Should We Teach All Students to Think like Scientists?

Issues such as climate change illustrate that scientists, even if armed with overwhelming evidence, are at times powerless to change minds or motivate action. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, people in the U.S., one of the countries that emits the most carbon, were among the least concerned about the potential impact of climate change. (…) For many, knowledge about the natural world is superseded by personal beliefs. (…) It is imperative for the next generation of leaders in science to be aware of the psychological, social and cultural factors that affect how people understand and use information. (…)
Scientists cannot work in silos and expect to improve the world, particularly when false narratives have become entrenched in communities. This is especially true in tackling issues such as public trust in vaccines, a topic that is flooded with misleading information, despite a lack of legitimate scientific evidence supporting the view that they are unsafe.

It is very easy to agree with these observations by social psychologist Peter Salovey, current President of Yale University – and, in general, I do agree with him. Referring to climate change, Salovey properly points out that, at least in the US, the public do not seem to be very concerned about it. The reasons of such attitude, instead of being sought (only) in the lack of science literacy and technical reasoning ability, should be also identified in the power of personal beliefs, that can lead people to frame issues in ways which conflict with scientific evidence.

The Loop of Democracy

Irrational Absurd Triangle Escher Triangle Geometry

Back in 1992, American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama published the influential essay The End of History and the Last Man. His main thesis pointed out that, after the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy was destined to become, gradually, the final form of government. After 25 years, we may argue that (somehow) he was right – but probably not for the reason he thought. Even if we certainly live in deeply chaotic times, history is far from being come to an end. Nevertheless, liberal democracies may represent the final (or terminal) form of government (at least in Western countries) not because they are the best option available, but because of the incapability of conceiving something different. In other words, I fear we are not moving forward since we are short-sighted, and not because we have found a settlement so good that it is preferable not to leave it.

Idyillic Nightmares

Norman Rockwell, Whispering Sweepstakes (1963)

Connectivity benefits everyone. Those who have none will have some, and those who have a lot will have even more. To demonstrate that, imagine you are a young urban professional living in an American city a few decades from now. (…) Your apartment is an electronic orchestra, and you are the conductor. With simple flicks of the wrist and spoken instructions, you can control temperature, humidity, ambient music and lighting. You are able to skim through the day’s news on translucent screens while a freshly cleaned suit is retrieved from your automated closet because your calendar indicates an important meeting today. (…) You take another sip of coffee, feeling confident that you’ll impress your clients. You already feel as if you know them, though you’ve never met in person, since your meetings have been conducted in a virtual-reality interface. (…) There’s a bit of time left before you need to leave for work – which you’ll get to by driverless car, of course. Your car knows what time you need to be in the office each morning based on your calendar and, after factoring in traffic data, it communicates with your wristwatch to give you a sixty-minute countdown to when you need to leave the house. (…) You think about having another cup of coffee, but then a haptic device (“haptic” refers to technology that involves touch and feeling) that is embedded in the heel of your shoe gives you a gentle pinch – a signal that you’ll be late for your morning meeting if you linger any longer.

This amazing look at our bright future was described in The new digital age: reshaping the future of people, nations and business (pp. 28-30), a 2013 bestseller penned by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. Bill Clinton praised it, and Richard Branson described it as “a brilliant guidebook for the next century”. Schmidt and Cohen do love the Digital Age. Unfortunately, their judgement may be slightly biased by the fact that they both work for Google. The former is currently the Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc., the multibillionaire corporation parenting Google, while the latter is the CEO of Jigsaw, a technology incubator created by… Google. This implies that the future “of people, nations and business” they present in the book may be heavily influenced by the business plans of their own company.

The Finger and the Moon

One of the most daunting aspects about technology is represented by the highly unpredictable consequences it always implies. Mankind creates and shapes technology, but we may argue that the latter tends to produce – as we are reminded by Newton’s Third Law of physics – an almost “equal and opposite reaction”. Sometime, the outcomes are better than expected; sometimes, they are worse; sometimes, they are not expected at all, and they may even turn out to reverse the effect initially meant to be obtained. We could say, by using the own words of French poet Paul Valery, that we are increasingly embedded into a very complex ICT-led system “that is leading us… we do not know and can by no means imagine where”.

Take the internet, for instance. It was initially conceived to connect electronic devices and people by creating a horizontal network: the core idea was to communicate and share data and information in a simpler and faster manner. Economic elements appeared to be secondary, if not irrelevant at all. With the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, this idea was brought to the entire globe and gradually spread to a massive scale, ending up involving billions of people. After more than 25 years, many people are enjoying the advantages brought by the internet. But the incoming revolution so widely praised in the 1990s seems to be producing also unexpected and unintended outcomes.

Democracy, Public Spheres and the Internet: a Tangled Relationship

In this period, I am reading plenty of things about the concept of public sphere (Habermas in primis) while reflecting on the very complex relationship between ICTs, society and politics. I am trying to find out what angle I may adopt to address such topic in a proper way. And it is not easy at all. Is a society defined more effectively by its inner clashes or by its more lasting bonds? Is it still correct to use the expression “information society” in 2017? Is politics “as we knew it” in the 20^th century still alive? Do formal representative democracies still make sense? Are public spheres agonizing together with a weaker and weaker (and poorer) middle class? Is it actually possible to build public spheres within mass societies where the boundaries between public and private/intimate are more and more blurred?

Rising Idiocracies? A Political Reflection

Whenever I think about contemporary politics (and about western political leaders in particular) there is always a movie sequence that comes to my mind: the final scene of Burn After Reading, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen almost ten years ago. The always excellent J.K. Simmons plays a CIA Superior who is questioning an Officer (David Rasche) about the result of an operation aimed at recovering a mysterious disk. The problem is that they have made an incredible mess, casualties included. The CIA Superior suggests they should learn something from the errors committed, but since they do not know exactly what they have done, there cannot be a lesson to learn. Next time, things will likely get even worse.

The Coen’s movie, full of dumb characters who cause serious damage while barely realizing it, may be interpreted as the portrait of a country (or, maybe, of the entire western society) whose politics has reached its terminal state: harmful idiocy. If one considers – just to make a few recent examples – the arrogant and devastating foreign policies of the Bush and Obama administrations, UK former Prime Minister David Cameron’s suicidal referendum about Brexit, the ineptitude of former French President François Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s very questionable policies on immigration and the agonizing, ridiculous Italian political class, the doubt is as chilling as inevitable. Is there an epidemic of criminal idiocy spreading throughout our societies, or this is just the inevitable outcome of decades of bad education, greed and very short-sighted decisions?