to protect themselves when non-experts expose "the Truth".
    4, By implication, all of the readily-available scientific knowledge that is out there is bullshit.

    Seemingly, we have a conspiracy theory involving scientists who are actively working to conceal the Truth from the rest of us. Those scientists are bullshitting us so they can get funding and keep their jobs, but they don't actually produce anything useful. I guess all the real breakthroughs come from non-professionals who don't have vested interests.

    Clearly, there's no value in being educated, either. Formal education is useless. As we often hear:

    "I don't need no book learnin'. I learned everything I need to know from the University of Life/School of Hard Knocks."​

    The fact that your microwave oven works, and your iphone, and the very computer that you're reading this post on, has nothing to do with those bullshitting scientists. Obviously, the technology that drives your computer must have been invented by a non-scientists who had no formal education or qualifications. If that scientist had been "indoctrinated" into the system of bullshit that universities teach, he could never have invented the transistor. Obviously only somebody educated in the University of Life could have come up with the necessary technology, because scientific bullshit is just that - bullshit aimed at duping the masses.

    It's a good thing that we have couch scientists who can see through all the bullshit that the so-called "experts" are trying to feed us. Want to know about black holes? Don't listen to those so-called "astronomers". They are formally educated, and therefore only know how to bullshit other people. The only astronomy you can really trust is from heroes like Bob the Backyard Astrophysicist, who taught himself astrophysics through a rigorous process of inventing personal theories from scratch in his back shed. Bob managed to avoid the formal education system, and can therefore legitimately claim real, hard-won knowledge. The best way to learn about astronomy is to go down to your local pub and buy Bob a beer. Bob will fill you in not only on real astronomy, but also on what's wrong with the bullshit astronomy that is pushed by those ivory tower frauds. Bob will dismantle their world over a beer or two.

    Feeling ill? Don't worry. Contact Martha the psychic doctor. She has learned medicine at the School of Hard Knocks, and has, like Bob, managed to avoid being indoctrinated into the Grand Conspiracy of Bullshitters. Martha can give you some herbs to cure your gastroenteritis/impotence/cancer/malaria/hepatits/etc. And for a small fee, or perhaps just out of the goodness of her heart, she can also tell you what the future holds for you, and maybe get a message through to you from your dead grandfather. Martha can dismantle the world of the bullshit "doctors" with their book learnin', don't you worry about that!

    I wonder how people who make these kinds of claims manage to account for what they see in the world around them. Where did all our modern technology come from? Are we really expected to believe that Bob and Martha invented it, with no formal education? And what of all the other experts we seem to rely on? Hurt your back? Would you visit Martha or a qualified physiotherapist? Oops - perhaps it's better not to ask that.

    And what of lawyers and accountants and dentists and engineers and primary school teachers? Obviously we can't trust these people. All of them have "book learnin'". All of them must be self-interested and full of bullshit. You'd better home school your kids yourself. Why waste their time teaching them how to bullshit? Well, admittedly it might not be a waste of time. They could get a high-paying job in the "system", but that would be unethical. They wouldn't be contributing to society - just uselessly expanding the bullshit quotient of the world. What a waste of a life that would be. The ethical thing would be to bring them up to be astrologers, or to sell Power Bracelets or something. They can carry on the proud family tradition of dismantling the bullshit.

    Question: is it really true that we don't need no book learnin'?
     
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  3. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

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    If we don't have any learning then we are going to be burning.
     
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  5. R1D2 many leagues under the sea. Valued Senior Member

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    I got a "small" education compared to some.
    But any amount is sometimes better than no amount.
    I knew a successful business man who "dropped out" in the 6th grade. And if we had none what so ever book learning. We might not be able to read what's on here or participate.
     
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  7. Janus58 Valued Senior Member

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    Just be sure to heed Alexander Pope's warning:

    "A little learning is a dangerous thing;
    drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
    there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
    and drinking largely sobers us again."
     
