I'm going to be that guy about GMO crops. If we were modifying them to be drought resistant or need less water, I'd be all for it. Instead, what we modify them for is to be "roundup ready" meaning that glyphosate can be sprayed liberally on it without killing it making weeding the field much easier. I am not concerned about the GMO crop, but I am concerned with all my food being covered in Roundup.

This whole thread is a box of rocks.

'Leave no child behind' was/is a bad policy. You can't call yourself a major league player when you're still hitting from the tee.

The sad thing is those people did take those classes.

that's the same people who later get to helm companies and say "who the fuck needs market research when you have the force of will"

I think equally important as teaching these things to begin with is letting students know when they're being taught a simplified model, and that serious academic discourse of the subject is still evolving and/or involves much more nuance (which is pretty much always). some people who do pay attention in science classes nonetheless think that what they learned is gospel and never re-examine it, or stubbornly refuse to acknowledge when said nuance is relevant because it seems to contradict the simplified model they've cemented in their brain as the whole truth. the kind of people who say things like "I know there's two genders because I learned it in high school biology" and apparently never considered why there would be collegiate and post-graduate studies on biology and gender (or why those are two entirely different fields of study) if we all already learned everything there is to know in high school.

Real talk: those “boring” science classes aren’t about memorizing facts — they teach you how to spot bad claims and check sources. That skill pays off forever.

Does that mean that the people who got an A in biology are more right than people who got a B in biology?

As a kid I always thought a lot of stuff taught was like, duh, so obvious. It took being thrown in the adult world to see hmm... I guess... not obvious enough???

To be fair, most schools give those classes only out of obligation. Doing dumb calculations of mols and atomic masses in high school is definitely teaching kids to ask "why the fuck am I even doing this?"

And billionaires love people like that because it keeps the most obsessive of us focused away from the greed.

Internet contains the whole knowledge of humanity.... the other 98% are influencers, ChatGPT posts, memes, cat photos, fake news, bots and flat earthers.

The "do your own research" people need to have it explained to them that even experts in their respective fields aren't automatically capable of parsing scientific literature. A family doctor with 50 years experience who prescribes antidepressants every day will have no deep understanding of what any particular scientific peer reviewed study on SSRIs is telling them. They need a grounding in statistics more than anything else, which most people just don't have. So the idea that a non-educated, non-scientist can read peer reviewed studies and come away from them with some sort of understanding of the issue is the thing that needs to be highlighted, preferably in high school science class (earlier, frankly). A willingness to slog through scientific papers in pursuit of deeper knowledge is admirable, but is dangerously misguided without proper training. I don't even mean training in the specific science, but just in how to speak the language of peer reviewed studies more generally. It's very much its own discipline.

I want someone to ask Joe Rogan what 'regression to the mean' means. I want someone to ask him what a 'standard deviation' is and how to apply the concept. I don't want to know what papers he's read, because you could read 50 true scientific papers a day on one topic and still have no idea what the current scientific consensus is on said topic, absent the requisite training. You'll almost certainly come away from it with a very wrong but very confident belief. Dunning-Kruger on steroids.