More on irrationality
Manuel - there is a wonderful reference to the "Where is New Mexico" problem in .
Dr Kotkin is right - I agree that Susan Jacoby should not have the last word on these issues of rationality etc: in particular I think she under-appreciates America's continuing contribution to learning and the advancement of human comfort and happiness - for instance in medicine.
Vincent, Jacoby is American! This is a US debate not a transatlantic one. And our teeth ARE bad.
Alexandria Marder asks where the figures come from: they are Jacoby's, but I see that might be responsible for the sun/earth question. I would be interested to see the same question asked of British people - or Chinese or Russian. The depressing thing about it is not the ignorance of the one in five: it's the lack of intellectual curiosity.
As for the Petraeus-Crocker appearance - is one of the weirder reactions. I didn't understand either. is the straight version.
Hello, I'm 
颁辞尘尘别苍迟蝉听听 Post your comment
"I would be interested to see the same question asked of British people - or Chinese or Russian. The depressing
thing about it is not the ignorance of the one in five: it's the lack of intellectual curiosity."
I'm glad to know this-that while there are, sadly, large numbers of ignorant, and down right stupid Americans in this world,, one shouldn't forget that this is most likely the case for all other nationalities as well. And I disagree with you on your other point; to me at least, it is depressing that both 1 out of every 5 Americans don't know that the earth revolves around the sun, and the fact that they are intalectually lazy-its all surprisingly shocking and disturbing!
I would very much like to see perhaps this author write a book similar to '"The Age Of American Unreason" on another nationality, though. I think it would be interesting.
Wouldn't it be interesting to find out just how many members of the Senate committee who grilled Gen. Patraeus and Ambassador Crocker so unmercifully and at such great length today (Tuesday), or any of their children for that matter, ever served in the military? These self-appointed experts on military matters, some of whom take great delight in trying to embarrass military leaders for political expediency, make me want to puke!
Or for the real straight version watch the clips on msnbc? - it might be quite handy for people to know that they can get the full clips of all the candidates there and make their own minds up. There was only one stellar performance, though.
having read SJ's book I challenge her detractors to compare it with Mark A. Noll's "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" that is if you have the guts - this column consistently relevant...many thanks
Justin,
I'd like to know your reaction to the petraeus-crocker hearings. I was taken by how strength in Clintons demeanor. She also seemed more genuine that on the campaign trail. I thought that Obama did well although closing argument was rather weak. McCain's "questioning" was a walk on the park and not worth watching.
The articles that you posted were strange. Where and how do you find them is my question.
Justin, just for once couldn't you write a blog entry without links to obscure sites? Most, if not all, of the readers and writers at this space are quite capable of finding them without your prompting - and I hardly think that Wonkette with its foul-penned contributors adds anything to the debate. As for intellectual curiosity, or the lack thereof, there was a damning assessment of Britons' knowledge of their own history shown in a 大象传媒 poll:
Just Google 'Britons ignorant' to find 338,000 entries for a population of around 60+ million compared with 636,000 entries for 'Americans ignorant' - for a population of 301 million, five times as many. Although not scientific, it suggests that Americans are far less ignorant - or more intellectually curious - than are my fellow countrymen.
Lack of curiosity can be overcome if people perceive value in getting at the truth. Record numbers of people are registering to vote in this election and hopefully that will lessen the apathy that has allowed presidents to be elected by the smallest of margins. I recently listened to a woman at the gym from Germany who has been here for thirty years and just became a US citizen. Her excitement, enthusiasm and civics knowledge put many of her native born listeners on the spot, but that is what motivates them to learn.
To my fellow Americans who claim that Americans are not ignorant: You guys need to get out more. And saying that Europeans are just as dumb is no excuse. We're supposed to score better than everyone else, and we're supposed to be the world's center of science and engineering. Also, Europeans have more protective trade, so in the increasingly globalized economy, lack of education among the general populace will be much more damaging to us than to Europe in the future.
To Justin, who doesn't understand the peculiar reactions to Petraeus: Both the left and the right are growing tired of the dog-and-pony show and want to move beyond the Iraq war. It is a distant thing, now that our own economy is blowing up.
"...it suggests that Americans are far less ignorant - or more intellectually curious - than are my fellow countrymen"
Or, perhaps, so ignorant that it doesn't even show up?
Britain's getting pretty bad too, but that's as much to the younger generation taking on the worst aspects of American culture as it is to the UK's own cultural decay. I say that from personal experience of having taught students at one of the UK's top 5 universities.
