Most Popular Posts
Search
-
Spider Star
The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
Read More. -
Praise for Star Dragon
"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin"Star Dragon is terrific fare, offering readers a fusion of hard science and grand adventure."
-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
-- Booklist starred review"Readers hungry for the thought-provoking extrapolation and rigorous technical detail of old-fashioned hard SF are sure to enjoy astronomer Brotherton's first novel."
-- Publishers Weekly"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM
Stupid Smart Person: Chris Mooney
August 4th, 2009
I reserve the label of “stupid smart person” for people who obviously have a clue, can function and succeed in society, but obviously do obviously dumb things with some consistency. Our chump today is Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War of Science, which I admired very much when I read it a few years ago.
So, Chris Mooney is an atheist who is pro-science and who has argued in favor of more aggressive framing of science issues (e.g., the way Republicans call bills relaxing pollution standards things like the Clean Water Act), and now writes a blog with Sheril Kirshenbaum at Discover.com called The Intersection. Those are all positive things in my book, so why do I think he’s been stupid?
Well, it’s a bit more hypocrisy than stupidity, for the most part, and just a general failure to make cogent arguments that have supporting evidence. He may be right in some cases, but he does a piss-poor job of convincing me. Let’s start a little ways back.
First, Mooney, the master of the framing argument, immediately proclaimed that upon its release the Ben Stein creationist propaganda piece EXPELLED! to be a great success. WTF? Even if it was, a pro-science guy wouldn’t admit this immediately, according to Mooney’s positions. Except he did. The movie failed to meet the producers expectations by a large factor, may not have made a profit at all, and certainly failed to impact the public consciousness in a significant way. But a creationist can point to Mooney and say it was a success when talking with reporters or followers. See the comments on that post.
Furthermore, Mooney has made a big point of the issue of compatibility between science and religion, a false one in my opinion, based on the notion that there are people who engage in both. Well, yeah. Since when has an individual believing in two different things at the same time been proof of logical compatibility? The answer is never. Lawrence Krauss is totally right on this one.
Then Mooney is all about not pissing off the religious folks, turning them off from science by pointing out that science doesn’t support, or flat out contradicts, religous beliefs. At the same time, he doesn’t mind pissing off potential allies by telling them to shut the fuck up and not to tell people this, even though it’s true.
So now, Mooney in collaboration with Sheril Kirshenbaum, has published a book called Unscientific American which points fingers at who has been derelict about the general problem of public illiteracy. Guess who? The Scientists, primarily. What fuckers. And I mean that. They’re the ones who bring the knowledge in the first place and fucking PUBLISH THEIR FINDINGS. But they apparently don’t dumb down their gigantimous jargon-filled vocabularies to talk directly to the little dumb people in the public masses who don’t read the scientific journals anyway. Except a lot of us fucking do, all the time, in all the myriad ways, from teaching classes, to TV shows like Cosmos and Nova, to science fiction novels, to anthologies like Diamonds in the Sky, programs like Launch Pad, blogs like this one and many others, to a dozen or two dozen channels on cable TV, to coffee table books like A Brief History of Time.
Or, well, if it’s a different venue, maybe the journalists. I’ll give them that cutbacks in science journalism are a real problem, but they seem fine relegating this issue way down the totem pole when they want to.
Or maybe it’s those damn “new atheists” who make the religious fundamentalists feel bad about being total ignoramuses about science.
Their solution is to train the science failures, the ones who can’t get academic jobs, in science education and communication. WTF???!!! To take those science journalism jobs that have vanished, as they explain? Or maybe to do the same things the National Science Foundation and NASA already pay scientists to do through educational or public outreach grants, to the tune of billions of dollars per year? Launch Pad and Diamonds in the Sky happened because of this funding, WHICH ALREADY EXISTS.
How about we blame the real culprits, the bad mother fuckers, who are really causing the problems as opposed to the people working hard to support scientific literacy?
We have political pundits like Rush Limbaugh spewing nonsense about science. We have big oil and big tobacco, pumping large sums of money to discredit science. And we have the deluded religious, telling each other that they can believe in the TV and computer, but not in evolution or the Big Bang. But they’re NOT the problem?
Chris Mooney, you’re farking deluded if you believe the crap you’re shoveling. You’re building bridges with this shit?
The majority of opinion of Unscientific American is that it’s a shallow and unconvincing book, and that I believe.
I respect Jason Rosenhouse’s reviews here and here, for starters, and you can find a lot more stuff like this. Mooney seems to be a serious sourpuss interested in book sales a lot more than he is in scientific literacy. He’s right, there’s a problem, but he seems to have totally fucked up figuring out why or what to do about. To the extent he may be right, he hasn’t made a shadow of a convincing case. He’s no scientist, that’s for sure, and neither is his collaborator, apparently, if this book is the evidence to judge them.
It’s a shame. We need someone like Mooney who has had some sales and can draw some attention, but not if he’s just going to spout unsupported opinion. Hell, I can do that better than him and for cheaper.
OK, I can fill this up with about twice as many links, but I’m going to sleep on it and head out to Rio tomorrow for the IAU Meeting there. We’ll have about 2000 astronomers talking science there, and it should be fun.
