Miss USA 2011 — Should Math Be Taught In Schools?

I’d actually have a bit of faith in the left if they were teaching solid science skills in schools to kids

In order to do that, the teachers would have to teach critical thinking skills, the evaluation of empirical evidence, the construction of logical argument ... all of these are opposed to their underlying liberal agenda; which is to keep the people stupid and dependent on the government so they don't figure out how to think on their own.

Teaching science well breeds a lot of skepticism. That’s healthy. The left isn’t interested in that at all. All they want is consensus in their political agenda.

You hit it perfectly. I'm so tired of the left claiming that the whole global warming thing is science. Science requires experimentation, and proof. The GW crowd has yet to show that they can make consistently accurate predictions. They did the first two parts of the scientific mt hod, formulate a theory, make predictions based on that theory, and stopped right there. The science can't be settled until you complete the experiment.

No matter how much you attack the opposition it doesn't change the fact that in either the cases of Evolution or Global warming they have not been able to make observable, falsifiable and accurate predictions. And until you do that it isn't settled science. That doesn't mean that the other view is automatically right, it just means that on that subject there is no settled science.

After all Newton said that there could be no random events, then Quantum Mechanics showed that in fact there are random events. Einstein said that black holes were just an artifact of mathematics and couldn't actually exist. Then we found them. Einstein also said that the Universe was constant in size and had no beginning or end. We now know that it definitely expanding, had a beginning, and will end. When I was a kid the scientists were sure that Dinosaurs died because the Earth got colder, now we are sure they died because they got hit by a big space rock. Just image what we will be sure of tomorrow, that just isn't so.

Teaching science well breeds a lot of skepticism.

What do you mean by skepticism?

Teaching science well breeds the ability to:

Properly ask a question.

Understand what a question is really asking.

Recognize hidden assumptions within the question.

Know the form that the answer to a question will take.

Understand what must be done in order to form a relevant answer to a question.

Assess the validity of various possible answers to a question.

Science isn't just about asking questions. It's about answering them.

Skepticism, it seems to me, is about asking questions, and hiding from answers. The left is really good at skepticism.

“Skepticism, it seems to me, is about asking questions, and hiding from answers. The left is really good at skepticism.”

Mr. ArrogantBustard :-) ...

We are in agreement. I should have been clearer. Science should always keep you questioning things from a curiosity standpoint. My use of the word skeptic is probably poor. I guess I got caught up in too much of the junk science aspect I was discussing.

I’m an engineer myself and find myself being a skeptic (far too much that I should) of things like simulation tools and the like :-). If I had $1 for every bug I have found in things like SPICE models and VHDL/Verilog IP cores all the way up to the simulation environments myself, I would have retired the national debt many times over (hyperbole there ;-) ). I’ve wasted many hours chasing problems that weren’t my own :-).

On a side note, my experience with these simulation tools makes me giggle at those “climate models” the “experts” use. Some of the tools I use have literally millions of man hours of development behind them yet still have bugs that produce erroneous results. Moreover, should the models of components themselves have errors, one gets, you guessed it, erroneous results.

Now, modeling the Earth’s climate has millions of variables to take into account :-) ... I cannot buy that their simulations of a system as complex as the planet’s climate are anything resembling accurate!!!! There’s so much we still do not understand about the planet itself ... I can’t see how these bozos can peddle their doom and still call their selves scientists. I honestly think historians are going to have some hilarious things to write about these “scientists” long after we’re gone.

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