Who was the first USA president? John Hanson anyone?

This poor performance of the Chinese isn’t surprising, or necessarily a reflection of Chinese IQ as opposed to Chinese GDP. But, it does give one pause at the idea of encouraging any kind of reasonably direct Western style democracy there.

Look at the populist demogauges that get elected in less enlightened parts of the U.S. and then make it worse by an order of magnitude. It is a wonder that the Chinese economy and society is thriving as well as it is given all of that.

Yet I still possess lots of knowledge about those things which I’ve gleaned from chance exposures – from magazines, books, and television shows which mentioned them. Watching a single episode of NOVA can give a person passing familiarity with the most basic aspects of that show’s topic.

So just how incurious, sheltered, and intellectually stunted does a person have to be before they remain unaware that the Earth goes around the Sun, in our society? (Clearly being a peasant in Sudan or something excuses such ignorance.)

My mother has a personal theory that the full moon affects people strangely because it exerts a greater gravitational pull on them than the new moon.

Rationality Rule #278: Before coming up with an explanation for some phenomenon, make sure that phenomenon actually happens…

After this (http://johnhawks.net/node/15383), I think a few seemingly secular archaeologists will start the site “Father Jose de Acosta is still right.”

Anecdotally, people from Catholic families in the U.S. whom I told a while ago about this and similar stats (e.g., the no. of Americans who believe in evolution) explained them as being “influenced by religion.”

Seriously.

Check the GDP per capita for China and compare with Japan and S.Korea>

A more accurate idea of how Chinese would think if they were wealthier is do the same survey in Taiwan.

Sherlock Holmes notoriously didn’t know the answer for precisely this reason. The obvious riposte is that wasting(!) brain time on stuff that’s not immediately relevant is part of what makes us human.

Nevertheless I’m much more concerned about the line in that table which suggests that nearly half of Americans, more than half of Europeans and the vast majority of Chinese think that antibiotics kill viruses. Way to make sure they don’t kill anything!

Since the fraction of responders who know anything more than middle-school science is very small, the imprecise questions simply do not matter.

for social science it is nice to have variance in responses you’re going to be awful close to ~ 0% accurate.

I would have thought the answer is quite defensibly False on one level, given we know the Big Bang had to have been preceded by some rendering of some singularity of forces; and the same on another level, given the lack of clarity as to whether the term universe refers what we on this planet and with the supplement of our satellites can SEE, in which case the answer would be … well, STILL False given the first objection, but at least ARGUABLY True, or whether instead the term refers to all possible entities that might qualify as universes, in which case the answer again is quite defensibly False.

This is not the ONLY problematically worded question. See for example the imprecision in the use of the term VERY HOT in relation to the center of the planet; that would certainly be hotter than the median surface temperature on the planet, but not even hot at all relation to the Sun or planets in this solar system closer to it, or indeed any one of the beellions of beellions of other stars in this universe, and not even hotter than particular parts of the planet at and above the surface.

And its not as if these problems are rendered less significant by the number of responders, for no amount of crowd-sourcing can possibly improve an inherently flawed survey question. The curse of science is that almost nothing is a simple and straightforward as we would like or as it might seem, and to me this survey fails for forcing simplicity into areas that science does not allow to be so simplified.