You have entire corporations, nation-wide that are backed by religious nuts and racists, entire state-sized organizations of assholes paid from the bottom-up, and unless science and education has the same backing, we will lose.
When’s the last time a rock band was labeled a “science band”, but you can name four or five christian bands without even listening to them?
There are entire record companies and publishing houses that do nothing but spread more of it, interest groups in the billions of dollars that circulate faith and blindness. Even philanthropy, and a yelling preacher on every corner, sometimes across the street from one another, hospitals, nonprofits, foundations, you name it.
Christianity and Judaism is so overblown in support, we shouldn’t expect anything less than absolute ignorance. Look what’s pushing it.
I mean math rock is a genre, in fairness
Time to program something nasty and tricky or tweaking in a tight part: put on the math metal and figure it out.
When’s the last time a rock band was labeled a “science band”, but you can name four or five christian bands without even listening to them?
I feel like a pedant, but I’m sorry, the notion that most Americans can name five Christan bands/artists is bullshit. Maybe most Bible Belters can. Christian music gets the designation of “Christian music” because it is segregated away from everything else, listened to by a large, but still niche demographic who are already very religious, and treated as a joke by everyone else (including most non-Evangelical Christians.)
I can name two, Skillet and Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. The former is just the band I see mentioned to make jokes about Christian music, and the latter I saw on a show about one hit wonders (the hit is about domestic violence and doesn’t even have faith based undertones.) If I start making exceptions like “became Christian after the height of their fame” (Kansas and Kanye West) or “stopped being Christian before they became known” (Katy Perry) I can get to five.
And on that note, what would a “science band” be? Like, a band that writes lyrics about new scientific discoveries? Yeah that’d have more in common with Nick Jr. than most music, secular or not. Most music deals with emotions in a way Christian music can but “science music” couldn’t. The closest would be philosophy, but there’s already a ton of music drawing on philosophy, and nobody segregates it from normal music because it’s not music that only appeals to a specific demographic.
…not Creed tho?
Science music… Rush, maybe.
Didn’t know Creed was Christian (and it seems at least debatable whether they fit the label of “Christian music.”) So that hurts my point I guess.
Science shouldn’t be compared to religion. On one hand because the doctrine of non-overlapping magesteria which all religions should follow (it can be summed up as anything Science has a say in, religion shouldn’t). But also like science shouldn’t bother competing here. When science is treated as religion, it’s often abused similarly. Its a method for understanding the world.
The fact that pv=nRT is provable and if I go and get rudimentary equipment to do this I can double check without any scientists present. Sure there are stories associated with science, but unlike in religion they aren’t the stuff its made of. Science doesn’t ask for praise or belief, it asks for skepticism, curiosity, and precision.
Edit: wait, does Muse’s album “the second law” count as science rock? It slapped and was about thermodynamics to a certain degree
Where exactly are the Jews advocating for cutting educational resources? Jews in general perform far better on educational metrics than most other groups, and their whole religion is based on reading, study, and debate.
the Jews(Israel) advocate for Zionism which I’d argue is equivalent in danger to some fundamentalist Christians seeking white nationalism.
Ironic
This is a discussion about literacy my dude
Oh, that makes it ok, then.
No that makes it irrelevant dumbass
Palestinians are not irrelevant, dude.
downvoted you too, thanks.
and no, you’re right. The Zionist state spends billions annually to perpetuate their victim complex. American media and our educational system is rife with their propaganda and pro-Israel rhetoric. You knew that.
You need to go outside and touch grass dude.
How do you test a reading level? Like for me it was always you either can read and understand or you can’t. What differentiates reading levels from grade to grade?
This might help. https://smcl.org/blogs/post/making-sense-of-reading-levels/
Did you start reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason the instant you learned to read?
Another comment here gives an example of how a 6th grade reading comprehension test could be formulated. Essentially, it’s about how complex sentences you can parse, and how large your “context window” is while reading.