Wow, this is a wierdblog. At one site I get nuclearbikerdude wanting to 'nuke them to they glow' and from there it's bad teeth, then staight to politics. We call it crack in Texas. Puts you all over the place.
At 09:30 AM on 08 Apr 2008, Andrew Puckering wrote:
"It's hardly surprising that a quarter of all college graduates believe living things were created roughly as they are now. You see, Americans are much more independent than us Brits.
For starters, am I wrong or is the above quote nothing but a flagrant sweeping generalisation? To suggest that a reliance on the twin concepts of reason and the scientific method of enquiry is somehow indicative of having a less "enterprising spirit" is, frankly, baffling. Adhering to an 'orthodox' view does not necessarily imply a lack of independent thinking: sometimes an orthodoxy exists simply because its correct, or more crucially, because it is the best fit for the data presented. The beauty of the scientific method (if applied properly) is that it is robust enough to accept paradigm shifts, so long as those changes can be successfully argued, based on all the available evidence.
You and as many of your colleagues as you can muster can ultimately believe what you like privately but, unless your ideas can be backed up with sufficient evidence and subjected to the rigours of peer-review and assessment, they will always remain just that: deluded private beliefs.
The fact is, there's a real debate going on in our educational institutions
I'm sorry but thats simply nonsense. The fact is, there is an overwhelming consensus within the scientific community that natural selection is the only valid explanation for the development of life on earth. The debate in scientific circles simply doesn't exist. Only in the political sphere do we have to contend with the spurious arguments, opinions and misinformation of the so-called 'intelligent design' advocates - which, lets be clear, is just a pseudo-scientific euphemism for creationism, created to circumvent numerous legal rulings in the US regarding the constitutional separation of church and state and has never been subject to proper peer review.
I would recommend going to the to perhaps address some of the common misconceptions and ignorance (yes, thats what it is) common in this kind of debate. If you can't be bothered with that, I'll end with the following quote from the site:
"About a hundred years ago, scientists, who were then mostly creationists, looked at the world to figure out how God did things. These creationists came to the conclusions of an old earth and species originating by evolution. Since then, thousands of scientists have been studying evolution with increasingly more sophisticated tools...Sometimes their work has changed our understanding of significant details of how evolution operates, but the theory of evolution still has essentially unanimous agreement from the people who work on it."
Is this blog alive? I can't get the comments half the time and can't comment most the time.
Just In Case I get through, I would like to be noted that I have enjoyed this space during my rehab from surgery. Thank You. The comments and the off central stories, too soon or to late were informative and interesting.
I doubt this will post, but at least I know I tried.
As others have pointed out, ignorance seems widespread. An AFP story from February 3 (https://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jkhaMzfJ3JEjQsM7DaUlY1PFEU_g) reported: "Britons are losing their grip on reality, [...] nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real." (There are more frightening statistics in the brief story.)
Looks like "sic" isn't happy with you Justin...
Justin,
Thank you for the book recommendation (These United States by John Leonard). I鈥檝e ordered it and will have it in a couple of days. No one could better represent New Mexico than Tony Hillerman. His descriptions of place and people capture the authentic flavor of this part of the country. Judging from the reviews of the book, the other writers will be as interesting and should provide a really fascinating tour of the United States.
On irrationality: One of the benefits of having a career in academia is that I鈥檝e had a chance to live, research, and teach abroad. Though most of this work has been focused in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, I have significant collaboration and communication with academics and students in Asia, Australia/New Zealand, and Africa. During my experiences here and abroad, which have not been all sweetness and light, I have had abundant exposure to both the rational and irrational. Happily, everywhere I have been operates mainly in the realm of the rational and positive but, at the same time, no place is without its irrationalities, some of them quite surprising, though I guess they would be, since they are 鈥渋rrational.鈥 Also, every place has an abundance of interesting and intelligent people. Every place also has its share of boorish, uninformed scoundrels. Happily, the former everywhere greatly outnumber the latter.
I confess to great affection for all the countries where I have visited but especially for those where I have had the chance to work and experience daily life for longer periods of time. I love those places and I love my home, the USA. After returning from a year of working abroad that took me through nearly every Western European country, a friend asked, 鈥淲hich was your favorite?鈥 The question implied the kind linear hierarchy from best to worst that seems to be everywhere these days. What I said, and still contend, is that the question itself is wrong, since these countries are all so different and yet all wonderful, just in different ways. Hmmm鈥s this perspective irrational?
