Today seems to be stupid day...

[elfs]

Daniel Akst's article in The American, Science and the Chattering Classes, falls into that commonplace journalistic sin, handwringing over the stupidity of the masses without offering anything but a pablum response to a given problem.

The problem is scientific illiteracy. Akst writes,

With its great stress on specialization, capitalism has eroded the kind of homely technological skills Americans typically possessed a generation ago. Most of us no longer work on our own cars, for instance, and given electronic fuel injection and other newfangled features, we probably couldn’t even if we wanted to. Heck, a lot of us can’t even cook our own food.

That last part is what made steam come out of my ears, as you can imagine. Most people can't cook their own food? Most people can't apply heat to meat and vegetables and see what happens?

Akst ends his piece with this:

The challenge for business, whose products will contain more and more technology as time goes on, is to increase the general level of comfort in science without making people feel they’re being taken for a ride. More and better science in the schools would be a great start.

This, too, is outrageous: it is not in the best interests of most businesses for the common people to understand the science behind their products. If the average man did, he might not be so worried, as Akst points out, about the surfactants is vaccines, or the use of gamma radiation to pasteurize food, but he also wouldn't be taken for a ride by the billion and one forms of woo out there, and wouldn't spend a billion and one dollars on cures for "subluxation" and "toxification," wouldn't spend money on Big Placebo, and would actually realize that the best cure for half of our population's medical issues is a half-hour walk every day in the park. Near trees and birds and water. (Yeah, I know, Weil's guilty of massive amounts of woo, but the whole "being out in nature daily reduces depression" thing is pretty well backed up.)

Schooling and business are at odds with each other. Businesses exist to propogate beliefs in the quality of their products. Education exists to replace belief with facts. To put the two hand-in-hand like that is, I guess, the educational equivalent of homeotherapy: the idea that tiny droplets of knowledge in an ocean of bullshit will somehow multiply, magically, turning indoctrinated children into self-willed Jeffersonian citizens.

But really, "Most people can't cook their own food?" How sad is that? It doesn't take science to learn how to cook your own food: it takes curiosity and a willingness to ocassionally burn a dish. You can order take-out only if you fail. This isn't a failure of science; it's a failure of culture.

Comments

What's the weather like on your planet?

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

You wrote, "...it is not in the best interests of most businesses for the common people to understand the science behind their products."

I have no idea what world you live in, but in the world I live in, about 90% of all businesses very much want customers to understand and appreciate what goes into their products. Maybe 95%, even. In businesses that sell primarily to other businesses, the number might even exceed 99%.

Smarter customers are generally wealthier, have more money to spend, are able to make better decisions, and are better able to appreciate the difficult tradeoffs that all businesses must make on costs, pricing, sales and marketing, product development, and so on.

Most companies have customers who do not, in fact, know anything about science, but that's just a consequence of human nature and unrelated to the point you're apparently trying to make.

I suppose that if you live in a Hollywood TV series like Scooby Doo or The A-Team, or in the fantasy world of the Occupy Wall Street movement, you might have reason to believe that many business owners rely on fraud, graft, and outright theft to make their profits.

But in THIS world, those things are so rare that when they do occur, the perpetrators become infamous. We all know who Ken Lay, Bernie Madoff, and Barney Frank are, but crooks like these account for an insignificant fraction of the population and the economy.

Well, okay, Frank and his co-conspirators did manage to screw up the whole economy for a while, but that was mostly a matter of unintended side effects. The housing market isn't really all that large. US tech companies produce an order of magnitude more revenue than all the new-home builders put together, and since banks operate by taking a small cut of the cash that flows through them, they can never account for more than a small fraction of the economy (currently around 5% if I have my math right). And of course even at the height of the housing bubble, most of the people, most of the houses, and most of the loans were fair and honest; as far as I can tell, the foreclosure rate never exceeded 1% of the overall housing market.

So, bottom line, I think you should reconsider this statement and figure out why you would be so far wrong about such a fundamental fact.

. png

Re: What's the weather like on your planet?

[pakraticus.livejournal.com]

They want you to realize the labeled differences not the actual differences.

Take OTC drug cocktails. We have one cocktail for menstrual pain that's caffeine and acetaminophen. We have another cocktail for headaches that's caffeine and acetaminophen AT THE SAME AMOUNTS. And then we have caffeine pills, generic acetaminophen and a pill splitter for the same cost as the name brands. If people actually understood what was behind the first two products, they wouldn't buy either one.

Pharma companies *REALLY* don't want the public to know "It just has to be statistically better than a placebo," not "Well, it wasn't quite as effective as the drug the patent just expired on."

Electronics. Take something like digital cameras. The number they advertise, megapixels. What they don't want consumers to know is more megapixels for a given sensor size == more noise in the image.

Re: What's the weather like on your planet?

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

I can see that you don't understand the difference between accepting the fact that many customers don't understand science and actually preferring that customers don't understand science.

. png

Re: What's the weather like on your planet?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I don't know what planet you're from, but mine is inhabited by Homo sapiens, the species that got to the top of the food chain by being the most subtly deceitful creatures the planet has ever seen. So I have to disagree, from your initial premise to the last, about the idea that "90% of all businesses very much want customers to understand and appreciate what goes into their products."

"Appreciate" what they ask you to appreciate, I agree with. That is marketing. "Understand?" I doubt it. The entire point behind a business is to sell something, and to do so requires an asymmetrical relationship between the buyer and the seller: both must perceive they are getting a benefit out of the their mutual act of consensual commercial intercourse.

In the thirty years I've been working, I've worked for seven companies: there large, four small. Once was in a marketing department, once as an engineer for an advertising firm, the others were all software related. My experience has been that every one of those companies was interested in selling their products, and to do so they told a narrative about the quality and efficacy of their products that had, at times, a passing relationship with the truth. In no case were those companies actually interested it educating the consumer about what really went into their products, or how easy it was to produce them, or how huge the markup frequently was.

I don't think this is exceptionally immoral or deceitful, any more than breath mints or makeup are immoral or deceitful during a date. We go into such things with our eyes open. But the phrase "caveat emptor" lives on for a very good reason. Businesses have no reason to tell the truth, other than to avoid the embarrassment of being caught outright lying (and in our oh-so-postmodern world, being ashamed of lying is itself becoming old-fashioned), and in my experience, deception is as commonplace as paperwork.

Re: What's the weather like on your planet?

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

I suggest that the problem is in your interpretation, not in the facts.

. png