"Dumb and Dumber"- Are Americans hostile to knowledge?

Started by Iago, February 17, 2008, 10:32:38 AM

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BachQ

Quote from: paulb on February 18, 2008, 03:36:54 PM
The problem of ignorance is not an epidemic limited to the USA, its a  world wide phenomenon.

We weren't aware of that ........

Joe Barron

#62
Quote from: Florestan on February 18, 2008, 07:22:32 AM

I call "cultural leftism" that school of thought which subscribes to the following tenets:

1. There is no such thing as truth, just opinions.

But, as the Times article points out, this is exactly the deconstructionist argument used by evengelicals on the right, and some of their intellectual sympathizers (eg., Stanley Fish) to call science into question and create room for their God. The argument goes something like this, though it is rarely stated so bluntly: Science cannot know everything, its theories are mental constructs, and it relies on assumptions that cannot be proven within its own system. (Nature behaves consistently everywhere and at all times. Changes in the fossil record may be linked together in a form of narrative.) Such assumptions must be accepted on faith. The scientific interpretation of reality is, by extension, a form of religion. And since no faith can be proven, all of them are equivalent, and the scientific world view is no more valid than worldview based on Biblical literalism.  One might might as well believe one thing as another.  This argument became a theological necessity once anti-evolutionists on local school boards began losing court cases. Theology is highly adaptable in such circumstances. It's strange, of course: religion used to be a foundation of reality. We knew the world existed and that men would be judged fairly, because God exists and He remembers everything perfectly. Now, His very existence is a matter of assumptions. Even more strangely, evangelicals still talk of God as the source of eternal moral laws, not realizing their positions are not compatible. Someone said it better than I: Epistemological relativism became the basis of moral absolutism.

More to the point: One reason we are seen as anti-intellectuals around the world, in my view, is that we persist in electing ignoramuses to high office. Anti-intellectualism certainly infects American politics, if not our life as a whole, and politicians are among our most visible representatives abroad. Someone with genuine intellectual gifts, like, say, Al Gore, is ridiculed for them in the press, while an amiable-seeming dunce (to coin a phrase) like Bush, who can barely put a coherent sentence together, is seen as a regular guy, someone you'd like to have a beer with, as if it were a qualification.  (Much like the girl on the game show, Bush once called Africa a country.) We're democrats (with a small "d") in this country, and as such, we don't like to believe our leaders are smarter than we are. You could pass it off in 2000, when the election was arguably stolen, but we as a nation chose Bush on 2004, and we did it out of spite.


And yeah, it was embarrassing that the girl on Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? never heard of Hungary, but we should keep in mind these contestants are screened, and no one who is too bright will be selected. A friend of mine tried out for Tic Tac Dough years ago, and he was turned down simply because he knew too much. On Jeopardy, Budpest would have been a $100 question. 


As for some of the anecdotes in this thread about ignorance, a favorite counterexample of mine comes from one of my editors, who liked to retell it as proof you can't judge by appearances. She was in a roadside diner one night, seated not too far from a couple of greasy looking trucker types. They had tattoos, long, stringy hair topped with baseball caps, and a few days' stubble, and they were arguing about which conductor had recorded the greatest performance of Brahms' First Symphony.

paulb

Quote from: Ephemerid on February 18, 2008, 04:06:08 PM
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/13/national/printable838207.shtml

http://kapio.kcc.hawaii.edu/upload/fullnews.php?id=52

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7126562.stm

http://www.reason.com/news/show/33014.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUSN2922875820071129?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0&sp=true

http://oneutah.org/2007/07/28/how-stupid-are-americans/


Gosh i havn't looked through all the links, but the first 2 are great reads.
Nice work.
The only thing each of us can do is study, understand  and sow seeds  of knowledge along the path of life.
Its obvious the herds will have to make out the best they can.
Now should we intervene in The Sudan and Kenya and other places in which ethnic cleansing/tribal wars  are taking place?
The governments say that foriegn intervention will not work, and should  stay out.
So the world can only anxiously look on at the horrors.
The United Nations has not proven up to the task to police the world.

Ephemerid

Quote from: Joe Barron on February 18, 2008, 04:45:03 PM
And yeah, it was embarrassing that the girl on Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? never heard of Hungary, but we should keep in mind these contestants are screened, and no one who is too bright will be selected. A friend of mine tried out for Tic Tac Dough years ago, and he was turned down simply because he knew too much. On Jeopardy, Budpest would have been a $100 question. 