I happened upon your initial entry on Susan Jacoby鈥檚 鈥淭he Age of Unreason鈥 Tuesday, after serendipitously finishing the piece Monday night. I had been attracted to it in hope of finding some plausible explanation for the 鈥榠nformation insanity鈥 I鈥檝e observed for the last decade, and particularly since 9/11.
Before reading it I had posited two causes: too much communication and too many MBAs. The first, it seemed to me was a manifestation (or corollary) of Gresham's law applied to information, occasioned by the explosion of technological capability. The later expresses our societal tendency apply quantification to this explosion, in a (futile) attempt make sense of it all.
Jacoby, IMHO, tended to validate both of these insights, albeit the 2nd somewhat implicitly. Who鈥檇 a thought that our success in expanding our communications abilities, would so undercut our ability to communicate effectively. Thankfully, the 大象传媒, NPR, PBS and the great papers of the world, are still able to step back and inform us in a measured, reflective way.
Keep up the good work (and tell the web guys/gals the new site looks great!)
Justin,
If you look at the Gallup press release you link to, you'll see that they actually do compare the statistics for the US with two other countries, specifically Germany and Britain:
"In the new poll, about four out of five Americans (79%) correctly respond that the earth revolves around the sun, while 18% say it is the other way around. These results are comparable to those found in Germany when a similar question was asked there in 1996; in response to that poll, 74% of Germans gave the correct answer, while 16% thought the sun revolved around the earth, and 10% said they didn't know. When the question was asked in Great Britain that same year, 67% answered correctly, 19% answered incorrectly, and 14% didn't know."
As you can see, according to these statistics, unless education in the UK greatly improved over the past decade, an even smaller share of Brits (and Germans) have been notified of the Copernican revolution. Of course, I don't think any of these three countries have anything to brag about here (and I suspect results would be very similar in nearly every other Western nation)!
Interesting, by the way, that such survey results seem to find their way into prominent articles on the ignorance of Americans far more frequently than articles on the ignorance of other countries' citizens. At any rate, my suspicion is that these statistics reveal the ignorance of people in general rather than the educational shortcomings or peculiar anti-intellectualism of certain countries.
"British people - or Chinese or Russian"
What's the common denominator there??
" When the question was asked in Great Britain that same year, 67% answered correctly, 19% answered incorrectly, and 14% didn't know."
So honestly now, how many out of 5 of any nationality BELIEVE that 1 out of every 5 of ANY of these people understood such a silly question?
Do astronauts say the spacecraft "revolves" around the earth? Doesn't "revolve" connotate rotation producing a.. you know.. one of those "day" thingies, not one of them.. oh whatcha call 'em.. "year" thingies?
Can Einstein's relativity come into play? :)
Or would that be cheating.
Speaking of, Hey class, are there any massive objects that exceed the speed of light?
Ask that one. I predict 1 out of 50 say "yes".
Justin,
I enjoy your blogs, particularly as you communicate that you enjoy interacting with people from a different country and that you are learning from the experience. However you still occasionally slide into our strange habit of assuming non-British cultures/beliefs have a much more desperate need to progress than our own.
For example, you write:
鈥渙ne in five American adults (20%) believes the sun revolves around the earth; 鈥
鈥渂ut I see that Gallup might be responsible for the sun/earth question. I would be interested to see the same question asked of British people鈥
Well, I鈥檓 afraid it already has been. A 1988 British survey found that
鈥渢he sun was believed by 30% to rotate round the earth鈥
In other work
鈥淥verall, the Americans had marginally better scores than the Britons. Forty-three per cent of Americans know that electrons are smaller than atoms, compared with 31 per cent of Britons. One-third of Britons know that it takes the Earth a year to orbit the Sun, compared with almost half of Americans.鈥
And in another on geography:
鈥淎ccording to the British Council, British schoolchildren now come bottom in the international awareness of 10 countries surveyed, beaten by America, India and Nigeria. English children do even worse than Scottish and Welsh ones.
A separate National Geographic report found a third of UK respondents thought Mount Everest was in Europe.鈥
Are these surveys reliable? Do these surveys results add insight into to character of a people? Or do they just reinforce the caricature of the people that we have in our mind?
No, Mr. Webb. THIS is the straight story.
"Asked repeatedly yesterday what 'conditions' he is looking for to begin substantial U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq after this summer's scheduled drawdown, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said he will know them when he sees them."
That's a line from the famous (and rather amusing) Supreme Court decision regarding pornography, "I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it."
All the same, Petraeus did manage to associate the well-known definition of "obscenity" with the Iraq War ... so I guess his appearance wasn't a total loss.
All the same, the joke is wearing thin, like Senatorial patience, on both sides of the aisle.