This review (found by Mike) was far more coherent than the book it was reviewing, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirschenbaum.

I checked out the book from the library because I really liked this excerpt, of which my favorite thought follows: (ex-excerpt)

The anti-vaccination advocates are scientifically incorrect; there’s little doubt of that at this point. But whether they could be called “ignorant” or “scientifically illiterate” is less clear. After all, they’ve probably done far more independent research about a scientific topic that interests and affects them than most Americans have.

Now I find this a really intriguing quandary. You ask any crank who believes the opposite of your views, and they’ll generally have reasons, well thought out or less so, but reasons, and usually some numbers or ratios that support their ideas. These numbers may very well be wrong. But numbers! They spouted numbers!

And the thing is, it’s very hard to have that good of a grasp of which numbers are actually correct and significant. It takes a lot of research, a lot of time invested, to learn the jargon of a particular field, and then learn what ideas are well understood and agreed upon by the experts, and which are not. You need that kind of context to be able to weigh outlier opinions and determine whether they express ignorance of facts obvious within the field, or whether they bring up criticisms of ideas that really haven’t been fleshed out, or weaknesses that have been revealed with recent events. The huge majority of people don’t have that kind of understanding.

This book doesn’t profess that we should get everyone to that level of knowledge (which I agree would be impossible), but it also doesn’t have any suggestions on how to differentiate between the cacophony of claims. Ok, so they could have gone in several directions, but while the authors fault “deregulation and decades of mergers [in the media]…. cutting down on substance and quality” and “programming to the least common denominator,” I failed to find any content in their own work. Challenge your readers, dammit, or at least don’t waste their time. I gave up after chapter two and only skimmed the rest.

Maybe it was a problem of not having a target audience. This book is not a book about science and it tries very hard not to alienate the public; there are no big or field-specific words. But it also takes as a given the scientific findings on those exact topics where alarmingly large portions of the public have gotten it wrong. More broadly, I saw no discussion about critical thinking and why we’re so bad at it, or the interplay between fact and myth, or the psychological or evolutionary reasons why we mistake the two, and only a brief mention of how the rest of the world manages with educating their unscientific masses. It’s not even about the threats in our future and how to meet them as a culture, nor did I find any suggestions on how to make the ideas and process of science more interesting and relevant to the public. Just, resurrect Carl Sagan and get out there in the public eye:

We must all rally toward a single goal: Without sacrificing the growth of knowledge or scientific innovation, we must invest in a sweeping project to make science relevant to the whole of American’s citizenry.

It does not bode well in keeping the attention of the masses when you can’t even engage and interest receptive readers that agree that we have a genuine and significant problem on our hands.