Name: Unscientific America
ISBN: 9780465013050

Unscientific America

Climate change, the energy crisis, nuclear proliferation—many of the most urgent problems of twenty-first century require scientific solutions. And yet Americans are paying less and less attention to scientists. For every five hours of cable news, less than a minute is devoted to science; 46 percent of Americans believe that God, not evolution, created life on earth; the number of newspapers with science sections has shrunk from ninety-five to thirty-three since 1989. The disconnect between the scientific community and American culture grows wider every day. In Unscientific America, journalist and best-selling author Chris Mooney and scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum explain how corporate interests, a weak education system, science-phobic politicians, and hyperspecialized scientists have created this dangerous state of affairs. They also propose a broad array of initiatives that could reverse the current trend and lead to the greater integration of science into our national discourse—before it is too late.

What Hacker News says

dwcApr 2011

Two books I've recently read are The Age of American Unreason by Jacoby [1] and Unscientific America by Mooney & Kirschenbaum [2]. Both are worth reading, but Jacoby gives a deeper and more thoughtful analysis and spends considerable time on historical roots and trends.

This topic is tied heavily to politics, and I hesitate to get into that here. I will say this: science is about exploring, like math is about exploring. Viewing science and math as pragmatic skills reduces them to engineering and accounting. Now there's nothing wrong with engineers and accountants and we desperately need and value their skills. But we also need scientists and research mathematicians who explore mysteries for the sake of discovery. There are a lot of subtle implications of that which are completely lost on people who think of science and math as purely functional, vocational pursuits. The benefits of science and math that have been capitalized on by engineers are spin-offs of people with curiosity exploring for exploration's sake. When exploration for its own sake is devalued, the engineers of the world find once fertile ground growing barren.

1. http://www.amazon.com/Age-American-Unreason-Susan-Jacoby/dp/...

2. http://www.amazon.com/Unscientific-America-Scientific-Illite...

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evgenDec 2010

Most scientists do work that's not at all related to what the public knows about and talk about their work in ways that no one else can understand.

Yeah, because no field has jargon and standard methods that require a small amount of prior knowledge to understand... We use a ton of confusing and sometimes overlapping jargon in the computer industry, simplify complex systems using metaphors that are not really correct (e.g. the internet is a series of tubes...), and will often give vague answers to people who are not in the industry. It is not because we have anything to hide, but because we do not have the time or energy to give someone an introductory course on how computers work just to answer a simple question. If you had the time to learn and the necessary educational background you could in fact learn when they are working on and understand what they are saying without too much effort. Most of the public is too busy, too lazy, or too stupid to do this.

As far as scientists being "chased" from the republican party, start with The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney, move on to Unscientific America by the same author, The Great Derangement by Matt Tiabbi, or Idiot America by Charles Pierce. Skim through Merchants of Doubt or Doubt is their Product to see some of the links to various corporate think tanks. The evidence is clear, maybe you should check some of it out.

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