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.

On a related note having 6 different classes a day 8 hours total times 5 days a week made it impossible to learn properly.

There are something like 10 million students attending Christian school and the like, and another 5 million or so being home schooled.

They don't really believe in the scientific method and critical thinking, in general. At least in my experience as a student of a Christian school. I had no idea.

Ignorance is piss

I took the minimum amount of science classes in highschool. Lack of science education is less of a problem than teaching you how to sort through bullshit and analytical thinking. I basically think that our school system needs to stop focusing so hard on teaching things from the textbooks in an ever-changing world that's cherry picked from an endless wealth of knowledge and focus more on learning how to be skeptical and check various sources and such. In school it seemed like research was always just a backseat to the goal, instead of the goal itself.

Stay curious‼️ 🤔

I found by high school the kids who said that (that hadn't dropped out) moved onto a different argument by that age

Honestly, I know it ruins the joke, but I don't think there's as much overlap between the top and bottom groups as one may suspect

My highschool chemistry teacher almost got kicked out of her university for trying to pipette hydrochloric acid with her mouth. That's who I want teaching chemistry, the crazy woman who knows what it means to fuck up, bad. Not some honor roll, life plan having baby bitch.

I always found science and history interesting even though i hated school.

Maths though, i always resented "you wont always have a calculator" … but now as im older i imagine kids today having a similar idea about "AI" and i can see that not ending well for anyone. 

If we want children to learn these things, we should teach them these things directly, instead of relying on science classes. I'm not saying we should get rid of science classes, but the people who are saying these stupid things did actually take science classes in school.

We desperately need to teach classes that are specific. I learned a lot about problem solving from math classes, but I was shocked when I tutored other kids, and they only learned the math, but had no idea how to approach problems. And I don't mean just word problems, but literally even if you just give them multiple equations and variables.

My tutoring often went like this: "I can't solve this!" "What information to they give you? What answer do they want? What can you do with the stuff that they've given you to get the answer?" And then they get the answer. Then repeat. Literally no math involved in the tutoring for math class.

So, we need required classes, early, like in elementary school, that specifically teach problem solving, critical thinking, how to detect misinformation, and what I'll call empathy. By "empathy", I mean the ability to imagine yourself in another person's shoes so that you can predict why they're doing what they're doing. It's essential for detecting misinformation because you need to trust somebody at some point, so you need to understand how to tell who is more likely to be trustworthy. I also think we should teach children meditation techniques.

I don't agree with this. The stuff written by, for example, the "vaccines cause autism" people can sound as sophisticated and authoritative as any textbook. A high-school education isn't going to help someone judge it according to its merits. Thus the problem is a collapse of trust in authority rather than a lack of basic knowledge, because ultimately an ordinary person can only decide to trust the scientific consensus without meaningfully verifying it.