This reminds me something Steven Wright said several years ago (paraphrasing):

Have you ever noticed the difference between different contestants on different game shows?  For example, look at Jeopardy: "Here's our contestant Mike.  Mike is a computer programmer for NASA and in his spare time he likes to build brains!"  Then flip over to Wheel of Fortune: "Here's our contestant Jan.  Jan likes small shiny objects." 

(OK, its a lot funnier to hear him say it in that deadpan delivery of his, but you get the idea LOL)

Florestan

Quote from: Joe Barron on February 18, 2008, 04:45:03 PM
But, as the Times article points out, this is exactly the deconstructionist argument used by evengelicals on the right

The extremes touch each other.  :)

Quote from: Joe Barron on February 18, 2008, 04:45:03 PMSomeone said it better than I: Epistemological relativism became the basis of moral absolutism.

Word.

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Florestan

#66
Quote from: O Mensch on February 18, 2008, 12:54:12 PM
No. It does sound like you haven't really understood what they were saying, though. Thus you present a grotesque caricature of what you think is their philosophy and then overstate its importance.

OM, you seem to me an intelligent and rational man and your posts are always interesting. Moreover, I wholeheartedly agree with some of your stances. But it also seems that we are irreconcilably at variance about some issues. Let us not get into a polemic on them. I'm sure I won't convince you and you won't convince me. Furthermore, knowing me (and you), that could easily escalate into an entirely useless flamewar. We can live peacefully on this virtual dinner-room even if our philosophies are antagonistic. I am not a rigid ideologue: I've always thought that the qualities of a flesh-and-blood person are more valuable than her / his ideas (and this includes me, of course). So, let us give three cheers to Obama and be friends!  :-*  :)

Now back on-topic, I am really interested to learn what you think are the true causes of this amazing ignorance of average Americans.
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

RebLem

Quote from: head-case on February 18, 2008, 12:51:18 PM
Belgians or Uruguayans have the luxury of sitting around talking about how the US is full of stupid people and has screwed up the world, and how if only the Americans were as wise and as cosmopolitan as they were, everything would be better.  That is well and good, because Belgians or Uruguayans have no influence on the world, and their smug opinions will never be put into effect and we will never know how much more screwed up the world would be if it were.

Actually, the Belgians ruled what was once Zaire and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and was then known as the Belgian Congo from 1908-1960.  The present state of that country does not speak well for the Belgian case.

The Philippines were ruled by the United States from about 1900-1946, with time off for the Japanese occupation.  While they have had their share of problems, ask yourself this:  If you had to live in either Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo, or Manila, which would you choose?
"Don't drink and drive; you might spill it."--J. Eugene Baker, aka my late father.

Florestan

Quote from: RebLem on February 18, 2008, 11:16:33 PM
Actually, the Belgians ruled what was once Zaire and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and was then known as the Belgian Congo from 1908-1960.  The present state of that country does not speak well for the Belgian case.

The Philippines were ruled by the United States from about 1900-1946, with time off for the Japanese occupation.  While they have had their share of problems, ask yourself this:  If you had to live in either Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo, or Manila, which would you choose?

You have a point here, but the things are not so straight-forward.

You seem to completely forget the history of both those countries. The Philippines as they are today were not created ex nihilo by the United States. They took it from the Spaniards who ruled there a few hundred years before the Americans. Moreover, another very important factor was the native people of these islands itself. The present state of the affairs in Philippines, admittedly better than that in Congo, is thus the result of the interplay of all these forces.

Same analysis for Congo: it's not only the Belgians, but also the native peoples who shaped the Congo of today.

Saying that Belgians are bad because of nowadays Congo and Americans are better because of nowadays Philippines is a gross oversimplification.

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

Lethevich

Quote from: RebLem on February 18, 2008, 11:16:33 PM
Actually, the Belgians ruled what was once Zaire and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and was then known as the Belgian Congo from 1908-1960.  The present state of that country does not speak well for the Belgian case.

The Philippines were ruled by the United States from about 1900-1946, with time off for the Japanese occupation.  While they have had their share of problems, ask yourself this:  If you had to live in either Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo, or Manila, which would you choose?

