by Dinesh » Mon Feb 14, 2011 4:35 pm
a_k wrote:One widespread strategy to deal with this dilemma seems to be to replace the tedious task of acquiring knowledge with some magical explanations
I think there's an element of that. But I also think that people have increasingly been seduced by celebrities, personalities and the media, or even (gawd help us!) the internet. There is an increasing abrogation of any rational thinking or analysis, instead there's an acceptance of the "expert", or the celebrity, wholesale. However, people choose their "expert", indeed, their science, based on their politics. Those that apparently reject the conformist view of the way the world works based on science and mathematics will swallow the bizarre superstition of pyramids and aliens (what I call Deepak Chopra sh*t!) Those that accept the conformist view simply parrot the celebrities of the science world with no background thinking or reasonable analysis.
Today we get so much of our understanding of the world, of our accepted behaviour patterns and our social skills from the world of scriptwriters and science popularisers that the metaphor of TV has become the realism of accepted fact. My old Physics teacher from my A level days used to say that the definition of a lecturer was notes from the lecturer's notebook to a student's notebook without passing through the heads of either. Today, I think it's cliches and packaged factoids from the TV/film screen that's become part of our psyche without actually passing through our heads.
I think all these discussions about holographic TV and chemical phobias are a case in point. People warn you of the dangers of too much "sodium" in your food, while happily cooking with sodium carbonate (baking soda). People warn you of the effects of cholestorol, without actually knowing what it is. It's actually an alcohol with a very high molecular weight (C_27O_45OH).
I once tried to have a discussion on the epistemology of mathematics - was there such a thing? I couldn't get very far. People simply accepted that 2 + 2 = 4, despite my pointing out that 2 camels and 2 dishcloths didn't equal 4 of anything.
[quote="a_k"]One widespread strategy to deal with this dilemma seems to be to replace the tedious task of acquiring knowledge with some magical explanations[/quote]
I think there's an element of that. But I also think that people have increasingly been seduced by celebrities, personalities and the media, or even (gawd help us!) the internet. There is an increasing abrogation of any rational thinking or analysis, instead there's an acceptance of the "expert", or the celebrity, wholesale. However, people choose their "expert", indeed, their science, based on their politics. Those that apparently reject the conformist view of the way the world works based on science and mathematics will swallow the bizarre superstition of pyramids and aliens (what I call Deepak Chopra sh*t!) Those that accept the conformist view simply parrot the celebrities of the science world with no background thinking or reasonable analysis.
Today we get so much of our understanding of the world, of our accepted behaviour patterns and our social skills from the world of scriptwriters and science popularisers that the metaphor of TV has become the realism of accepted fact. My old Physics teacher from my A level days used to say that the definition of a lecturer was notes from the lecturer's notebook to a student's notebook without passing through the heads of either. Today, I think it's cliches and packaged factoids from the TV/film screen that's become part of our psyche without actually passing through our heads.
I think all these discussions about holographic TV and chemical phobias are a case in point. People warn you of the dangers of too much "sodium" in your food, while happily cooking with sodium carbonate (baking soda). People warn you of the effects of cholestorol, without actually knowing what it is. It's actually an alcohol with a very high molecular weight (C_27O_45OH).
I once tried to have a discussion on the epistemology of mathematics - was there such a thing? I couldn't get very far. People simply accepted that 2 + 2 = 4, despite my pointing out that 2 camels and 2 dishcloths didn't equal 4 of anything.