alex chiang: web 6.0

First, thanks to David over at mind poison for linking to me. If you’re one of the saps who reads my dreck on a somewhat regular basis, you should consider popping on over to David’s site as well, since the quality of his writing is way better than mine.

In any case, continuing on with our framing discussion, we see that he who controls the framing controls the agenda. It’s a wily debate tactic, and takes a bit of practice to recognize, but it happens all the time, intended or not. A few days ago, we saw that those two programmers had a framing disconnect in their discussion. They didn’t notice it, but they were addressing two distinct points. Today, we see what happens when one side of the debate purposefully attempts to reframe the argument because they cannot win with the way the argument is currently framed. This tactic has parallels to the straw man fallacy, but it’s slightly different. Both are still dishonest (or lacking in discipline) however.

Interesting article in Wired today regarding creationism’s resurgence in some public schools.

This is a classic example of a framing battle. The creationists are attempting to reframe the debate about whether to teach creationism by using such language as “teach the controversy”. They have found a psuedo-scientific sounding phrase — “intelligent design” — to replace “creationism” which carries with it a lot of baggage.

(aside: I don’t accept this new phrase, since it attempts to add a veneer of scientific legitimacy to a non-scientific set of ideas.)

(aside 2: you’ll notice a lot of scare quotes in the following, basically because creationism is bunk)

The creationists have done a lot of vigorous hand-waving in order to make it seem like they are merely teaching the other “scientific” side of the “evolution controversy”.

The dissembling is what bugs me the most. If one wishes to believe in creationism, that is fine. It’s a matter of faith, and far be it from me to tell others what to think. But to pass it off as science is just plain dishonest, and a disservice to students.

The main difference, is that science is a process. You start off not knowing the answer, try to ask the right questions, look for the data to answer the questions, and then see if you have any further understanding. If taught poorly, science can seem like a mere litany, handed down from teacher to student and memorized by rote for the sake of regurgitating during a test, like history or grammar rules.

But it’s not supposed to be that way. Again, it’s supposed to be a spiral process, where you get closer and closer to understanding how things actually work while realizing that your understanding tomorrow may be drastically different from your understanding today.

In a nutshell, science is about testable hypotheses (thanks to a coworker for the pithy phrase).

In contrast, creationism presupposes the answer, and then goes looking for data to support that answer. Data that do not support creationism are discarded or subjected to more hand-waving until it does fit the conjecture. It proposes no hypotheses, makes no predictions, and its claims are untestable.

The implications of the last point should be made explicit here — untestable claims are a fundamental component of faith.

Let’s not “teach the controversy” in science class. Save that discussion for comparative religions.