  8. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    5,089
    I knew a guy once who had plenty of brains, ambition and energy; built up a pretty decent small business. His next goal was to marry an educated woman who would guide him in book-learning, once he had the leisure to pursue it. This guy was smart enough to succeed with very little formal education, and also smart enough to want it.

    The people who diss education are not smart enough to know what it is. Somebody [probably with a political axe they wanted ground by manipulable flunkeys] convinced them that democracy means all opinions - informed, un-, mis- and dis- are equal, and that anyone who uses words you don't understand is bullshitting. They go along, because they're being offered validation they don't need to earn.

    Poster boy: http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blpic-moran.htm
     
  9. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    One thing that "book learnin'" doesn't teach people is how to be decent human beings.

    Few things are as sad as seeing people promulgate the necessity of critical thinking, but who themselves are averse to it and especially in decisive situations do not apply it.
     
  10. Stoniphi obscurely fossiliferous Valued Senior Member

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    The word we seem to be groping for here is "arrogance".

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  11. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    Actually, a great deal has been written, every day since the invention of symbols, about how to be a decent human being, as well as how to think. College education doesn't guarantee that you'll take the sages' advice to heart, but at least you'll be exposed to it. In the school of hard knocks, maybe not.
     
  12. Gustav Banned Banned

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    12,575

    take a crack at some holy scriptures
     
  13. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    They may be telling the truth, or maybe they aren't.

    The problem is, laypeople aren't typically in the position to distinguish truth from bullshit, once a certain level of technical jargon has been exceeded. The suggestion that laypeople must simply believe whatever "scientists" choose to tell them is just a prescription for mindless credulity. And similarly, the suggestion that laypeople should always disbelieve what "experts" tell them, is a prescription for equally mindless nihilistic skepticism. And given that acquiring a professional level of expertise in all fields of knowledge is impossible for anyone (even for scientists outside their own specialties), it isn't immediately clear what the best path is going to be between these two extreme caricatures.

    Back in Hellenistic times (the Greek world after Alexander and in ancient Rome), rhetoric was perhaps the primary emphasis in education. People were trained to argue convincingly, to be able to sway audiences to their view, whatever that view happened to be. It was the skill of the lawyer, and of the political orator. Schools of rhetoric would often assign students to argue for a certain thesis, and then to argue against it, the goal being to develop the ability to be equally convincing both ways, whatever the subject. (Think of the American political debates.)

    It's interesting that today in places like France, perhaps disillusioned by two world wars and by the collapse of intellectuals' Marxist dreams, the "post-modern" humanities are taking up very similar positions in even more aggressive "deconstructive" fashion. They deny that objective reality, and truth along with it, even exists. All that exists are standpoints, points of view, interpretations, that represent different people's personal, race and class interests.

    This is a view that's currently very widespread among the academic left, among precisely those university professors that laypeople are expected to believe and to accept as authorities.

    If two points of view are in opposition, then each side is likely to close ranks against the other. We certainly see the professionally trained biologists closing ranks against Biblical creationists, and vice-versa. I'm 100% with the biologists on that one. But what about all the Marxist economists on university faculties back in the last century and their so-called "scientific socialism"? (Where did all the Marxist economists suddenly dissappear to after 1990?) It isn't always immediately and easily obvious who is right and who isn't.

    I don't think that's plausible. But it's possible to advance a less extreme hypothesis, one that's just as troubling in its own way. It's the hypothesis that a small number of stinky turds still exist, perhaps accidently and perhaps intentionally so as to serve somebody's purpose, among all the many nuggets of truth (or at least truth-like verisimilitude) that constitute "science" as it's presented to the public.

