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Merged US conservatives' trust in science has fallen dramatically since the '70s

Anybody who still believes in piddle-down ecconomics is bound to foster a few other superstitions as well.. Superstitious people get offended and defensive when their superstitions are challenged. In their minds, there has to be something wrong with the people who reject or criticize their superstitions.

This is especially true where it regards negative impact on their freedom to damage the environment and poison their neighbors for fun and profit.
 
There's a huge difference between distrusting a scientific establishment and distrusting the scientific process. Academics, such as the person who extracted this "conservatives distrust science" conclusion from survey data, flatter themselves that they can run your life better than you can. If you ask someone "Why won't you give me control over your life?" and s/he responds "God would not approve", parhaps that's just the polite way to say "Sod off, you arrogant prick".
 
It makes perfect sense to distrust science if science provides proof your agenda is a load of crap.

The really sad thing is those same people blame schools for the educational ranking of U.S. students. Instead they should look at their party and their presidential candidates.
 
I don't trust these statistics.

Probably worked out on one of them 'computing systems' the eggheads waste their time on.
 
AdMan said:
Some of the science-related questions from the General Social Survey that may have been taken into account in the study:
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A. Because of science and technology, there will be more opportunities for the next generation.

More opportunities for what? To succeed in life? I think that is likely so. Job opportunities? Maybe. A lot of technologies are taking over a lot of jobs. But, there may emerge a new way to be successful without a "job" thanks to those same technologies.

B. Science makes our way of life change too fast.

I think a certain velocity of change is inevitable, and will likely increase as more people go into the sciences. This will certainly seem "too fast" for some people to handle, today. But, the next generation will more likely value flexability and adaptation to change, (and decrease value on authority and tradition), to handle that better.


C. Even if it brings no immediate benefits, scientific research that advances the frontiers of knowledge is necessary and should be supported by the federal government.

I agree with this. Research at the current frontiers of knowledge tend to transform into the foundation of knowledge many years later. If we don't get the foundations right, we drain the future of possible benefits.


D. Science is too concerned with theory and speculation to be of much use in making concrete government policy decisions that will affect the way we live.


Again, what is on the verge of discovery will be less relevant to our current policy needs. BUT, over time, they will generally become much more relevant.

Could you imagine someone making this argument about horseless buggies, back when they were first introduced? "Those scientists building steam and/or gasoline engines won't effect public policy! Why should we care? Why should the government ever fund anything to do with cars?!"

Or, more fundamentally: Electricity.

E. Government decision makers should pay attention only to those scientific theories that have been accepted by most leading scientists.

Sounds suspiciously like an argumentum ad populum for me to agree with wholeheartedly. But, if the alternative was to only pay attention to theories made by pseudo-scientists, I would have to bet my money on the "leading scientists" side.
 
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Check out the graph posted here. What I find interesting is that (despite the blogger's claim otherwise) that there was not a significant difference in trust between conservatives and liberals even as late as 1990. Note as well that it's not as if liberals are all that trusting themselves; my read is that liberals trust science about 50% of the time, while hidebound conservatives only trust it about 40% of the time. Since the unspoken assumption appears to be that we should all trust "science", sounds like both groups should get a failing grade. Note as well that moderates historically were the least trusting of science and are not statistically significantly above conservatives today; don't quite know what to make of that.
 
Yet they trust science when they use their computers, go to the doctor, drive their cars or ride the airplanes, etc... It's just the "inconvenient" science (with it's well known liberal bias) that earns their ire...
 
DavidJames said:
It makes perfect sense to distrust science if science provides proof your agenda is a load of crap.1The really sad thing is those same people blame schools for the educational ranking of U.S. students. Instead they should look at their party and their presidential candidates.2
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1. Again, there's a difference between "distrust the scienctific process" and "distrust the scientific establishment". The scientific process involves experiment, observation, statistical summary, reason, and generalization. Since "What works?" is an empirical question to which an experiment will provide a more reliable answer than will intuition or Divine authority, in the realm of public policy this means support for federalism and markets. The socialist agenda is anti-science.

2. Theocratic indoctrination inspired government support of compulsory schooling in the religious colonies of British North America. When waves of Catholic immigrants in the early 1800s provoked an allergic reaction in the resident Protestant majority, public sector entrepreneuers like Horace Mann rode a wave of anti-Catholic bigotry into positions of authority. The current policy, which in many US States gives to the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel an exclusive position in receipt of the taxpayers' age 6-18 education subsidy, enshrines an anti-science respect for artificial authority.

