Thursday, October 17, 2013

Scientific Literacy


For John, BLUFWait for the punch line.  Nothing to see here; just move along.



Politico reports on Yale law professor Dan Kahan, who "posted on his blog this week that he analyzed the responses of more than 2,000 American adults recruited for another study and found that, on average, people who leaned liberal were more science literate than those who leaned conservative."

OK, that confirms the accepted wisdom.  It explains why conservatives, whatever they are, are skeptical about "global warming".

However, those who identified as part of the tea party movement were actually better versed in science than those who didn’t, Kahan found.  The findings met the conventional threshold of statistical significance, the professor said.
Who would have thought?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

2 comments:

  1. The comments section in the blog post contain some interesting back and forth and give at least some reasons for skepticism with his conclusion.

    In the course of some people wanting to dig into the details, I found this comment particularly funny:

    "Well, for starts, thanks to the shutdown, I can't go to the NSF website and check out what might be on the NSF Science Indicators test."

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gee whiz, when I ignore my blog for a couple of days, it doesn't go away . Nor my lame web site.

    Is it a "shutdown" issue or more about "headspace and timing"?

    Regards  —  Cliff

    ReplyDelete

Please be forthright, but please consider that this is not a barracks.