    My own personal practice in this regard is to weight scientific pronouncements in inverse proportion to how politicized I perceive their context to be. I just perceive many pronoucements in subjects like sociology and cultural anthropology especially, to be less believable than pronouncements in less political subjects like condensed matter physics or applied mathematics. Rhetoric in the so-called 'social sciences' often seems to me to be designed from the very beginning to serve this or that political cause. In other words, it looks to me like it might be an example of ancient-style rhetoric, meant to bamboozle and persuade laypeople like myself, more than it's a simple straight-forward statement of the Truth of Science, before which we supposedly should be kneeling and mindlessly worshipping.

    I am generally very supportive of science. I think that methodologically, it's the best instrument that we humans currently have for understanding the physical world of which I believe we are a part. It's transformed the modern world in a rationalistic direction, and I strongly and emphatically support that.

    But having just said that, I feel that it's foolish for me to assume a totally credulous attitude towards everything that's said to me in science's name. I'm always going to retain a bit of skepticism towards any proposition, weighting that skepticism more or less as I sense conditions demand. I think that's it's important that I continue to do that. It's part of what intellectual integrity means to me and I'm never going to shut my bullshit detector off entirely.
     
  14. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Practical Implications

    I'm going to use Young Earth Creationism (<10,000 YA) as an example.

    When my daughter was four and five, she began repeating the obnoxious horsepucky her maternal grandparents were teaching her about Jesus and Christianity and the Bible. I remember one occasion, picking up Em, she was in the middle of lunch. She looked up at me and said something about what she was eating, and added, "Because grease is from Satan."

    Grandma beamed. Grandpa hunkered down and concentrated on his food. He wasn't going to undermine his wife in front of me or the child, but you could see in his body language, "Hey, don't look at me on that one!"

    But he will advocate some version of YEC. He's one of those who thinks carbon dating isn't real, and all that sort of stuff.

    One time, driving in the car, my daughter wanted to test the boundaries of what she understood, and insisted on Grandpa's YEC argument. I explained to her that we knew the Earth was older than 10,000 years because we could test that.

    Now here's the fun part: Those tests, we know, are reliable because when you get down to it, they involve a certain aspect of mathematics. And if that math is wrong, there would be no atomic bombs—she knows what a nuclear weapon does, and has seen images from blast sites. The microwave oven would not work—part of her personal empowerment behavior at the time was to prepare small snacks in the microwave. My mobile phone would not work.

    The practical implications of the science being fake are huge. The bombs won't explode if the math is wrong. The microwaves won't heat the water in the food if the math is wrong. The satellite won't be able to synchronize with terrestrial equipment if the math is wrong.

    I've found that while you can't necessarily persuade people from their subjective mistrust of science, the most effective way to interrupt their advocacy of crackpottery is to simply point out other necessary effects in the world if they are right. If, for instance, our understanding of atomic decay is so wrong that carbon dating is fake, then our understanding of how atoms work is so fatally flawed that we couldn't make a bomb. Nor could we suggest that the sun will burn for a long, long time. If our understanding of physics and the underlying math is so askew, we cannot say with any reasonable assurance that the sun will rise next Tuesday.

    It's not that people are necessarily sinister. I have a friend who once insisted that cold causes things to expand. Her rationale considered nothing of heat, because the basis of her cold-makes-things-expand argument was that a beer, left in the freezer, would explode. She was looking at a different process, and not recognizing the difference.

    It helps, in those moments, if you're capable of explaining the mistake to them. In truth, perhaps because I'm lazy or maybe it's just that I'm stubborn, I never did go back and look up exactly why frozen beer explodes out of the can.

    But I've found that addressing the practical implications of bunk theories is the best way to make the advocates think.
     
  15. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    So there was a particularly notorious Young Earth Creationist active in my (small) hometown back in my high school days. He was a regular feature in the letters to the editor section of the local newspaper, tossing off wild crank theories and associated hysterical accusations about the local high school teachers being a Satanic cabal, etc.

