Reefer Ramble & Others VIII

We were concerned that these kinds of beliefs are much more widespread than people thought, so we decided to test that here. The sample we took is not representative of Spain. It is a convenient sample, but it’s a very particular kind. We got a little more than 1,200 answers to the survey, and half of that was conducted amongst students in our university, which has three big faculties—engineering, business, and social sciences. Many of the CEOs in Spain are alumni of our school, and the employability record of our students is really high. And the percentage of people who answered the survey that are in the top bracket in terms of salary is pretty high. The other half consisted of people with disproportionately high income with a college education. So we’re kind of stacking the dice against us. You would expect that this is not something you would find amongst a sample of highly educated rich people! Well, we did.

We found that 17 percent said they were not sure the Earth was round. This is very worrying to us. In theory, you give people education and things like this can disappear. People who have very high means have easy access to education. They should not fall for this. They are also not disenfranchised. You may think, well, there’s a lot of conspiracy theories going around for people who feel disenfranchised. This is not the case for this sample. There’s still a percentage who do not know as much about science as they think they do. They still feel they are above the rest.

This might have to do with a mistrust of the social part of scientific reasoning. So there is a chunk of Flat-Earth believers who brand themselves as the only true skeptics alive. (“No, I will not believe anything that I cannot test myself.”) There are many things that are very difficult to test. It sometimes takes a certain amount of skill, or knowledge of mathematics, to be able to conclusively prove some things. Even people who dedicated their lives entirely to science have only so much time. Most of what we take as empirically falsifiable scientific truth we cannot falsify