Vicki Cobb, a writer of science books for children, ponders the question that puzzles so many of us at this time:
Why do so many people refuse to believe proven facts?
Why do so many prefer to believe myths instead of facts?
As Groucho Marx used to say, “Who are you gonna believe? Me or your own lying eyes?”
She begins:
Recent resistance by some people who refuse to believe the science that predicts the course of covid 19 through a population, reminded me of a post I wrote several years ago that bears revisiting.
When Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in his telescope, he couldn’t wait to share it with the world. So, in 1610 he hurriedly rushed The Starry Messenger, the story of his discovery, into print. Now in those days they didn’t have talk shows. So, to promote his book, Galileo took his telescope to dinner parties and invited the guests to see Jupiter’s moons for themselves. Many refused to look claiming that the telescope was an instrument of the devil. They accused Galileo of trying to trick them, painting the moons of Jupiter on the end of the telescope. Galileo’s response was that if that were the case they would see the moons no matter where they looked when actually they could see them only if they looked where he told them to look. But the main objection was that there was nothing in the Bible about this phenomenon. Galileo’s famous response: “The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.”
Galileo is considered the father of modern science, now a huge body of knowledge that has been accumulated incrementally by thousands of people. Each tiny bit of information can be challenged by asking, “How do you know?” And each contributing scientist can answer as Galileo did to the dinner party guests, “This is what I did. If you do what I did, then you’ll know what I know.” In other words, scientific information is verifiable, replicable human experience. Science has grown exponentially since Galileo. It is a body of knowledge built on an enormous quantity of data. And its power shows up in technology. The principles that are used to make a light go on were learned in the same meticulous way we’ve come to understand how the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen over the past 100 years leading to ominous climate change or that Darwin was right, and living species are interconnected “islands in a sea of death.”
Yet there are many who cherry pick science—only believing its findings when they agree with them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Fundamentally Irrational Belief Systems (FIBS)
yup
FIBs is a term of Wisconsin origin describing the ILL Annoy tourists that flood the state in the summer time. It has since been appropriated by Missourians to describe said ILL Annoyens that pour into the Show Me State in the summer.
Yeah, but what does the acronym stand for when talking about us Ill Annoyen tourists.
First the ILL Annoy comes from a life long resident of Illinois, right retiredbutmissthekids.
Anyway, to answer your question f$#@#$g Illinois bastards. I learned it from my brother when he lived in Milwaukee back in the 80s.
Not spoiling for a fight, Duane. Every state has its “ugly Americans,” Ill-Annoy included. I have a son who lives in a very rural state that depends on its tourist industry for a lot of revenue. It definitely is a love/hate relationship, love the money, hate those dang outsiders. We have several generations connections with the state, both summer and year-round, so we straddle the divide a bit.
My humor sometimes takes a dark turn. Living just west of Illinois most of my life, I’m quite familiar with Southern IL. Have quite a number of friends who live and/or work, have businesses there. You are correct that no state has a monopoly on annoying folk, well except maybe California and NYC!
Oops, there I go again with the malhumor.
Take care, I enjoy your posts!
When I was in college, i worked as a parking lot attendant at Tommy Bartlett’s water show in Wisconsin Dells and can definitely relate to that.
Beautiful area, the Dells!
This is the modern GOP/Trumpian party: climate change is a hoax, the earth is only 10,000 years old, evolution is just a “theory,” a guess, the corona virus is exaggerated and Alex Jones is a prophet…………………in far right wing world. The stupidity, ignorance and troglodytism of the right wing is a threat to the welfare and survival of this country.
Let’s not forget that Trump was chosen by God to serve the nation. They even use Bible passages to back this claim.
Religion has historically been at odds with science. Those in the pews of evangelical and Catholic churches feel no responsibility to dissuade their leaders from making the US the theocracy that Jefferson condemned.
And the Supreme Court is on the verge of a decision that will force all states to fund the antediluvian backward narrow-minded indoctrinating “schools” of the far-right.
Trump wouldn’t have been elected without the churches.
yes, a key in their overall strategy
I don’t believe the story about Galileo and the dinner parties.😀
Galilean Mythology
Galileo went to dinner
With his telescope in tow
People thought he was a sinner
Cuz he showed them “what I know”
People said ” he is an artist
Painting moons on telescope”
Galileo tried his hardest
But he couldn’t move the Pope
Galilean Mythology 2
Galileo climbed a tower
Leaning in the Pisa town
Climbed it in a thunder shower
Just to toss some objects down
Galileo dropped a feather
And a heavy bowling ball
Just to fathom really whether
Both exactly equal fall
Boy, I wish I could go bowling about now. And, I’m a crappy bowler.
Candlepins ala New England. Plus, greasy food and beer.
Yikes, it’s not even noon. That’s what social distancing can do to a person.