Imagine a small child just learning to read. They struggle with every word, so if a sentence grows more complex than “The dog is brown.”, they simply can’t get to the end of the sentence while still remembering what the start was about. This also applies at a higher level: Keeping track of a complex “scene” which describes a setting while also describing dialogue between characters and inner dialogue in parallel requires more cognitive effort than the simpler “scenes” in children’s books. A higher reading level means you spend less cognitive effort reading and understanding the words and sentences, so you have more cognitive capacity in reserve to actually understand the full picture.
Shit, is that why I can’t understand fuck all in Finnegan’s Wake?
Ah I see. That makes sense.
And 21% of American adults are illiterate
knew an old man who couldn’t read. he could write phone numbers in a notebook and remembered who it was by where it was written. no names. Fort Worth 1980.
I dare not find out what my reading level is, for the same reason I dare not find out what my IQ is. I don’t gain anything by knowing it, and knowing that I’m stupid will only worsen my self-esteem issues.
I feel better assuming I’m roughly average for both measurements.
Here is the thing… You can work on both of those. Literacy is not capped by your intelligence, unless you are exceptionally challenged, like mentally unfit to live by yourself challenged. You can read more books, and journal articles, and expand your reading ability.
IQ is mostly bullshit. The test can help identify if you have a disability, but it’s relatively worthless for determining how intelligent you can actually be. You can practice pattern recognition and then take an IQ test, but all that means is that you are good at recognizing patterns. There are plenty of “High IQ” people who can’t figure out basic shit, like how to put on a spare tire.
So don’t feel bad if you don’t score well on those tests. They only measure how you did one time on one test.
Yeah, no shit. gestures generally toward the DC area
Republicans at work. A dumb electorate is the easiest to manipulate.
Well, reading and writing is a 6 millenia old technology, thus it’s in dire need of replacement with AI readers /s
In case you were wondering why we’re losing our democracy to a felon rapist.
For us foreigners, 6th grade is around 10 / 11 years old?
Yes, about. Ten years is peak reading for most Americans. And we wonder why they f-ck up the world.
Yep. God help us.
A little older. I was 11 in grade 6, but I was also the youngest student.
I’m curious what it is for other countries so off to do a little searching…
Update:
Right, it’s better but not wildly so when spread across the EU and lower in some places. This page is from the Irish Central Statistics office with 2023 numbers and puts us at 21% at or below the level 1 (at or below a grade 6 equivalent). On that page (2023 numbers) the US is at 28% so that 54% statistic in the OP smells a bit.
The main difference between Ireland and the US is that we’re only 5% below level 1 where the US is at 12%.
For reference, Portugal has 15% below level 1.
Here’s the definition of level 1:
Here’s the relevant graph with all levels in picture format but you can get the individual numbers by going to the page and hovering over the individual levels.
Japan and the Nordics crushing it to nobody’s surprise.
FYI, Portugal has a massive disjunction in educational and reading level between people who grew up before the Revolution that overthrew fascism and those who grew up after.
Fascism definitely kept people ignorant: mandatory education back then - and Fascism lasted until 1974, so we’re not talking about the first half of the XX century - was only 4 years, which is just about enough to learn to read and that barely so, and access to anything beypnd that was nearly impossible for most people as the country was very agrarian and dirt poor.
I’m Portuguese and some of my older aunts are functionality illiterate, whilst most of my generation in my extended family (so around 14 people in our 40s and 50s) have degrees - which shows the veritable chasm in the availability and quality of Education before and after the Revolution.
The point being that minus that bulk of illiterate and near-illiterate old people who grew up during Fascism, the picture for Portugal changes a lot and, frankly, any 1st World country which is close to present day Portugal without having a whole generation that lived under a dictatorship which denied Education beyond the very basic to most people, doesn’t really have an excuse for it.
That’s an absolutely fascinating insight. Thanks!
Some years ago I saw some graph that showed the proportion of people in each country of Europe whose maximum formal education level was Primary Education, Secondary Education and Tertiary Education an Portugal had lots of people with only Primary Education, then few with up to Secondary Education and then lots again with Tertiary Education, and having that gap in the middle is quite unique in Europe.
