Real live nuts
Topics: Thoughts | February 10, 2009 @ 4:19 PM
I was on the bus today on my way to school when I overheard some (older) people talking. One lady seemed to have mentioned bipolar disorder, to which the other responded “Yeah, it’s such bullshit, everyone has bipolar.” They mentioned a few other things, such as how doctors use them as guinea pigs and how she (the second lady) has now, at 44, started getting strokes because she’s been on Prozac for 20 years (and her doctor had been using her as a guinea pig, evidently). Another lady also pointed out how we’ve started using all these pills because people stopped believing in God and stopped praying, to which the others (of course) agreed.
Oh, sweet Jesus. This is one of the things that really, and I mean really, scares me. I’m frightened to the bone, terrified, in horror of the fact that there can be such a lack of education floating around. And while I always read (online or offline) about such craziness, it’s something entirely different to encounter it for oneself. As I pointed out to some friends the other day, it’s almost comforting when you see someone offering some pseudoscientific solution to <insert your problem here> for some fee, because that’s familiar; people are just scamming others and I can understand that. But when people just put this stuff forth because they actually think it’s real – that’s something I cannot understand.
I really see now the need for organizations such as The Skeptics Society and the James Randi Educational Foundation. Unfortunately, they don’t get nearly the exposure and visibility that they need except from people who already agree with them! Part of the reason, I suppose, is that skeptics aren’t, by definition, driven by the fanaticism that drives religion and pseudoscience. I hope one day the JREF gets the support it needs to really educate the public about this stuff, and I hope even more that its existence becomes unnecessary.
This does bring up some thoughts in my head. Firstly, as much as I think the public are a bunch of idiots, they are after all the public, and if we want them to make informed decisions we can’t rely on them to become informed and have to inform them ourselves. Scientists need to move beyond just research and need to incorporate, as parts of their jobs, to educate the public on what it is they’re doing.
Another thing is that our education system needs revamping. Basic education – that shared by all citizens – should be guaranteed and should incorporate not (necessarily) knowledge of how to use a formula or how chemicals interact, but what science is, how it works, and why we do it. It’d be interesting to see what would happen if we intervened in the salary of teachers and jacked it up to attract more people and introduce competition. Sam Seaborn (on The West Wing) got it absolutely right when he said schools should be palaces and teachers should be paid six-figure salaries.
Lastly, it seems to me that religion is not the problem; people are. Religion is just another irrational belief, and people love irrational beliefs. Take away religion and people will fall to something else. While religion can induce particular (even violent) fanaticism, fundamentally the underlying issue is the lack of education on how the world works and how we learn more about it.
I urge everyone to support The Skeptics Society and the JREF, even if that doesn’t mean anything more than becoming a member. The Skeptics Society membership gets you the quarterly Skeptic magazine, which covers a great variety of things (not just skepticism-related stuff; for example, they had a great article a while back discussing the problems with psychiatry) and one I enjoy greatly (in contrast to Discover, to which I thankfully no longer have a subscription). But other than supporting these groups, what else can we do? What else can we do locally? How do we educate people? It’s a tough question, and one to which I desperately hope we find an answer.
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February 10th, 2009 @ 4:35 PM
Exactly! Irrationality leads to most of the problems that we see in the world and is rampant in all sectors of the populous.
As for local solutions, check out these:
Edmonton Skeptics Society
Centre For Inquriy – Calgary (and Alberta)
The ground work has started, and its slowly moving beyond conferences and online forums.
February 10th, 2009 @ 9:32 PM
[...] Real live nuts – heuristicism [...]
March 30th, 2009 @ 2:21 PM
If those ladies REALLY knew what bipolar was, they would know that there’s no way that ‘everyone’ has bipolar disorder… lol. They should come work with me for a few days and meet some interesting people.