Gerard Lassibile and Lucia Navarro Gomez,
"Organization and Efficiency of Educational Systems: some empirical findings"
Comparative Education, Vol. 36 #1, 2000, Feb.
Furthermore, the regression results indicate that countries where private education is more widespread perform significantly better than countries where it is more limited. The result showing the private sector to be more efficient is similar to those found in other contexts with individual data (see, for example, Psucharopoulos, 1987; Jiminez, et. al, 1991). This finding should convince countries to reconsider policies that reduce the role of the private sector in the field of education.
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Joshua Angrist
"Randomized Trials and Quasi-Experiments in Education Research"
NBER Reporter, summer, 2003
One of the most controversial innovations highlighted by NCLB is school choice. In a recently published paper,(5) my collaborators and I studied what appears to be the largest school voucher program to date. This program provided over 125,000 pupils from poor neighborhoods in the country of Colombia with vouchers that covered approximately half the cost of private secondary school. Colombia is an especially interesting setting for testing the voucher concept because private secondary schooling in Colombia is a widely available and often inexpensive alternative to crowded public schools. (In Bogota, over half of secondary school students are in private schools.) Moreover, governments in many poor countries are increasingly likely to experiment with demand-side education finance programs, including vouchers.

Although not a randomized trial, a key feature of our Colombia study is the exploitation of voucher lotteries as the basis for a quasi-experimental research design. Because demand for vouchers exceeded supply, the available vouchers were allocated by lottery in large cities. Our study compares voucher applicants who won a voucher in the lottery to those who lost. Since the lotteries used random assignment, losers provide a good control group for winners. A comparison of voucher winners and losers shows that three years after the lotteries were held, winners were 15 percentage points more likely to have attended private school and were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished eighth grade, primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades. Lottery winners also scored 0.2 standard deviations higher on standardized tests. A follow-up study in progress shows that voucher winners also were more likely to apply to college. On balance, our study provides some of the strongest evidence to date for the possible benefits of demand-side financing of secondary schooling, at least in a developing country setting.(6)
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Brainster said:
Check out the graph posted here. What I find interesting is that (despite the blogger's claim otherwise) that there was not a significant difference in trust between conservatives and liberals even as late as 1990. Note as well that it's not as if liberals are all that trusting themselves; my read is that liberals trust science about 50% of the time, while hidebound conservatives only trust it about 40% of the time. Since the unspoken assumption appears to be that we should all trust "science", sounds like both groups should get a failing grade. Note as well that moderates historically were the least trusting of science and are not statistically significantly above conservatives today; don't quite know what to make of that.
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A.) I think the trend is significant. B.) I think there is something to be made of 10%. That said, my opinions about the significance could simply be due to bias.
 
Wowbagger said:
I trust that the institution, at least in the long run, is able develop ideas that are accurate enough to be relied upon, in general. Is that good enough?
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I'm interested in the alternatives. However I kinda doubt any will ever show promise. Lacking any I would say I trust science insofar as there is an adversarial system that seeks equilibrium. The human ego is actually good for something in spite of my sig file. Human diversity ensures conflict and ego and need ensures a market place for ideas. Since we are human the numbers often get fudged and protocols are often poorly designed. Junk actually gets printed in peer-reviewed journals. So, that brings us back to our proposition. My answer to your question, I think so.
 
I do find it rather disturbing that so many liberals are also not trusting in science. It makes me wonder about how all the questions were worded.
 
I wonder how performance on a standardized test of basic science would relate to political orientation. The Pew Center found Republicans better informed than Democrats on current events. I read somewhere that skeptics of the AGW/CO2 theory were better informed about the science than were believers. It's radical egalitarians, not free marketeers, who deny the plausible inference from evolutionary theory that the brain is an evolved organ and that geographic varieties of human may differ systematically in nervous system function. It was a D member of Congress who imagined that moving troops from Okinawa to Guam would cause Guam to capsize.
 
Malcolm Kirkpatrick said:
There's a huge difference between distrusting a scientific establishment and distrusting the scientific process. Academics, such as the person who extracted this "conservatives distrust science" conclusion from survey data, flatter themselves that they can run your life better than you can. If you ask someone "Why won't you give me control over your life?" and s/he responds "God would not approve", parhaps that's just the polite way to say "Sod off, you arrogant prick".
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I don't suppose it has dawned on you that you are repeating an unfounded narrative.

Liberals no more want government to run their lives than conservatives. It's a lie.

However, it's also off topic.

Money that buys campaigns to discredit science also have adopted the conservative party in the US. So you get corporate interests that have an economic interest in discrediting science. When they do that by creating unfounded doubt in research findings the result is undermining the credibility of science itself.
 
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