    The kicker, however, is that he was also a successful, respected computational geophysicist. He knew more about geophysics than just about anyone alive. His entire line of work was focussed on computational simulations of the Earth's geophysical history. By day, he'd run these simulations showing exactly how the earth's geology progressed over millions of years to arrive at the present tectonic and geological configurations, including the formation of river canyons over millions of years, etc. His results were peer-reviewed and rigorously obtained, and their correspondence with accepted theory and observation are considered legitimate scientific confirmation of standard, mainstream geophysics.

    But by night, he'd run the same simulations starting from wild Young Earth Creationist assumptions, and show that the present geology and tectonics could also be arrived at in ten thousand years given an extreme - I should say, divine - initial cataclysm (it consisted of God pulling a big chunk of molten core up through the Earth's crust or something like that). So he was leveraging his legitimate, non-controversial work in the area to lend scientific credence to YEC.

    The upshot is that I am doubtful about the tactic of holding crank's feet to the various consequences of their assertions. Either they aren't going to be scientifically literate enough for that to make a difference, or they are going to be creative enough to propose alternative theories with whatever level of detail is required. Cranks simply would not persist if they didn't have strong mechanisms for handling such things. By definition, a crank outlook is self-sealing, so if you encounter a crank you can be confident that those seals are working at whatever level of scientific literacy and scope are appropriate for the individual in question.

    It will work on people who are not cranks, but are simply impressionable and have been taken in by some superficially appealing crank rhetoric though. So I can perfectly well believe that such an approach would work on Tiassa's daughter, but also be perfectly confident that it will have no effect on his crank relatives. That's not to say that it won't "make them think," but what they will think about will only be "how do I supply an explanation for this fact without fundamentally changing my perspective or admitting any serious error?" and not "should I reconsider my adherence to this line of thought in light of this conflicting information?" By definition, a crank is somebody who has already failed to summon the level of self-doubt and humility to behave in a legitimately scientific manner. Instead, they have latched onto various ego-defense tactics to deal with the cognitive dissonance in question without ever challenging their core beliefs.
     
  16. kris Registered Member

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    In Australia at least, there are certainly serious flaws within the education system. There is also a lot of non-science masquerading as science.

    But my view is that we need to evaluate honestly and recognise what is effective, accurate and beneficial to humanity and what is blatantly misleading, erroneous or just needs to be improved.

    With an objective (as much as possible) understanding of the current status of research and education we can make incremental improvements and re-evaluations and calibrate our trajectory dynamically to suit the needs of humanity.

    I believe that often the problem, as alluded to in posts above, is that we are susceptible to becoming personally attached to beliefs in an egotistical sense. This can happen on both sides and will only serve to conceal obvious truth from us and lead to lots of overly-emotional and rash thinking and behaviour.
     
  17. elte Valued Senior Member

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    I'm reminded of the effect that people who are largely unknowledgable in a field can tend to greatly overestimate their ability in that area. I recall the same thing happening to me even.
     
  18. kris Registered Member

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    There is a flip side that some people who are highly knowledgeable in a field may tend to understimate the ability of everyone else in that area
     
  19. ccdan Registered Member

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    Most often, one's "knowledge" in a specific area is not the issue(we don't even have to get there)... the biggest issue is much more fundamental: most people simply don't understand the fundamentals of science like the scientific method and the importance of rigor, quantitative data, sound logic and verifiability/repeatability in kind of experiment/study/whatever that might be labeled "scientific"
     
  20. elte Valued Senior Member

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    There is an interesting term given to this type of thing, even, illusory superiority.
     
  21. Mars Rover Banned Banned

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    Does this mean that unheeding arrogance can affect lay and professional alike sometimes?
     
  22. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    You mean overestimate?



    But it's not clear what exactly is "effective, accurate and beneficial to humanity" to begin with. Different people have different ideas on what that is.

    What if a humanist outlook is not actually "effective, accurate and beneficial to humanity"?
     
  23. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    Apparently, this is often the case, given that some very educated people have a great affinity for logical fallacies.
     

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