I’m here at NYU setting up the MEG this morning, but Chad’s got the first ScienceBlogs review of Unscientific America over at Uncertain Principles:
To my mind, though, the really important parts of the book are Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, on political and media culture, respectively. They lay out in great and depressing detail just how the culture of science fails to match up with the ways that politics and the mass media work, and how it got to be this way. The problems really are huge, and if anything, they’re getting worse, not better.
He ends with:
This is a very good book, well argued and engagingly written. There’s a lot of good stuff here, and a lot of food for thought about the history and future of science in America. I suspect I’ll be boring you all with posts about different aspects of the book for most of this week. I recommend, though, that you pick up a copy and check it out for yourself. Even if you’ve read their blog, Unscientific America presents the most complete and coherent version of their basic policy argument you’re likely to find, and it’s well worth reading.
Read the full review here and check back at Uncertain Principles for more on Unscientific America all week. I think Chris will also be responding to this post by Orzel, in which he notes that he doesn’t like the phenomenon of “un-noted endnotes,” which we use aplenty….
July 6th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
hey Sheril and Chris, just wanted to say i got your book in the mail today, plan to start reading it tomorrow
July 7th, 2009 at 7:33 am
Awesome, we hope you like….
July 9th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Chris, over at PZ’s blog you said that, in contrast to PZ, Chad Orzel did find some solutions to the illiteracy prolem in your book. I pointed out that he, in fact, didn’t: “I don’t have a solution … We could all use some brilliant suggestions …”. Even in his original review post, he only does some very vague hand-waving:
Whatever he’s found, he doesn’t really seem to be able to get anything across that’s at all specific.
I’m honestly curious, since I’m an educator and journalist dealing with science topics regularly myself, what your proposed solutions are. Would you perhaps care to share one or two sentences about that here on the blog?