That means nothing. Africa is just most succeptible to massive corruption at the moment. Look at Zimbabwe pre and post colonialism.
Peanut butter, flour and sugar do not make cookies. They make FIRE.

drogulus

Quote from: Joe Barron on February 18, 2008, 04:45:03 PM
But, as the Times article points out, this is exactly the deconstructionist argument used by evengelicals on the right, and some of their intellectual sympathizers (eg., Stanley Fish) to call science into question and create room for their God. The argument goes something like this, though it is rarely stated so bluntly: Science cannot know everything, its theories are mental constructs, and it relies on assumptions that cannot be proven within its own system. (Nature behaves consistently everywhere and at all times. Changes in the fossil record may be linked together in a form of narrative.) Such assumptions must be accepted on faith. The scientific interpretation of reality is, by extension, a form of religion. And since no faith can be proven, all of them are equivalent, and the scientific world view is no more valid than worldview based on Biblical literalism.  One might might as well believe one thing as another.  This argument became a theological necessity once anti-evolutionists began on local school boards began losing court cases. Theology is highly adaptable in such circumstances. It's strange, of course: religion used to be a foundation of reality. We knew the world existed and that men would be judged fairly, because God exists and He remembers everything perfectly. Now, His very existence is a matter of assumptions. Even more strangely, evangelicals still talk of God as the source of eternal moral laws, not realizing their positions are not compatible. Someone said it better than I: Epistemological relativism became the basis of moral absolutism.




    It's funny...the Stanley Fish position comes out of pragmatism. Pragmatists used to believe that the success of scientific models counted as evidence in their favor. Now they've come around to the view that this is just another faith. I think that's a self-thwarting position, since the same thing could be said about radical pragmatism, and it builds no successful models, period.
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MishaK

Quote from: Florestan on February 18, 2008, 11:01:11 PM
OM, you seem to me an intelligent and rational man and your posts are always interesting. Moreover, I wholeheartedly agree with some of your stances. But it also seems that we are irreconcilably at variance about some issues. Let us not get into a polemic on them. I'm sure I won't convince you and you won't convince me. Furthermore, knowing me (and you), that could easily escalate into an entirely useless flamewar. We can live peacefully on this virtual dinner-room even if our philosophies are antagonistic. I am not a rigid ideologue: I've always thought that the qualities of a flesh-and-blood person are more valuable than her / his ideas (and this includes me, of course). So, let us give three cheers to Obama and be friends!  :-*  :)

Fair enough, though I'd like to point out two things: 1. it is you who has fallen prey to a certain set of right wing polemics on this issue, which mostly emanates from people who have never read the people they criticise (as a simple anecdotal counterexample to your claim, the only people I know who have actually read the deconstructionists and the Frankfurt School - e.g. my wife, who is an expert in both and is now teaching some of this at college level - are among the most educated people I know and don't subscribe to any of the absurd tenets you allege they do). 2. I don't think you quite understood the point of Joe Barron's intelligent post above.

Quote from: Florestan on February 18, 2008, 11:01:11 PM
Now back on-topic, I am really interested to learn what you think are the true causes of this amazing ignorance of average Americans.

I don't think there is one single cause, nor am I sure that I have an adequate grasp of what is causing it. There are a number of factors, I think. One being America's geographic isolation and relative safety from external aggression which has allowed a certain blissful ignorance of the outside world to go relatively unpunished. That's something the peoples of most other continents cannot afford, living as they do virtually on top of each other with little or no natural barriers between them. Secondly, there is a very strong myth of a sort of rural ideal, where inherently good folk persist simply on having a good heart and working hard, without the requirement of advanced education. It's sort of a frontier myth that anyone who works hard can succeed and you don't need the credentials of good education etc. It's one aspect of the American dream that differentiates it from socially immobile old European society where if you didn't come from the right families or go to the right schools you were screwed. Except, oops, modern America looks so much more like that these days. Finally, America has this very schizophrenic love-hate relationship with its own government: it thinks its system of government is so ingenious that it should be spread across the world, by force if necessary, but not at home where instead it should be cut down to an unworkable dysfunctional shadow of itself. In its most extreme libertarian ideal, government basically shouldn't exist. Problem is, without central government there are no reliable national education standards, no adequate public school funding etc. Part of the pain of applying to college in the US and undergoing a silly rigmarole of standardized testing is that, by just looking at your high school credentials, a college admissions officer can't tell anything at all about how educated you are. The high schools are too dissimilar. An A in one might be worse than a D in another in the same subject. When it comes to general public education, there is something to be said for the European model of highly educated central government technocrats setting a national curriculum and national standards, vs. the American model where every community can make it up as they go along, leaving the poorer, less educated communities with lower quality of education than more affluent, better educated ones.

