[Vision2020] Eureka! Tea partiers know science

Paul Rumelhart godshatter at yahoo.com
Fri Oct 18 09:02:19 PDT 2013


>From politico.com: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/tea-party-science-98488.html

Never underestimate those you disagree with. It's also a good example of how following only those news outlets you agree with can affect your perception of reality.

Paul




Eureka! Tea partiers know science
By TAL KOPAN | 10/17/13 1:53 PM EDT Updated: 10/17/13 3:42 PM EDT

 
A finding in a study on the relationship between science literacy and political ideology surprised the Yale professor behind it: Tea 
party members know more science than non-tea partiers.

Yale law professor Dan Kahan 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.
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.


Kahan wrote that not only did the findings surprise him, they embarrassed him.

“I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I 
pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected 
I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the 
Tea Party and science comprehension,” Kahan wrote.

“But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the tea party,” he continued. “All my impressions come from watching cable 
tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the ‘paper’ 
(New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused Internet sites like Huffington Post and POLITICO). I’m a little embarrassed, but 
mainly, I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken 
view.”

While Kahan cautioned against thinking the results can be used to 
explain deep ideological fights over climate change and other 
politically relevant science, and he said the results wouldn’t change 
his negative views of the tea party, he did say he will no longer make 
assumptions about the level of knowledge on his opponents’ side.
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