The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [182]
• A separate series on fundamental misunderstandings and mistakes made by famous scientists, national leaders and religious figures.
• Regular exposes of pernicious pseudoscience, and audience-participation ‘how-to’ programmes: how to bend spoons, read minds, appear to foretell the future, perform psychic surgery, do cold reads, and press the TV viewers’ personal buttons. How we’re bamboozled: learn by doing.
• A state-of-the-art computer graphics facility to prepare in advance scientific visuals for a wide range of news contingencies.
• A set of inexpensive televised debates, each perhaps an hour long, with a computer graphics budget for each side provided by the producers, rigorous standards of evidence required by the moderator, and the widest range of topics broached. They could address issues where the scientific evidence is overwhelming, as on the matter of the shape of the Earth; controversial matters where the answer is less clear, such as the survival of one’s personality after death, or abortion, or animal rights, or genetic engineering; or any of the presumptive pseudosciences mentioned in this book.
There is a pressing national need for more public knowledge of science. Television cannot provide it all by itself. But if we want to make short-term improvements in the understanding of science, television is the place to start.
23
Maxwell and The Nerds
Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?
Ronald Reagan,
campaign speech, 1980
There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.
George Washington,
address to Congress, 8 January 1790
Stereotypes abound. Ethnic groups are stereotyped, the citizens of other nations and religions are stereotyped, the genders and sexual preferences are stereotyped, people born in various times of the year are stereotyped (Sun-sign astrology), and occupations are stereotyped. The most generous interpretation ascribes it to a kind of intellectual laziness: instead of judging people on their individual merits and deficits, we concentrate on one or two bits of information about them, and then place them in a small number of previously constructed pigeonholes.
This saves the trouble of thinking, at the price in many cases of committing a profound injustice. It also shields the stereotyper from contact with the enormous variety of people, the multiplicity of ways of being human. Even if stereotyping were valid on average, it is bound to fail in many individual cases: human variation runs to bell-type curves. There’s an average value of any quality, and smaller numbers of people running off in both extremes.
Some stereotyping is the result of not controlling the variables, of forgetting what other factors might be in play. For example, it used to be that there were almost no women in science. Many male scientists were vehement: this proved that women lacked the ability to do science. Temperamentally, it didn’t fit them, it was too difficult, it required a kind of intelligence that women don’t have, they’re too emotional to be objective, can you think of any great women theoretical physicists?... and so on. Since then the barriers have come tumbling down. Today women populate most of the subdisciplines of science. In my own fields of astronomy and planetary studies, women have recently burst upon the scene, making discovery after discovery, and providing a desperately needed breath of fresh air.
So what data were they missing, all those famous male scientists of the 1950s and 1960s and earlier who had pronounced so authoritatively on the intellectual deficiencies of women? Plainly, society was preventing women from entering science, and then criticizing them for it, confusing cause and effect:
You want to be an astronomer, young woman? Sorry.
Why can’t you? Because you’re unsuited.
How do we know you’re unsuited?