BTW nice poem.
Love these, SomeDAM!
Who you gonna believe? Me? Or Galileo’s layin’ eyes?
Galilayin’ Reality
Galileo went to party
Hoping to attract some chicks
By convincing “He’s a smarty”
With his science bag of tricks
Galilayin’ Reality 2
Galileo used the line
“Earth is orbitting the sun”
Man, it worked, most every time
On the chicks ,for nightly fun
Most of what people “know” was not explicitly learned. It was acquired, as by osmosis, from the general culture in which they were raised. This has to do, in part, with how the mind operates. Much of its acquisition of information about the world takes place automatically, below the level of conscious awareness and reflection. That which is acquired in such a way tends to very, very sticky. It becomes part of the underlying fundamental belief structure of the individual, and when such an unconscious assumption is disconfirmed, the disconfirmation is unsettling in the extreme. It’s experienced, by the individual, as an attack on the foundations of his or her understanding of the world. So, this tendency is baked in.
And, of course, as we live our lives more and more online, people tend to inhabit their separate online Galapagos Islands, where their notions about the world are confirmed. Conservatives visit conservative websites where they read stories about immigrants committing crime and that the lion’s share of taxes are paid by the wealthy. Liberals visit liberal websites where they read that immigrants have, by far, the lowest crime rates and that the wealthy pay lower tax rates than middle-income people do. Continual confirmation.
The most significant, and hardest, kind of learning is unlearning. As I put it in a book I wrote a few years ago, “All real learning is unlearning. You have to step through the wardrobe or fall down the rabbit hole into a place beyond your interpellations, beyond the collective fantasies that go by the name of common sense. Real learning requires a period of estrangement from the familiar. You return to find the ordinary transmuted and wondrous. You see it anew, as on the first day of creation, as though for the first time.”
And that’s what the best teaching does. It causes students to see it anew. The best teaching is usual unteaching what people think they know but don’t.
As Isaac Asimov once put it, the most exciting moments in science are not when people find themselves saying, “Eureka,” but when they find themselves saying, “That’s funny.” (“funny” as in “weird,” “unexpected”)
An important goal for teachers: try to unteach something today
and what I began to see as a gift was that the more I tried to open students to new thought, the more I, as their teacher, had personal epiphanies
yes!!!!
Ditto!
Galileo was also convicted of “heresy” by the Catholic Church for publicly sharing his science-based discoveries.
“Galileo’s technical argument didn’t win the day. On June 22, 1633, the Church handed down the following order: ‘We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo… have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world.'”
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-is-convicted-of-heresy
This is a very good reason to NOT trust any religion that refuses to accept what science discovers.
For instance: “4 in 10 Americans Believe God Created Earth 10,000 Years Ago”
… “About half of Americans believe humans evolved over millions of years, with most of those people saying that God guided the process. Religious, less educated, and older respondents were likelier to espouse a young Earth creationist view — that life was created some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago — according to the poll.” …
https://www.livescience.com/46123-many-americans-creationists.html
What about Trump? What camp does he belong to?
Trump joins whatever group suits his personal advantage. He lacks any convictions.
1953- Alan Turing’s crime wan’t his work, it was the religious taboo against homosexuality. He committed suicide.The 2009 Manhattan Declaration signed by evangelical and Catholic leaders, including NYC’s archbishop, Timothy Nolan, shows the current allied agenda of the two major U.S. religions.
Muslims aren’t exempt- Rhazes was their victim.
And, then there was Michael Servetus.
Thanks for adding to my list that explains why I refuse to trust religions, any religions.
And yet, I have and still do read the Bible to understand what it means. I have friends that do the same thing and agree with me not to trust religions. When two or more of us get together to talk about what the Bible says, we are doing exactly what He said to do.
One friend said most of the Bible is history and not the word of God, but some take that history and claim that God controlled the pen that wrote it and that kind of thinking leads to more religious rules until there isn’t anything we can do as a human that isn’t a sin.
What happened to that Free Will God was supposed to have given us?
Yeah, I take issue with the people who try to take the Bible literally. The writers may have felt inspired by their belief in God, which may have led to them actually saying things worth hearing, but there is a heck of a lot of stuff in it that is obviously pertinent to the times and culture from where those writers came. History is obviously colored by who is writing it and why. Reading the Bible is hard work, and meaning is not at all “right out there.” We read our translation of choice as if it was written yesterday and the words mean what they would mean today. We interpret things in light of our own reality that may have only minimal connection to what the writer was experiencing. That’s fine in its way because there are universal values embedded in it that seem to have almost universal acceptance irrespective of one’s belief system. Trust the Bible or a particular religious persuasion? What does that mean? I was raised in a particular culture which has led me to a particular religious view of what I see as universal truths. I believe in a Creator, but I sure don’t think I have the “answers.” Organized religion is an attempt to make sense of the incomprehensible.