Related Posts
Related Posts
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
<
August 6th, 2009 at 7:42 am
Should be “War _On_ Science”, not “War _Of_ Science”.
August 6th, 2009 at 7:55 am
Of course, you’re right. Thanks!
August 6th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Good post. It is the sort of issue that causes ones blood pressure to rise, which is part of the problem. Science literacy is part of a larger culture war, one that tends to run on emotion rather than logic.
I think people with an affinity for science, and probably people in general, tend to give the human brain more credit than it’s due. Sure it has allowed us to create languages, pass our knowledge on to others, and develop sophisticated technology. But all that is happy accident.
The most complex and powerful parts of our brain evolved to tackle the most complex and difficult part of our environment; namely us. As a social species the most powerful and intractable part of our world is the network of social bonds that connect us to one another.
It is no wonder then, that more people read People or Us Weekly rather than Scientific American or New Scientist. Though we may look down upon gossip, it’s what our brain evolved to do. It is the currency of culture.
We can use our brains to uncover the secrets of the universe, but in the end we’re fixated on ourselves and each other. The icon of science is Einstein, hair frazzled and tongue sticking out, instead of “E=mc^2″ or some other more appropriate flag-bearer. It is the persona, not the idea, that interests most people.
It’s nice to know that the Earth moves around the Sun, or that water is composed of one atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen, but it’s not necessary to know it. But one had better know the rules of society and the relationships between its members, or be left friendless, foodless, and homeless.
Humans seem rational only in comparison to other animals. In the end most of us believe what we want to believe simply because we want to. The Scientific Method is a wonderful way of sorting truth from bullshit, but truth isn’t always what we really want. (One could reasonably argue that the truth is seldom what we want.)
We are evolved to be cultural beings; A simple truth often ironically overlooked by those most ardent supporters of evolution. And so they struggle as they fight not just a culture war, but a fight against basic biology as well. And so they lose.
The way to win the war on science is to stop fighting it. When creationists attack evolution don’t attack back. Stand firm, don’t balk at stating truths, but don’t let them make you angry. Science doesn’t need a war fought on it’s behalf, it needs an ad campaign.
Religion is embraced on the basis of emotion, not reason. Science won’t overthrow it by making reasoned arguments, but it can displace it by making emotional appeals. The key is a proactive and positive approach. There is more grandeur, beauty, and wonder to be beheld in science than in a thousand unseen miracles.
I think the ad campaign is well underway. But religion has a big head start, and it pioneered the arts of indoctrination and social manipulation long ago. The folks on Madison Avenue know that you have to give people a reason to want it. Truth is almost irrelevant.
We could take a lesson from Mythbusters, which while not exactly science does manage create excitement about the process of: 1) Develop theory. 2) Test theory with experiment. 3) Ponder results. 4) Repeat as necessary.
Or we could learn from John Stuart who makes a daily art of telling unpleasant truths by making the process entertaining. And we should admit that, for many people at least, the idea that man evolved from apes is an unpleasant truth. Or the fact that everyone will die eventually.
Our public education system doesn’t foster a desire to learn. After twelve years of forced learning it’s no wonder most people aren’t much interested in learning. And it doesn’t teach people how to think critically and ask questions. In school a satisfactory performance gets you decent grades. Later on it gets you a regular paycheck. There’s little external incentive to expand your horizons.
Every society develops a way to teach the next generation how to function within that society, but from a society’s point of view, critical thinking and asking questions is dangerous. A society survives by making the next generation able to function, not by making it able to overthrow that society.
Cultural inertia makes us much more likely to see a woman as president much sooner than we’ll see an atheist as president, but there’s been a slow steady shift in that direction for decades. Technology increasingly permeates everything we do, bringing science along with it, and as future generations grow more comfortable with technology they also become more comfortable with the science that goes with it.
The seeming rise of Christianity is just the rumblings of an increasingly vocal minority as they actually grow fewer and more fragmented. Those identifying themselves as Atheist, Agnostic, or Unaffiliated have doubled since 1990, from 8% to 16%, while Christians have dropped from 86% to 76% of the population.
It is doubtful that there will ever be a society in which each and every person managed to either ignore or accept the reality of their own. As long as there are people, there will always be those who believe in the afterlife, or that life here now has some transcendent and eternal meaning, and so there will always be something akin to religion. And so there will always be an accommodation between science and religion. Science adapts faster than religion, and this culture war is the social expression of the conflict between the two.
August 6th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Articulate and interesting comments, Soph. I let myself get too upset about this stuff sometimes, but it feels good to rant at times, also. I just find Mooney’s ideas unsupported and contradictory to his stated intent a lot of the time.
I’ve been saying for a while now that people are hardwired to learn through story. Turn anything into a story and they’ll pay attention. Mooney seems to think it’s a shame that no one in the public knows the names of any scientists working today — well, duh! Who is out there telling their stories? We need movies, documentaries, and even science fiction to do this better.
August 17th, 2009 at 4:33 am
[...] the atheists (who are not religious but without religion) “attacking” the religious. Mooney, you’re framing things to be a divider, not the uniter you claim to be. Shades of [...]