WOWCWHABPC: Sherri Shepherd, The Stupidity, It Burns!

[elfs]

Does anyone remember Roman Hruska^[?]? He was a U.S. Senator from Nebraska. He became famous for an incident on the floor of the U.S. Senate in which he was defending the nomination of Harold Carswell to the Supreme Court. Responding to the criticism that Carswell was mediocre as a judge, Hruska responded

So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they? We can't have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters and stuff like that there.

Unfortunately for Americans, Hruska's stance has become pretty much the usual fare of modern media: for every thinking person who appears on the TV screen, she must be balanced by someone's who's brain was last seen on a milk carton.

The latest example of stunning stupidity comes from Whoopie Goldberg's show, The View, and her co-host Sherri Shepherd. In an exchange between herself, Goldberg, and Barbara Walters, Shepherd said she doesn't know if the world is round or flat:

GOLDBERG: Is the world flat?

SHEPHERD: Is the world flat? (laughter)

GOLDBERG: Yes.

SHEPHERD: ... I Don't know.

GOLDBERG: What do you think?

SHEPHERD: I-- I never thought about it, Whoopi. Is the world flat? I never thought about it.

WALTERS: You've never thought about whether the world was round or flat?

SHEPHERD: I tell you what I've thought about. How I'm going to feed my child--

While this story has been widely reported, what has not been reported is Shepherd's flat-out admission earlier in the same show that she "doesn't believe in evolution, period." In that case, if she ever catches a Staph infection^[?], she should be happy with perfectly old-school penicillin, right?

You have to love her appeal to "screw knowledge, I have to take care of the children. Whoopie, think of the chilllllldrrrenn!!"

Sigh. Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

[Hat tips to Huffington Post (they've got it on video!), Boing Boing, The Daily Background, and of course PZ Myers.]

Comments

[solarbird]

At the end of that exchange: "If my son asked me if the world was flat, I guess I'd go and look that up."

[erisiansaint]

How does a woman, in this day and age, not know whether the earth is flat or round? (I am, mind you, assuming that she was born and raised in the US.) And why didn't she have the good grace to be EMBARRASSED about it? Since when is ignorance something to be proud of?

[(Anonymous)]

And since when is ignorance useful when raising a kid?

[tamino.livejournal.com]

hm. I guess I have a different take on that. I'm wary of reciting things I've read in books or things I've been taught and acting as if they're unassailably true. If someone asked me if the world was flat I'd probably feel a bit defensive. I'd realize that they expected me to say "no, of course it's not flat", but I would choke on those words because I would be thinking, in the back of my mind, "what supporting evidence can I provide for that, that I've witnessed, firsthand?"

I would probably say that *from what I know* it is not, and that various experiences I've had (the fact that there *is* a horizon, for instance, and the fact that when I fly to England I go over Canada and Greenland) I think it seems overwhelmingly likely that it is not flat. I've seen pictures of the earth from space, taken by people who have no reason to lie to me. I would be comfortable saying that for all practical purposes it's safe to assume it's not flat. But being asked that, point-blank, would put me in a position where I might really feel uncomfortable reciting the pat, dogmatic answer "no. the world is a globe." I hesitate to make this comparison, but I think giving that answer to that question would make me feel like I was "just as bad" as the people who ascribe unassailable truth to religious "facts".

[xengar.livejournal.com]

Yes, but you would be hesitating to answer from a standpoint of knowledge, not one of ignorance. If pressed, you could give the whole statement you just did here, and while the questioner might disagree with you the lingering impression would be "gee, there's someone who thinks about stuff, I wonder what his opinion on ______ is?" As opposed to "I have never thought about it, and even now that you're asking me I won't think about it until it directly impacts my interests," which makes me wonder why I would care what she had to say on any topic. Ignorance is one thing, it can easily be corrected with a book (or the internet) and time. Not caring that one is ignorant, however, is an entirely different matter, and a much more serious one.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's easy.

On a clear night, measure the angle from the horizon that the pole star is visible at. Then, travel several hundred miles north or south. Measure the angle again.

This is evidence that you're standing on a curved surface, and it's how people used to measure latitude, before they had GPS. If you were standing on a flat surface, the angle would be the same everywhere.

[blaisepascal]

The angle wouldn't be the same everywhere if the pole star were a finite distance above the flat surface.

If fact, with two readings, you could compute the distance from the (assumed) flat plane and the pole star. You would need a third reading to see that the results are inconsistent with a flat earth.

Come to think of it, Eratosthenes's famous measurement of the circumference of the Earth used only two solar angle readings, so he must have also worked off of the preconception that the world was round.

But then, with visibly watching sails go over the horizon, seeing the outline of the Earth during lunar eclipses, and a decent grasp of geometry, those Greeks didn't need to take three readings to prove the Earth was round.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

The angle wouldn't be the same everywhere if the pole star were a finite distance above the flat surface.

Ah, but the angle only ever changes if you travel north-south, and not at all if you travel due east-west.

Moreover, coming to the conclusion that the curved shadow on the moon during lunar eclipses is in fact the shadow of the earth, is a pretty big leap intellectually. Especially since it had been well known for a million years previously, that it was obviously the work of some kind of god or spirit or something.

[gromm.livejournal.com]

You've never thought about whether the world was round or flat?

That sentence contains too much extraneous information. It could well end with "You've never thought?"

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the scene in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories in which Holmes reproaches Watson for informing him that the Earth moves about the Sun, thereby cluttering Holmes' mind with a useless fact that takes up memory that could be devoted to useful ones.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

This assumes, of course, that long-term memory will keep that fact as relevant to one's existence, and that memory itself is a finite resource outside of its temporal framework.

Holmes always was something of a git.

The biggest problem I have with Shepherds "senior moment," as she's now calling it, is that she makes the case that such knowledge is not relevant. But I don't understand how someone can believe she's an informed citizen capable of making important choices about her child's future, when the future makes very heavy demands on practical scientific knowledge she denies needing. You can't respond rationally to nutrition advice, energy proposals, automotive efficiency claims, and consumer safety scares if you don't understand the basic science behind them.