Conservatives in Science and the Psychology of Politics

You're just following your feelings, son; you would do better to put those away and follow cold, hard logic and facts. That are carefully selected to support my arguments.

I'm am fully supportive of integrating scientific learning earlier. Second grade is far too late to be starting on it.

Last time we tried to teach things too early without the appropriate background we ended up with New Math. Somehow I'm not convinced foisting a complex process on kids who would be lucky to even spell "hypothesis" much less know what it means is a good idea.

Well, the formalizing isn't as important as the exploration and experimentation. Also, I'm going to go wiki "new math".

Back. Yeah, that was a stupid experiment. Arithmetic is the first step, and could use some improvements, but replacing it with algebra is retarded.

edited 16th Jan '11 7:48:50 PM by Deboss

Kids are dumb. We can't learn that many things at once.

Balloon Fleet, do you really think people's politics should be determined by their ethnicity?

No, but i'd understand if it was influenced by it. E.G. economically selling out your people is bad ju-ju

Because black people are only being kept down by the white man and can't possibly hope to change their own economic position without the help of all those rich whites and Asians.

wat

He was making fun of you.

Well, the formalizing isn't as important as the exploration and experimentation.

Most schools don't have that much? Hell, we were holding ketchup races, watching a wire melt through a brick of ice, and dripping water onto the surface of a coin.

Most of the kids still didn't really draw anything greater from it.

edited 16th Jan '11 7:59:07 PM by Pykrete

He was making fun of you.

I guessed he was trolling so I just put that there to lure him out of his foxhole/confirm the provocation. Ya shouldn't have forces me to uh, reveal the ruse.

Not "hard" experiments like that. Mostly data recording from my experience. To be fair though, I'm trying to remember more than half my lifetime ago, and my memory may be fuzzy. I'm slightly concerned that all science classes are still "science" until highschool rather than "physics" or "chemistry" or something.

You're asking kids who can barely write numbers coherently, much less do more than add/subtract them, to record and analyze trends in data. Gotta go for a bit broader strokes than that so early on

Like I said, I might be confusing my more high school classes with what we did in elementary and middle school.

I think "problem solving" and "getting a fell for kinematics and the like" aren't above them.

I'll attest that, at least as late as fifth or sixth grade, kids can be sort of stupid with regards to science; in a science experiment in my 5th/6th grad classroom (the school district was experimenting with multi-age at the time), we were supposed to stack little plastic blocks on a taut piece of toilet paper of various brands to test the strength, and after testing the first three a certain way, my group saw another group doing it differently, and did our fourth one that way and got way more blocks stacked than the other three. I was the only one who realized this was a stupid idea.
TL,DR: I'm all for teaching a bit more of the formalizing, at least in fifth/sixth grade. Experiments are fun, but at some point kids need to realize that science is a bit more than "let's try something!"

My fifth grade went to OMSI. I seriously doubt many of us would've gotten quite as much of an impact out of that any earlier.

@Pykrete: Oh it's possible to teach first graders the scientific method.

After all it can boiled down to three words: Predict. Observe. Conclude.

Well I've never seen a problem in Canada, where people think science and conservatives don't mix. The issue was always science and religious conservatives. The religious conservatives have only been a recent phenomena when our Tory party got absorbed by them. It's really unfortunate, but they've turned more centrist since then on the religious front anyway since the Supreme Court frowns upon such activity (as does the constitution).

In any case, I'm not sure that teaching the scientific method or anything earlier is going to help much. I think the problem is largely quality of education, as many others have already indicated in the thread. You don't learn much, you're going to distrust academics, theories and other science-related items later in life.

As far as there being more right-wing people in the sciences... well I think, socially speaking you'll see more right-wingers. Things such as monogamy, morality, structure in family/social life, etc etc are going to be more prevalent. Now Canada is a bit strange in that regard because many of the students are of East Asian and Southeast Asian descent, so their culture background is socially more conservative. However, for the large part, I think they would all vote Democrat if they were in the United States.

Science isn't left/right wing at all. I don't see why people keep making it seem like that. As an example, it's not left/right wing to deny or accept Global Warming, shit is happening. It's about what we're supposed to do politically that it becomes left/right wing. Do we want carbon tax? Do we want global framework? Do we want cap and trade? Do we just focus on carbon trapping, filtration? Etc. Global warming denial is just stupid and not a product of left/right wing discussion inside science because science doesn't care. It's either happening or it's not.

edited 17th Jan '11 9:25:10 AM by breadloaf

The thing is there's a perception that academics in this country get too involved in politics, particularly left-wing politics - a relic of the 60's, if you will.

That's universal. Universities tend to be left-wing except in countries where they were expressly broken into step. In those countries, the educational system tends to be rather broken.

Yes, but for many the particular brand of leftism is too strong. It's like someone who's OK with beer, but not with vodka.

Overton window varies by countries. The USA is one of the most far-right on average in the developed world. While other countries have "new fascists", those use basically far-letft rethoric + racism, so it's still more to the left than, say, the Tea Party.