Last time I discussed about the mistakes we did in learning and teaching, and how it impacted our ability to think and produce new ideas. If you haven't read it, link below.

Season 0, Episode 8 - What's Fun About Netflix?

"The earth is flat." I hear this sentence everywhere : instagram, twitter, reddit, name it. At first I thought it was just a silly joke, but then I realised that it is not a joke. Some people really think that the earth is actually flat. My first questions were, "how many of us really think so?" and "why so sudden? It has been years since people stopped asking about this." I do a quick google search, and I found this article on Forbes :


"This can't be true," i thought. So I continued reading and found this very interesting table:

...and this is really confusing, don't you think? From this data, i thought, "okay, so this phenomenon is new." Then this graph from The Economist approved my hypothesis: 


There are two things to conclude. First, this is certainly new, the fact that people started asking again about the shape of our planet. Second, people tend to believe on public figure, who I am certain they don't know any single thing about science (because if they know, they wouldn't say so), than believing in experts.

Scientific Literacy is More Important Than Ever

As I said in previous blog posts, with the abundance of information at the moment, it is really hard to build a system that could separate the truths and the lies. Sure we are now developing machine learning, but it will take some time until it takes over the traffic of informations online. Most of the jobs in deleting fake news are still being done by humans. Some new examples are the tweets from the infamous Brazilian president (I think you know which one), that twitter decided to delete since it shared the false news about the novel coronavirus.

Back to the question, why does scientific literacy so important? Let me tell you this way. A random person just shouted an information on the street, that said "this machine could turn water to wine" (this news is actually real tho around 2014). When your brain received this information, it started to collect other relevant information around this topic. Maybe you ask, "what does it take to turn water to wine?" or "what makes wine, a wine?" If you don't have any relevant informations, your brain could not decide whether this information is true, so it leaves this decision to your guts. There is 50% chance you get this right. However, maybe you recall, there has to be a fermentation happening to produce wine, which means glucose is needed for this process to occur. But there is no glucose in water, so your brain might say, "oh, that cannot be true." 

This is basically how our knowledge evolve from time to time. We receive an information, recollect other relevant informations, then compare to make the call. The more relevant informations we got, the better our chance to make the right judgment. I think everybody understand this, right? This  actually what differentiate science and faith: the amount of other relevant informations needed to ensure us whether something is true. This is why it is so hard in science to propose a new theory that oppose other proven ones, since we have to basically ensure everyone that everything we know and learned are wrong.

Comparing Our Situation With Scientific Resolution


This exact situation actually happened during the scientific revolution. It is a series of events that marked the rise of physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, etc during the early modern period, around 1540s. These events really transformed how society see the nature, since beforehand the church "governed" the nature. We used to believe that everything church said was basically the truth, since we connected church with God, and everything about God has to be true, right? 😉

Series of experiments were conducted, and this didn't come at no cost. A lot of philosophers and scientist at that time were actually killed because they oppose something the society believed during that time. Maybe the most famous one is Galileo. If you don't know the story, he was basically killed because he said that earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around. But most importantly, this revolution actually works. Once books were written in more casual languages, the way ordinary people could read and understand the concepts, people started to accepting it. 

This trend keeps developing, and maybe 'revolution' is not the correct word to describe the situation right now, since we don't have something to fight with, as early modern scientists have to do with church at that time. Now we don't have to do experiments from zero to make sure a proven theory is indeed correct. The way we learn science is more 'direct', we are just accepting the fact, without having to do complicated stuffs. But, does it come at a cost?

Back to The Future


This is our downfall. The way we learn science actually kills science itself. Science doesn't mean to be learned instantly, it needs process. However, this evolution already shaped our brain that we have no instant urges to ask more questions, just accepting the fact. 'Why' and 'How' questions are rarely heard this day, comparing to 'What' ones. And now we are at the peak of this evolution, which showed by the graph that our young generations don't believe in science anymore; they rather believe on popular opinions.

The problem with an evolution is there is only a little amount of people that realised it is happening right now. When some do realised, they are easily outnumbered by the people who do not find a problem with the current situation, and when they realised, we are already gone too far. There is still indeed time to fix this, but I personally think this won't happen soon. With other emerging problems such as healthcare systems, economics, and energy, education will be the 100th priority on the list. The only thing we could do is to make sure that more people start to realise the situation and consider this as a greatest problem for our future.