Antiscience is the elevation of ideology ahead of the knowledge of the real world gained from science--the views of church or political authorities, just because they are powerful.
That's a definition from Shawn Otto, author of "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America." Today Otto suggests ways to address antiscience.
How could the trend toward antiscience be rolled back? How do we get more Americans to respect scientific knowledge and findings, as they did in the past?
There are lots of solutions. The media embracing some sense of rationality would be a good start. Abandoning the he-said - she-said model and recognizing that false balance leads to false reporting, which leads to bogus legislation and a frozen democracy.
The media can do their job of speaking truth to power. That’s the age-old conflict and they have science on their side, they need to realize that and use it.
Then we need to get scientists out of the labs and into the public dialogue. Polls show most Americans can’t name a single living scientist. That’s a travesty and it’s got to change.
We have millions of scientists in America alone. But once the NSF was created after Sputnik, scientists didn’t have to be as large a part of the public dialogue in order to get research funding, and largely removed themselves from the political dialogue. I write about this in the book. That’s got to change.
America needs a plurality of voices to arrive at balanced policy decisions, and with the voices of scientists silent, America is skewing into unreason. Fortunately, the NSF has just recently, after Science Debate 2008, begun to recognize this problem and now for the first time has a public outreach component in their grant making. NASA does too, now.
Hopefully this will prompt universities--which currently have a lot of strong disincentives for scientists to spend time on public outreach--to begin to change their tenure systems to reward scientists who do that instead of punishing them.
People should buy my book and encourage others to. It and books like it should be required reading, I’m often told, in civics, political science, and high school and college science classes, because people need to understand what’s happening to America, and the precious relationship between science, democracy, power and freedom that is at risk.
We need science civics classes, I think. When you have people like the Heartland Institute preparing national K12 science curricula designed to fool students, teachers and administrators into believing that climate change is a scientific controversy when that’s simply not the case, factually--we have a major problem.
We need students to be given the tools of critical thinking so they can assess these forcefully articulated ideological claims, not be intimidated, and learn the difference between evidence-based arguments and political ones. It’s not always easy to realize when someone’s trying to con you or fool you or intimidate you. That’s why propaganda works, and that’s why vested interests turn to it to try to short circuit democracy and get their way.
But if you care about the future of the planet, the future of its economics and environment, and the future of your kids’ ability to compete in a science-driven global economy, you’ve got to arm yourself and them with the tools needed to recognize the difference between knowledge and opinion. It’s the difference between freedom and slavery.
Shawn Otto's blogs:
http://neorenaissance.org
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...