Nkrumah Steward on voting and education.

[theweaselking]

1 in 5 Americans believe Sun revolves around the Earth

A light bulb appears over my head.

I finally get it.

For the democratic process to run properly it necessitates the voter to have some knowledge of what he is voting on.

Comments

[spartonian.livejournal.com]

I'm going to hide in the corner and cry now....

[opaqueplanet.livejournal.com]

For the democratic process to run properly it necessitates the voter to have some knowledge of what he is voting on.
This is why Plato was a proponent of the aristocracy (in its true meaning, "rule by the best") rather than democracy. Too many people are just too stupid to allow them to help decide important matters.

[divinevirus.livejournal.com]

This is the stuff of nightmares.
Not knowing what radiation is? GAH! I am horrified. Truely horrified. I am at a loss for further words.

[eididdy.livejournal.com]

This comes as a postworthy surprise to you? In a country with around 300 million people, around 75% of which identify as some sect of Christian, it seems logical to deduce that some of them still believe the old Christian dogma about the Sun rotating around the Earth.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

No, but it's a quote from an article I find funny.

[post-ecdysis.livejournal.com]

Undoubtedly, around 3.8 of the other 5 Americans believes that the Sun is the center of the solar system.

We live in a relativistic universe, and the sensibility of whether you place the center of your frame of reference in the Sun or at some point on the Earth (or somewhere else entirely, like the galactic core or the location of the Big Bang) is largely dependent on the application for which you are untilizing that spatial frame. I am not a planetologist, and my appreciation of the solar system rarely goes beyond seeing Venus or Mars in the night sky. This being the case, to be frank, I am a very consistent consumer of the geocentric model myself, and it is always surprising that this view is regarded as a "heresy" against science simply because a relatively narrow set of mathematical calculations are eased by heliocentrism.

For the democratic process to run properly, it also necessitates the entire electorate to be able to communicate at some level with one another even though they all hold vastly divergent viewpoints. For one bloc to believe another beneath it, whether it is the spiritually elect or the intellectually elite, is to damage a process that is intended to serve *all* of the people.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"And yet it moves."

Regardless of the fact that you can do a model with a fixed earth and represent the motion of the other planets and the sun mathematically, relative to the earth, that doesn't change that the forces required to make it happen only make sense if the earth is moving.

And so, while you *can* represent the earth as fixed, it's not only not useful in any scientific sense when you're discussing planetary mechanics, it's counterfactual, too.

The electoral equivalent would be making all your voting decisions based on the candidate's responses to the invasion of Iraq, *given that* Saddam Hussein had nukes and was working with Al Qaeda. You've started from a patently false starting point, and while you *can* build a model based on your fallacious starting point, it's not a useful model for anything you want to do with it.

[post-ecdysis.livejournal.com]

Think for a moment about how far away you are from the location where you were born. If someone were celebrating their half-birthday, would you insist that that distance was on the order of two hundred million miles, or do you find that strict heliocentrism conceals the detail of whether someone lives near their "home town"?

As I suggested in my original comment, for planetological calculations, a sun-centered model is utterly reasonable. And I believe we are in agreement that those who dispute the ease of this model for this use are delusional (and I can only assume that spending your day calculating non-rational para-hypocycloids is its own punishment). But an overwhelming majority of Americans are not planetologists and never have to represent planetary motion using any model whatsoever. Our concerns are entirely terrestrial, and our strategies for conceptualizing these concerns is similarly geocentric. So, how many of these 20% of Americans would go on to agree that Copernicus was a properly convicted agent of Satan, and how many subscribe to a much more applicable model but still respect that an esoteric field of science requires a different discipline? I suspect that the former percentage is still disappointingly large, but not election-swaying large.

From my perspective, an equivalent would be if someone talked up all of the mouth-breathers who believe that there are sixteen ounces in a pound despite the well-documented evidence that jewelers use the Troy system in which there are twelve ounces in a pound. Avoirdupois is not a "false starting point" unless you are trying to use it to weigh precious stones, and creating a divisiveness between people who are aware and sensitive to the art of gemcrafting from those who are not is an unnecessary breach of the peace.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

> If someone were celebrating their half-birthday, would you insist that that
> distance was on the order of two hundred million miles, or do you find that
> strict heliocentrism conceals the detail of whether someone lives near
> their "home town"?

Ohhh, I call strawman argument!

Recognizing the fact that the earth revolves around the sun does not mean that one cannot assume that the question "How far are you from where you were born?" is asked in the unspoken context of "on earth, which is our current point of reference for commonly human-travellable distances, we being non-space-faring humans".

