As a college instructor it saddens me to see that people have become reliant on intellectual crutches. I had an opportunity to go around my physics classroom and give a simple problem to the students that required them to do things like divide by 100. These were all "STEM" majors. Many either couldn't or wouldn't do it without a calculator, and people had no "feel" for what the answer should be.
Most of the linked article seems spot on to me.
Given the ambiguity of their predictions and margins of error that encompass possibilities a blind dart throwing monkey could hit I'd say climate scientists have substantiated or practically made the don't know what they're talking about the claim.
Baaaahhh, baaaahhh, CO2 is the current reason bad weather is happening, well not this weather but CO2 has loaded the dice for weather like this but this is just weather, now I are intellectual Let's commit to the use of current alternative power technology because it's too late for other innovations and the future of our chidren or maybe their children or possibly their children and if not their children then definitely probably their children depends on ensuring CO2 levels don't reach a point above uhhh, ugh , well above some amount.
Given that 95% of the climate "scientists" models are overestimating current temperatures, it seems to indicate that the US public expects results.
Of course, with warmers out in force making absurd claims of a pending climate apocalypse and the "scientists" not only not correcting but also tacitly supporting this unscientific farce, the US public may also be concerned that the climate "scientists" have become a little too biased.
Edit:
I read your stupid article. So I have this straight.. ALTHOUGH it is our public schools that are falling behind, it is because of Japan's lack of religious schools that they do not have the problems we have???
What a crock of CRAP. You want to find the most successful schools in the US??? They are HOME SCHOOLS. That is right MORON. The homeschools performance puts the average homeschooler in the top 87th percentile, while the public schools are at the 50th percentile.
This is the HEIGHT of liberal idiocy in the US. You idiots have taken over control of the schools at both the college and primary levels and then you idiots have the audacity to blame the poor performance on conservatives. That is not to say they did any better of a job, because they did not. I am, however, stating that this liberal idiocy bias that have them spoon-feeding opinion to college students instead of allowing them to think on their own and GOD FORBID say something politically incorrect has been causing this very problem that this idiot liberal can't see past their own ideology to recognize.
STUPIDITY!!!
ITs is the same crap from the conservatives too. "The problems with schools is they are not taught God" as if that has anything to do with it. Instead of actually educating students on HOW TO THINK, both sides want to teach them what to think and wonder why we have a problem.
Heck, most people are too stupid to even research the problem and recognize that it is being exagerrated. What do I mean? SImpkly put, we compare high school students going to college. In most countries a far smaller percent of students go to college. Many countries place a majority of their students into trade schools prior becoming seniors in high school. So we compare our students from the 30th percentile and up to their from the 60th pecentile and up. Hardly a reasonable comparison.
Nonetheless, we still have a noticable problem and instead of dealing with the ACTUAL problem, the cons and libs fight about religion in school.
Well, America won't be the only Idiocracy in history though it will likely be the most influential. Intelligence has been declining since the invention of civilization, language and the codification of knowledge ( books ). This is because these inventions allow you to benefit from the intelligence of others, even Newton said that he stood on the shoulders of giants indicating it was only due to the works of those before him that allowed him to progress as far as he did. The average man of ancient Greece was probably far sharper than his contemporary counterparts and evidence suggests modern man has dropped 14 IQ points since the Victorian Era. With mobile communications, the decline in intelligence has become startling, you can see kids posting their homework and even their exam questions online on sites such as Yahoo Answers. The trend is towards the hive intelligence where the complexities move into the network and as we have seen in nature, the hive mind results in individual intelligence dropping as it's no longer a survival advantage.
We don't have to look at the Global Warming issues to see the decrease in intelligence.
As an outsider I don't know if I should comment, but just by reading some of the questions and answers here I am appalled by the ignorance of young Americans, my 11yr old Filipino step son can read and write english better than most of them, American youth seem to be ruled by facebook and youtube.
I dont know but I get the feeling that free and critical thinking is frowned upon, original thought is definitely not encouraged.
Yes, certainly, but there is more to than that. YA, where cranky geezers can finally rant at will -like they could not in the schol classes they barely passed decades ago- is far from representative of people generally. Most of what you here from the alarmed and steadfastly anti-science crowd here is echoed from the fossil fuel industry think tank front disinformation campaign of the 1990s, that was orchestrated by intelligent propagandists. Much more common in the general public, than the endless repetition of stock lies seen here, is confusion. Moreover, although the costs of action are tiny compared to the costs of INaction, the former are much more immediate and tangible than the latter, and are both readily susceptible to being distorted (especially if the overall education system suffers from dumbing-down -as it does). Politicians often pander to the distortions and the confusion and anxieties because this wins votes from some people prone to mistrust any new government policy initiative, and more crucially, because sizable campaign donations are available in response. All these factors inter-relate, and while speaking out against anti-intellectualism is important it remains but one valuable tool of many.
There has certainly been a change in my lifetime. My father was the only one of nine children – and in family history - from a West Virginia farm that been in the family since before the American Revolution to go to college – and then graduate school in engineering (he put himself through school driving a beer truck – how cool is that).
As a kid, I used to spend half of every summer on the farm, My grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and various Hardy County rednecks never preached that I should find their God or the value of farm labor – but they never stopped telling me what they didn’t have – an education. I grew up in a southern factory town where even the thugs and bikers had high school diplomas.
That world where education was valued is long gone. Now, even colleges and universities downplay the knowledge part of their mission. A friend of mine who teaches junior high school had another teacher (not a student) ask him what war Abraham Lincoln was associated with. I honestly do not remember a time in my life when I didn’t know the answer to that (but, then, I did grow up in the South where people were still ticked-off about that whole War Between the States Thing).
From the article: If you have not read any of Susan Jacoby’s stuff, you might like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Freethinkers-Ameri...
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Zippi62 –
>> Makes sense. They're all at the NAS and are teaching theories of teaching theories of how to teach a theory.<<
The NAS is not a teaching institution.
>>LOL<< Yeah. We laughing too – because you don’t know what the NAS is or what a scientific theory is – and you’re too stupid to know that you don’t know.
Davie Bwoi: "Not as dumb as the warmists had hoped "
Actually, not nearly as smart as most of us would like.
I rather do like - make that respect, Asimov's, "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." quote. Thank you zippi for pointing it out.
Raisin Caine: "LOL. You being a climate "scientist" just drive home my point of how biased your field has become"
Ummm, ummm, yeah. Just like biologists are biased in favor of evolution. Time to apply for a new brain, 'cause you sure got gypped on this one.
It's quite cool in my area today.
Makes sense. They're all at the NAS and are teaching theories of teaching theories of how to teach a theory.
From your link :
" ... Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, describes how the vast underlying foundations of anti-elite, anti-reason and anti-science has been infused into America’s political and social fabric. Famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov made once said: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." ... "
1964? LOL!
Okay, this article appeared on my FB page today.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201407/anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-america
Interesting article.
Does it really define the anti-global warming community?
Consider the number of times that universities have been denigrated as purveyors of liberalism.
And the number of times that people with degrees in climatology have been castigated.
And the number of times that we've seen "It doesn't seem hotter to me".
Is the AGW crowd a preview of what American society will become in the future?
I think the article is spot on.
And thanks to this cult of ignorance, we should not be surprised if China rules the world by the middle of this century.
And, if not China, some nation where knowledge is actually valued.
America has always been dumber than the rest of the world
Not as dumb as the warmists had hoped
Basically, yes it does.
America is also home to NASA