The most astounding thing to me is - apart from not learning much useful knowledge - US school kids seem to get very bad training in setting their thoughts to paper in a coherent fashion. My wife now happens to be teaching at the college I attended as an undergrad. When I entered college, there was a requirement to attend a sort of "basic composition" class that was a sort of remedial writing to teach kids to write a coherent college paper. Even though English was my third language, I placed out of this requirement simply on the basis of the quality of my application essays, thanks to the quality of my German public school education (and that wasn't that great either, let me tell you). My wife is now grading a lot of papers of the current generation of college kids, and the variation in the quality of the writing - I don't mean their grasp of the subject - is astounding. Supposedly all of these showed the same aptitude on standardized tests etc., but some of them write as if they had never written anything longer than a paragraph.

Florestan

Quote from: O Mensch on February 19, 2008, 07:38:52 AM
I don't think you quite understood the point of Joe Barron's intelligent post above.

Then please explain it to me.
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

MishaK

Quote from: Joe Barron on February 18, 2008, 04:45:03 PM
As for some of the anecdotes in this thread about ignorance, a favorite counterexample of mine comes from one of my editors, who liked to retell it as proof you can't judge by appearances. She was in a roadside diner one night, seated not too far from a couple of greasy looking trucker types. They had tattoos, long, stringy hair topped with baseball caps, and a few days' stubble, and they were arguing about which conductor had recorded the greatest performance of Brahms' First Symphony.

That reminds me: Carl Haas has a huge following among truck drivers for his exploring classical music radio show.

Quote from: Florestan on February 19, 2008, 07:51:52 AM
Then please explain it to me.

I'll let him do that. But the example he cites shows that the caricature of a supposed extreme leftist intelligentsia is one used by the right wing exclusively. That they then fall prey to using precisely the sort of relativism they accuse the left of espousing as a method of justifying absolutism is all the more amusingly ironic. But let me just add that it is precisely this unfounded accusation of leftist intellectual moral relativism that is used all the time as an attack against anything that smells of education. It is in fact one of the contributing causes of anti-intellectual predispositions in the US.

Josquin des Prez

I think those trying to blame the poor state of American education on some inherent cultural element pertaining the whole country might want to explain just how is it that they were number one both in term of general education and scientific production only a few decades ago. Something doesn't add up.

MishaK

Quote from: Josquin des Prez on February 19, 2008, 08:57:57 AM
I think those trying to blame the poor state of American education on some inherent cultural element pertaining the whole country might want to explain just how is it that they were number one both in term of general education and scientific production only a few decades ago. Something doesn't add up.

Oh, don't mistake my point for arguing anything about "inherent" cultural deficiencies. None of this is fixed. At the beginning of the Cold War, the US made a considerable push in improving public education, as it was perceived to be falling behind the Soviets. But as the Soviet threat subsided, so did support for public education. As to your stats. I'd like to see them. I don't know that the US was ever number one in terms of general eduction, but am willing to be proven wrong. As to scientific production, that's easy when you keep importing talent from outside.

head-case


Reminds me of a remark, the origin of which I can't recall, that the US has the worlds dumbest 18 year olds but the worlds smartest 30 year olds (judging by the fact that US workers have the highest productivity in the world).

BorisG


MishaK

Quote from: head-case on February 19, 2008, 09:09:44 AM
Reminds me of a remark, the origin of which I can't recall, that the US has the worlds dumbest 18 year olds but the worlds smartest 30 year olds (judging by the fact that US workers have the highest productivity in the world).

That statistic is misleading. It is true that US workers are most productive in total per year. But the workers of many European countries are more productive per hour worked than US workers. The difference is that US workers work a lot longer hours and have less vacation time and public holidays, which ends up putting them ahead. That, BTW, is another reason for the US's backwardness in education. School alone can't do the job. If families don't have time together during which the elders can mentor their kids because both parents are working long hours and commuting long distances, the school teachers will be fighting an uphill battle. The commuting goes back to this myth of rural utopia. Americans will rather build a brand new house out in the boonies and commute two hours than invest in reviving a neighborhood closer to the city. You end up with completely dead dormitory cities bereft of any intellectual stimulation for its younger population.

karlhenning

"Hostile" is such a peculiar word to use in the header question.

Oh! And look who initiated the thread!  All is now clear  8)