Attempting to associate an acceptance of a fact with an absolute insistence on ignoring other frames of reference--which one may still be capable of using, even if they know that said frames are based on convenient if incorrect assumptions--is specious at best.

> So, how many of these 20% of Americans would go on to agree that Copernicus
> was a properly convicted agent of Satan, and how many subscribe to a much
> more applicable model but still respect that an esoteric field of science
> requires a different discipline?

Hang on, are you presenting the concept that the earth revolves around the sun as an entire discipline?

Based on the idea that somehow, when you're discussing the solar system as a whole, your concerns are somehow still "entirely terrestrial"--despite the fact that you've gotten your conceptualizing ass out of the earthbound armchair, and are out tripping amongst the stars for the purposes of that discussion, and may reasonably be assumed to have dropped the "entirely terrestrial" schtick?

Just checking, here.

> I suspect that the former percentage is still disappointingly large, but
> not election-swaying large.

(I have the vague impression that this is when I'm supposed to say "Florida.")

[post-ecdysis.livejournal.com]

Let me preface my thoughts by claiming icon love.

We have different assumptions here. You seem to believe that the belief that the sun revolves around the earth precludes the converse; specifically, that 20% of Americans fundimentally reject the Copernican/Keplerian model. I argue that the two statements are relativistically equivalent and that I (and certainly some other people and perhaps many many other people) consciously believe both and draw conclusions based on either as is applicable.

We're centering our argument on second-hand knowledge of a poll whose methodology is unknown to us; if it was one of those idiot "How well do you know science" quizzes and the question was "The sun revolves around the earth: true or false?", then you are far too alarmed by the findings. On the other hand, if the question was "Do you categorically reject the belief that the earth is not the center of the universe?", then I am not alarmed enough. Without more evidence, we don't know which is true.

Hang on, are you presenting the concept that the earth revolves around the sun as an entire discipline?

I suggest that the heliocentric model is critical for advancement in the fields of aerospace engineering and astronomy (or more specifically planetology; indeed, people who look beyond our solar system would be commiting the same error if they thought that the sun was the center of the galaxy or our local group or the universe). Perhaps I do these fields a discourtesy by calling them "esoteric", but I still don't see any penalty in the rest of us understanding Kepler's work but remaining essentially "agnostic" to it, as it has no impact in our life beyond looking in the night sky and saying "Gee, Mars sure looks big tonight. I wonder when that will happen again?"

[torrain.livejournal.com]

*grins* G'bless the Heterodyne Boys, anyway. The science experiment with Lucretia and Barry--yeesh, sparks. :)

> We have different assumptions here. You seem to believe that the belief
> that the sun revolves around the earth precludes the converse;
> specifically, that 20% of Americans fundimentally reject the
> Copernican/Keplerian model.

I am of the opinion that accepting as truth the fact that the sun revolves around the earth does preclude accepting the converse as fact, yes.

> I argue that the two statements are relativistically equivalent and that I
> (and certainly some other people and perhaps many many other people)
> consciously believe both and draw conclusions based on either as is
> applicable.

I submit that you can operate with either a heliocentric or a terracentric viewpoint (witness Jo Blow saying "fifty miles" rather than "two hundred million and fifty miles" if you ask him how far he is from where he was born six months after his birthday).

I further submit that the ability to operate under the assumption that the earth is a fixed reference point *does not mean* that you have or haven't accepted as fact that the earth revolves around the sun.

Being able to make an assumption that one context or the other applies (and we haven't even discussed the univercentric viewpoint, assuming the center of the universe could be determined) is not an indicator of whether or not the fact that the earth revolves around the sun is believed.

And yes, this is the sort of thing that generally gets glossed over in casual conversation; people may say "I'm thirty miles from the place where I was born" or "All American citizens can vote", and it doesn't reveal ignorance or non-acceptance of facts one way or the other. What *does* do so is responses to the questions "Does the sun revolve around the earth, or does the earth revolve around the sun?" or "Can three-year-old American citizens vote in state and federal elections?"

Will you (generic you) have a noticeably harder life if you're ignorant of that particular fact? Probably not. Are you ignorant of a pretty well-established fact, one that North American public education covers by the time you're twelves (if you don't pick up a book and find out for yourself before then)? Yes. Is it an indicator of ignorance in other areas? Possibly.

[itlandm.livejournal.com]

This might be one reason why so many conservatives quietly think it was a bad idea to give voting rights to homeless and welfare recipients. But I am not sure how much difference it makes. Only a small minority have anywhere like a healthy mind, no matter how you look at it. Over time even most successful people know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.

[culfinriel.livejournal.com]

This would be funny if it weren't sad.