The difference between the importance of Education for the Fascists (earlier, none at all, later just about enough to make them cheap factory workers) and for the post-Revolution governments (which were all leftwing), is like night an day, and Portugal definitelly shows how it’s possible to invest in Education and undo many decades of severe under-Education of the population though you can’t really undo the damage to the older generations (even with Adult Education, which was available if you lived in cities, but only used by a fraction of those who could’ve benefited from it).
It took thirty years of cutting education spending but they are almost to a fully ignorant populace.
We’ve even hit the point where they don’t have to pretend to be pro education
Wait another 30 years and all the ‘educated’ people who are running the country now will start dying off leaving behind the generation that had little, limited or no education.
Sure you’re always going to have your best and brightest running the country … but they’re going to be severely outnumbered by an entire nation full of people who are dumb as bricks who raised children and grandchildren who are dumb as bricks.
As much as I worry about this I think the real scenario will be the rich keep their kids educated at proper levels and they start to look smarter than the poors. If this trend keeps up it will be easy to convince a population of uncritical thinkers that being rich makes you better.
I think it’s even sadder than that … a rich elite who believe they are raising more intelligent children but are in fact just raising slightly smarter kids that are one step brighter than an entire population of completely stupid people.
Money and wealth doesn’t make you intelligent … because often what happens is the wealthy get to the point of just buying or purchasing the credentials and diplomas like they do houses or cars because they see them as titles rather than academic achievements.
If you want some light horror reading, check out /r/teachers.
As much as I enjoyed Idiocracy when it came out, I wish its proposed answer/crux of the issue wasn’t “smart people should have kids” and instead focused on educating the ones that are already here/brought into this world.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Idiocracy didn’t propose any solution at all. If I remember correctly, smart people not having kids was just a plot driver. Sadly, with the way things are that is how it’s gonna happen in our lifetime most likely. Education is getting worse over time, so the ones who’ll be able to educate their kids properly are those who are already educated.
As unpopular this may be: With some, or probably some more, there are limits to what can be achieved with care and education.
Maybe, but those limits are extremely far from what we currently achieve…so there is that to consider.
People want easy solutions, like “Have more people be born smart” instead of hard, complex, realistic ones like “Put time, effort, and resources into robust education of the population in stable familial and social environments to develop higher averages of generally recognized metrics of intelligence in the general population”
more like rich and powerful people want stupid masses
stop blaming these issues on individuals when the whole system is setup to fuck them into this mess
anymore than individuals can fix our plastics or fossil fuel issues
There was already a precedent for all this. After the Second World War, American jumped right into the Cold War with the Russians and wanted to take the lead in science, technology, rocketry, space and engineering. They quickly realized that their country at the time was ill equiped and not well trained or educated for all this … so they took the shortcut of using former Nazis to head their science and technology fields for a few years. Then to take up the slack, the government heavily invested in education and training to pump out the scientists, engineers and professionals they needed to gear up their technological war with the Soviets.
So the 50s, 60s, and 70s got filled with a lot of bright well trained, well educated and informed young people. They were able to power the American war machine but a side effect to all that was all these insightful young people became the backbone of a counter culture that fought against war, capitalism, inequality, conservatism and racism and supported black rights, Native rights, women’s rights, minority rights, animal rights and environmentalism.
Then they had to bring in people like Reagan and Thatcher to reign in these counter culture movements and swing the pendulum back again. Once they defeated the Soviets in the Cold War, conservative America had all the incentive to break everything down again and dumb down the population until it was a just a compliant pulp that could elect a clown.
Using former Nazis wasn’t because there was a shortage of educated people in general in the US after WW2. The vast majority of Nazi scientists who made major contributions to US progress (or Soviet progress, for that matter), were in rocketry, which the Nazis put disproportionate effort and funding into.
