Brian Gettler@ct_bergstrom My objection, I guess, is seeing more science prescribed as the treatment for what is a problem of literacy. My colleagues and I spend our careers teaching about uncertainty, expertise, consensus, teaching how to weigh evidence and credibility, to detect perspective and critique systems, and to decide what all this tells us about claims being made. And yet - and this may only be correlation - while misinformation has grown, our enrolments have crashed (and continue to do so).
@ct_bergstrom Why not, then, promote what we already have? We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, we need students to learn about it. And, of course, part of the answer might well be team-taught courses or adjusting the content and aims of humanities courses to better meet the needs of STEM students. But it seems to me that leaving literacy education to scientists alone isn’t the answer – something, it seems, you agree with. I’d just like to see this message broadcast more clearly.
Carl T. Bergstrom@brian_gettler Brian, I fear I must have done a poor job with that Scientific American piece because this is not remotely what I am saying.
The charge of the working group whose report inspired the Scientific American piece was to figure out how we need to update science education for a misinformation age—in other words, answer the question "what do scientists need to do differently in their classes"?
You can see the report here: https://sciedandmisinfo.stanford.edu/about-report
@brian_gettler I suppose we (an interdisciplinary team among with fewer scientists than non-scientists) could have rejected our charge entirely, but it seems to me that since we do all this science teaching anyway, we might as well contribute — and that's the key word — to battling misinformation.
I don't know where you got the idea that we think that misinformation education should take place in the sciences exclusively.
We debated whether it belongs there at all.
@brian_gettler I've been saying for many years that for STEM students, courses in philosophy are indispensable both for detecting and refuting bad arguments, as well as for thinking well more generally. My view is that philosophy, literature, and history should be elevated at the expense of all the science requirements we impose.
That said, for Scientific American I was asked to write about what needs to be different *in the science classroom*.
Perhaps that is the source of confusion.
ForsettiAs someone ABD in philosophy, I couldn't agree more. The critical thinking skills and understanding what we know and why are indespensible in a quality education.
Athanasius@ct_bergstrom @brian_gettler This philosopher thanks you for our advocacy. It’s always a struggle to get scientists to acknowledge the need for anything like GE philosophy. (And I say this as someone pretty conversant in and sympathetic to science!)
Dr. Erik Klemetti Gonzalez@ct_bergstrom @brian_gettler This all supports the argument that a true liberal arts education is what is so badly missing across the country. Otherwise, college is just job training.
@ewklemetti @brian_gettler And my argument is that it's not even very good job training.
Over the past decade I've spoken with tech industry leaders around the world about this issue. What they want are not employees who merely can code or run a regression, they want people who are capable of asking what sort of analysis we need to do to get the answer we actually want instead of the one that we don't but is easy to compute.
@ct_bergstrom Yup, this is what I try to get across to student: first start with what you are trying to do before getting lost in how you're going to do it. As reductionist as it sounds, think before you act.
David J. Atkinson@ct_bergstrom @brian_gettler The importance of Ethics is not emphasized enough in STEM. We have a crisis in science with the growing number of papers that are retracted (few among many more that need to). Some are just bad as in poorly done science, but many are unethical in a number ways (e.g., bogus charts, ad hoc assumptions..plagiarism). If the scientific literature cannot be trusted, science falls apart. I could rant for pages. We need to train scientists to have the highest ethical standards, an undisputed reputation for ethical behavior, and responsibility to speak truth to power. That all comes from the Humanities.
I particularly commend climate scientists in this respect, and for their selflessness.