I want to suggest a slight revision to your last sentence:
Organized religion repeatedly fails to make sense of the incomprehensible.
What I can’t Comprehend does not Exist.
My opinion- democracy makes people active, religion makes many passive in all except defense of their denomination.
See this for some historical correctness …
🙞 The Renaissance Mathematicus • April 12th
“The most significant, and hardest, kind of learning is unlearning.” (Bob Shepherd)
Yes, teaching a kid to unlearn what he has been taught wrongly in school is the most difficult thing to do in teaching.
A majority of smart kids leave school as illiterate because they have been taught the wrong pronunciation of phonemes.
I have observed and ‘interviewed’ more than 70 kids who had come to me for a one on one tuition. All of them could read in Malay but not in English. This was what led me to quit working and do ‘research’ on why kids could read in Malay which uses the same letters as does English and yet were unable to read in English.
I then found out that these kids had shut down or disengaged from learning to read due to confusion. They were confused because they were taught pronunciation of consonants with extraneous sounds.
I told them to unlearn what they had learned and taught them the phonemes without extraneous sounds and within a short period of time, they were able to read.
Today, most of my students are top students in the universities to have gone to.
Educators have been trying to end the reading wars by rehashing what they have been doing over the past few decades.
The reading wars will end if the pronunciation of phonemes is taught correctly.
If everyone believed the ‘proven facts’ we would never progress in our ability to predict and describe our experience.
I came from a background (degrees in) Astronomy and Physics. Along with that background comes an familiarity with the history or our understanding of the natural world, and the remarkable and radical changes that constantly occur. Once it was a ‘proven fact’ that planets moved in circles, but it became more convenient to consider them ‘ellipses’. Once, time was a universal constant, and later time became dependent upon your reference frame. Once, it was ‘known’ that the Heavens (being perfect) were not governed by the same rules as was the Earth…Then it was a ‘proven fact’ that ‘gravity’ was universal. And then, the idea of ‘gravity’ was replaced by a space-time geometry, and so it goes….
Galileo did run stuff down inclined planes and come up with mathematical models for the motion (using the ‘algebra’ invented in India and transferred into European culture by the Muslims). However, unlike Newton, Galileo refused to accept Kepler’s idea that planets do not move in perfect circles, even though he knew of Kepler’s work. Personally, I think Newton has a better claim to being the Father of Modern Science. But, even Newton had the idea of an attainable ‘natural law’ that he was uncovering. This hasn’t been a ‘modern’ view for over a century.
My dog detects a world of scent that I can’t begin to imagine. The human mind is not ‘all seeing’. Even our eyes can be fooled. Our physical limitations guarantee that we will always be approaching certainty, but never grasping it in totality.
Having said that, however, some ways of thinking allow for better prediction than others. Inductive logic builds useful models. Deductive logic is sometimes useful (algebra) and sometimes irrelevant (chess).
Why do so many scientists refuse to believe proven facts? 😀
As Albert Einstein might have said “You are entitled to your own facts, but not your own reality”
“Quantum theory yields much, but it hardly brings us close to the Old One’s secrets. I, in any case, am convinced He does not play dice with the universe”
— Albert Einstein in a letter to Max Born (1926)
It is incredible to see so many intelligent people succumb to the lies.
People convinced against their will; are of the same option yet. People listen to only what their ‘tribe’ tells them. Humans never change.
The unintended consequences of of the new technology…that space where anarchy rules–cyber-space– these derelict human beings find company.and the opportunity to sow division and fear. The proliferation of outright lies, the disinformation paid for by the power elite who control ALL the the MSM , and the deluge of disinformation from that dark, place of anarchy –the internet make it impossible to know truth.
And when the leader of our nation lies with impunity, contradicts himself in he same sentence, then the world of ‘alternative facts’ drown an ignorant, frightened public.
Here is why people do not know what to believe… uttered contempt for the truth….
The Federalist as “Medical Journal” in the Time of the Coronavirus
The conservative online magazine, not known for its medical coverage, has published pseudoscientific takes on covid-19 by writers not known for their epidemiological expertise.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-federalist-as-medical-journal-in-the-time-of-the-coronavirus?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_041220&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bd67b913f92a41245df0c6d&cndid=45272181&hasha=0b7efaaf843601e54e3ef31aad9169d1&hashb=50d2958d4a70081c1c4006fb9fb3751e9226fdbb&hashc=c5b01153be51da58eadd552486fa254a96c94b4ca28601d8a39c5d8829c7ecc8&esrc=&utm_term=TNY_Daily
I am not sure if they are confused.
It is always possible to wakeup a person who is sleeping
but how do you wake up someone who is pretending to sleep?