Earth revolves around the sun? 1 in 4 Americans say nope

Indigent
reply to post by boncho

 

this is the guy that put his name on the survey, tell him his work is crap.

His survey is crap. You want me to send him an email? As Occam's razor said, the chances may be that the numbers are actually a lot higher.

25% of the population doesn't know the Earth revolves around the sun?

Here's some more statistics:

15% of US lives in poverty. Probably couldn't care less if the Earth revolved around a magical donkey.
46% belive in creationist origins. Earth doesn't revolve around the sun, and god farted man into existence.

reply to post by boncho

And why you have to come to my thread an insult other peoples believes exactly?

If a god farted or not is not related to the op


Last time i check the church send to hell the one that said this first and latter rectified, so religion have no room in this

Indigent
reply to post by boncho

 

Stop using straw mans i said sampling not polls

The actual report:

www.nsf.gov...

People are idiots. So asking their opinion, answers or anything, is just never going to be scientific.

But very close!

reply to post by Indigent


My ex fiance actually thought this for a while...probably still does and she just didn't want to argue about it anymore. Her kid even caught her on video saying so.

That was how I found out about it. The school had a project for the kids to film/tape their parents asking them to explain how the earths rotation & orbit affected the seasons. I wish I still had it. It was quite funny. You can hear me in the background saying, "UG! Earth Flat!", followed by her dirty look, but I was laughing my butt off.

reply to post by boncho




lol.."my momma told me stupid is stupid does"

reply to post by boncho

People are idiots. So asking their opinion...

Do you deny being people? Are you a reptilian?

If you are people why you give your opinion and said this at the same time?

As i said sampling is science stop using straw man on this.

First you say its trash then you say its more

Go home bro you are drunk

skyblueworld
I think this boils down to lack of education, or a complete ignorance towards it.
I would go as far as saying if this study was held in the UK, it would have the same results, if not worse.
I agree with the dumbing down of our society, or people have become very lazy!

I've seen previous results.

It used to be 1 in 5 in the US and 1 in 4 in the UK, roughly. Now that this says 1 in 4 in the US also, that would match the prior UK survey I read about.

I had a hard time accepting so many people didn't know which orbits which, because nobody I know personally thinks the sun orbits the Earth.

Then I went to the motor vehicles department to get my drivers license after moving to a new state, and I met a bunch of people there I normally don't encounter in my daily life. After that experience the statistic seems a little bit more plausible.

I don't really have a problem with the sample size. How the questions are worded is pretty important though.

reply to post by Indigent


Im busting your balls.

Social sciences will never be exact. That's the only point I was making. 100% of people willing to take a telephone survey answered how they would answer in most of the data sets. You can take that one to the bank.

A few of them came from face to face and questionnaires too.

www.youtube.com...

reply to post by Arbitrageur

It used to be 1 in 5 in the US and 1 in 4 in the UK, roughly. Now that this says 1 in 4 in the US also, that would match the prior UK survey I read about.

I had a hard time accepting so many people didn't know which orbits which, because nobody I know personally thinks the sun orbits the Earth.

I think the graduation rate in the US is around 70%.

So that kind of fits. I'm not sure if it has any deeper meaning beyond people not caring though, or having any effect on their lives. A few businessmen I know wouldn't be able to tell you the difference between an electron and a proton, name the planets, nor understand why we have day & night cycles but they are very smart gents otherwise.

reply to post by Indigent


Technically, they are right depending on how the question was asked. If it was a straight out 'Does the sun rotate around the earth' then no would be correct.

If it was 'does the earth revolve around the sun' the answer no would also be correct.

Soo...that one in four are correct.

reply to post by boncho


Telephone survey, right. There they are, watching 'American Idol' when the phone rings. They are asked a series of questions which they answer randomly, just to be done with it. Some of them deliberately give the 'wrong' answers just to mess with the interviewer. No, this was not a very tightly controlled survey.

From the report:

News followed “very closely” by American public: 1996–2012

Celebrity news.....................................................................….. 2008 7%
Science and technology......................................................……… … 2008 13%

This ones a little troubling. I think more people know about Bieber getting arrested than Hawking making his comments on black holes.

DJW001
reply to post by boncho

 

Telephone survey, right. There they are, watching 'American Idol' when the phone rings. They are asked a series of questions which they answer randomly, just to be done with it. Some of them deliberately give the 'wrong' answers just to mess with the interviewer. No, this was not a very tightly controlled survey.

Don't be silly. American Idol fans never answer the phone because they have to vote for their favs.

iunlimited491
reply to post by Indigent

 

A couple thousand people hardly speaks for the entire population.


Think about it; America is actually smart enough to take over the world!

- wouldn't you agree?

Nope, its the few who happen to have gray cells ones that actually using the mass mash potatoes population to take over the world. Mindless zombies is fun, if you know where and how to put the brains.

Evolution and the Big Bang
The GSS survey includes two additional true-or-false
science questions that are not included in the index calculation
because Americans’ responses appear to reflect factors
beyond unfamiliarity with basic elements of science.
One of these questions addresses evolution, and the other
addresses the origins of the universe. To better understand
Americans’ responses, the 2012 GSS replicated an experiment
first conducted in 2004 (NSB 2006). Half of the survey
respondents were randomly assigned to receive questions
focused on information about the natural world (“human beings,
as we know them today, developed from earlier species
of animals” and “the universe began with a big explosion”).
The other half were asked the questions with a preface that
focused on conclusions that the scientific community has
drawn about the natural world (“according to the theory of
evolution, human beings, as we know them today, developed
from earlier species of animals” and “according to astronomers,
the universe began with a big explosion”).
In 2012, respondents were much more likely to answer
both questions correctly if the questions were framed as being
about scientific theories or ideas rather than about natural
world facts. For evolution, 48% of Americans answered
“true” when presented with the statement that human beings
evolved from earlier species with no preface, whereas 72%
of those who received the preface said “true,” a 24 percentage
point difference.14 These results replicate the pattern from
2004, when the percentage answering “true” went from 42%
to 74%, a 32 percentage point difference (NSB 2008). For
the big bang question, the pattern was very similar: in 2012,
39% of Americans answered “true” when presented with the
statement about the origin of the universe without the preface,
whereas 60% of those who heard the statement with
the preface answered “true.” This represents a 21 percentage
point difference. The 2004 experiment found that including
the preface increased the percentage who answered correctly

"the universe began with a big explosion"

This question is actually kind of funny. There's quite a few physicists that would either answer N/A to a true or false question, or simply say false.

Well evetything else seems to revolve round the USA :p

reply to post by lordtez


its only counter intuitive if you are completely unaware that the earth rotates

boncho
"the universe began with a big explosion"

This question is actually kind of funny. There's quite a few physicists that would either answer N/A to a true or false question, or simply say false.

I agree, though it's also sad that science education is so poor, the people designing the question to evaluate knowledge of science don't know enough science to ask a properly worded question (or maybe as you implied they actually knew what they were doing and intentionally skewed the result with a poorly worded question? Who knows?)

Even the wikipedia article says:

en.wikipedia.org...

The Big Bang is not an explosion....

And I've heard many physicists say it wasn't an explosion, so it seems sad to ask about an explosion as if that's a valid test of scientific knowledge.

boncho
46% belive in creationist origins. Earth doesn't revolve around the sun, and god farted man into existence.

I saw it on TV so it must be true:

Fart Big Bang