This is old, but it absolutely floored me when I found it today.
Every couple of years, the National Science Foundation puts out data from surveys about science and technology. And every once in a while, they ask this innocuous question:
Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?
Think carefully.
Now in 2004, what percentage of Americans got it right? Take a guess, and then highlight the blank space underneath to see if you were close.
Only 71% got it right.
And other countries are even worse, except on the evolution question, where the US is among the worst. Here’s a messy text file with more results, and here’s an Excel file if you’re keen.
What are we to make of this in this day and age? That the difficulty of eradicating ignorance increases asymptotically?
24 January 2007 at 1:01 am
ok. I’ll bite. being from the unwashed masses:)
What are we to make of this in this day and age? That the difficulty of eradicating ignorance increases asymptotically?
I’m not sure what this means. Do you mean that as you get closer to 0% wrong answers it gets increasingly harder to make progress?
So we have 29% of the population getting this question wrong. So, statistacly what percentage can we throw away for things like: people who know the right answer but accidentaly chose the wrong answer, people who pick the wrong answer just to be contrary or to joke etc.
heres a question. Why is it and what does it say about us that we can ask a trivia question about, oh lets say, Paris hilton, that 98% of the population can get right but time after time questions like these seem to hit about the 1 in 4 area?
24 January 2007 at 6:00 am
Yeah, that’s what I meant.
I would love to see them mix in some Paris Hilton questions. The headline: “More people can identify Britney’s crotch than Mars.”
Sorry to make you think of that, but I didn’t know how else to put it.