Agreed … but in order for the US to push through their rocket program, they needed scientists and researchers to develop, test, build, test, retest, and test some more all of the applied science that had been developed. The country needed to build an entire community of thousands of professionally trained technicians, scientists, engineers, professionals … and with them had to come teams of administrators, academics, trainers, bureaucrats, office workers … and with all of them had to come entire groups of trained builders, workers, electricians, plumbers, draftsmen, planners and all the people that came with … and all that had to be supported by an industry that needed to build and develop all the things that had to be needed to get this monolith moving, which meant that all these corporations and businesses needed their own teams of professionally trained people.
It was a massive investment in education in order to get the ball rolling in industry to build the rocket program. It wasn’t just building rockets … it was building an entire industry upon industry upon industry to get to the point of building a single rocket that could launch anything into orbit.
The reason why any of it happened was that the government heavily invested in educating and training an entire population to make it all possible.
Oh yes, I strongly agree with all that. Just felt the need to nitpick that the contribution of Nazi scientists was relatively narrow.
I always respect and look forward to your opinion. You are a great contributor to Lemmy and I always learn something new from everything you share here.
Your analysis is spot on. (most of my career has been in aerospace)
I would also add that the training programs and apprenticeships that were developed have been gutted as they destroyed the unions.
The whole rebuilding American manufacturing through tariffs is a total pipe dream. I’m one of the few machinists that stuck through the great recession in my generation. There are no where near enough people like me to train kids and the guys that taught me are dead.
It takes minimum, four years, to grow a self-sufficent machinist on the job. Trade schools are pretty much worthless, kids come out of trade school and they’re fit to sweep floors or maybe punch a button if they’re real sharp.
It would take twenty years of consistent government and corporate support to rebuild and we all they are too greedy and short sighted for that.
I assume it is similar for a lot of other trades.
The US literally beat the Nazis to developing fission technology, i.e. nukes (admittedly with a very international research community). It’s quite clear just from that, that the US had plenty of strong scientists before they brought in Nazis/Nazi collaborators from overseas.
As a complete side note: I believe it’s been speculated (by people who know much more about this than me) that Nazi research on nukes, among other things, was hampered by researchers like Heisenberg deliberately dragging their feet because they were forced to work on the projects but didn’t believe in the cause. I’m not meaning to clear the name of any Nazi collaborators, but pointing out that not all scientists working under the Nazi regime were necessarily nazis.
Nuke and atomic technology was one thing … and the Americans basically had that in their pocket regardless if they had Nazi scientists or not
The big leap that the Americans made with Nazi scientists was to pair atomic technology with ballistic missile technology.
When you just have a bomb and you need a big slow moving aircraft to deliver the bomb, then it is almost useless as there are plenty of ways to take down a jet in mid flight before it even reaches a target.
The unholy match that humanity came up with was to pair nuclear weapons with missile technology … which created a weapon that is nearly unstoppable and completely dangerous for all of humanity.
Yeah, the problem with Idiocracy is that it over plays the role of genetics and doesn’t differentiate between ignorance and stupidity.
Sure, genetics plays some role, but I’ve seen some very smart people that came from average parents and some very dumb people who came from smart parents.
Education plays a much bigger role than people give it credit for.
I feel like there are probably some very smart people out there who we don’t know about because of their lack of educational opportunities.
Pretty much my whole life (I’m 51) Americans have been talking about how bad our education system is compared to much of the world, yet nothing substantial was done about it. I think the current state of affairs is a reflection of that fact.
Pretty sure the smart folks waited till they could provide for their kid well before finding out they couldn’t even have any. Implying that even if they did that kid would have been outnumbered by the mass breeding of fuckwits who’s only objective in life was rawdoggin after a good time.
It actually feels crazy that I know dudes who emulate the idiots from the beginning montage almost exactly. They didn’t used to be that way, it ramped up the last couple years
I don’t think that the movie was proposing that the issue or solution is eugenics based. I would argue that educated people are probably able provide a better education, and that uneducated parents are less likely to be able to provide their children with a quality education.
I don’t specifically remember Idiocracy really going into depth about “passing good genes”.
That is nearly 114,250 9/11’s worth of dumb people
What’s that in metric units?
Nearly 17 Holocausts
This ain’t a meme, Pug
President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho is saddened
