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Mr. Feldman's Quiz always opens with the same set of categories. Mr. Packard has the recitation down quite well. "Current Events, People, Places, Things You Should Have Learned In School (Had You Been Paying Attention), Science, or Odds and Ends?" Of course, when you're playing the Whad'Ya Know Quiz, all of those categories are very different than your standard trivia department.
There's a lot of current events the U.S. media wants you to be paying attention to. The dog-and-pony show of electoral politics, where rich white men attack other rich white men for not being radical enough in their desires to roll back the safety net, deny women the ability to choose if/when they want children, make sure that the richest among us pay the least in taxes (while claiming that it's a problem that "half of people don't pay taxes"), and want to ensure that it's more difficult for the demographics that oppose them to vote against them.
...then again, that might be worth checking in on occasionally just to see which reasons you'll need to cite to oppose them with when one of them wins a nomination.
The U.S. media decidedly does not you want to think about current events involving people in the Middle East trying to get rid of dictators and strongmen, except through the lens of "Well, it's obvious hardline Muslims are going to take over in the power vacuum, so really the only question left is whether or not Islam is compatible with any form of democracy." They're making sure to not talk about the fact that they have several examples of functioning democracy where many if not most of the members of the government are often hardline members of Christianity.
...now that I think about it, maybe this government at this junction of Space-Time isn't the best example.
Ah, and speaking of the media, how big of a blind spot is there with regard to advertising? Just about everywhere you go, physically or digitally, there's an ad somewhere. Supposedly-objective newspapers, television news, and Internet sites carry advertising, commercials, and other means of revenue generation apart from subscriptions or access fees. And whlie most of us learn in school a little bit about being able to evaluate the claims of things like commercial advertising, we don't get the same cursory instruction (or any instruction at all) when it comes to evaluating the content of political advertising. Maybe a little bit about fact-checking gets picked up in other contexts, but one of the things we really should have learned in school (had anyone been paying attention) is how to evaluate the emotional context and content of ads. A slick liar who makes you feel like you're a patriot and your opponent's supporters are terrorists or worse will get elected, sometimes in spite of the fact that everyone knows he's a liar. The best ads aren't the best because of their factual content, but because of their emotional appeal.
Shouldn't we be teaching our upcoming voters how to figure out whether they're feeling good about this guy (and they're almost always guys) because of his policies or because his ads are triggering your emotional centers?
Of course, if we did that, we might have to admit to the primacy of the scientific method in disciplines other than the hard sciences. (Although, even there, there are people who demand that myth and religious belief be taught as scientific conclusion, rather than as myth and religious belief. While I'm all for cross-disciplinary work, this is one of those cases that doesn't.) That would mean acknowledging that marketing departments, think tanks, advertising agencies, and political campaigns all test thousands upon thousands of hypotheses on actual people every day, interpret the results, refine their products, and test again in an iterative cycle that could (and probably should) be used as the textbook examples of how the scientific method produces replicable results, which can be analyzed to draw conclusions and make a profit.
Far too many people don't see the application of science to their everyday lives - even in their churches and on their pulpits. Because they believe that they can't be swayed that easily, even as they have examples of just that around them.
Which leaves us only to mention that another thing that we really need to be better at is understanding risks and chances. Most of us are fairly innumerate when it comes to statistics, probabilities and the likelihood of events occurring. We think that when it says that we have a 1 in 3 chance of winning, it means that we have a good chance of winning the grand prize, when it really means we're likely to win the food prizes, if we win anything at all. We don't get why, when Monty (or Wayne, or Howie) reveals a curtain and says "so, do you want to change or not?", that the smartest course of action is to change your choice. We play in casinos and at lotteries, thinking that a dollar a week isn't a major investment for the chance of willing millions. We'll spend billions chasing "terrorists" and setting up chokepoints that would be much better targets for terrorists, all over one statistically unlikely event, when we're far more likely to die of an automobile accident or of an unhealthy lifestyle causing myocardial infarction. We're afraid of things that are spectacular, but otherwise rare, like lightning strikes, and utterly unafraid of the most common killers of people, like tobacco usage.
So, Whad'Ya Know?
(This has been a Shadow Idol entry for Prompt 13: Current Events. It probably wouldn't qualify under the official Idol guidelines for this week, but Shadow Idol doesn't have to follow all the rules when it doesn't want to, and I think this idea was too good not to write.)
There's a lot of current events the U.S. media wants you to be paying attention to. The dog-and-pony show of electoral politics, where rich white men attack other rich white men for not being radical enough in their desires to roll back the safety net, deny women the ability to choose if/when they want children, make sure that the richest among us pay the least in taxes (while claiming that it's a problem that "half of people don't pay taxes"), and want to ensure that it's more difficult for the demographics that oppose them to vote against them.
...then again, that might be worth checking in on occasionally just to see which reasons you'll need to cite to oppose them with when one of them wins a nomination.
The U.S. media decidedly does not you want to think about current events involving people in the Middle East trying to get rid of dictators and strongmen, except through the lens of "Well, it's obvious hardline Muslims are going to take over in the power vacuum, so really the only question left is whether or not Islam is compatible with any form of democracy." They're making sure to not talk about the fact that they have several examples of functioning democracy where many if not most of the members of the government are often hardline members of Christianity.
...now that I think about it, maybe this government at this junction of Space-Time isn't the best example.
Ah, and speaking of the media, how big of a blind spot is there with regard to advertising? Just about everywhere you go, physically or digitally, there's an ad somewhere. Supposedly-objective newspapers, television news, and Internet sites carry advertising, commercials, and other means of revenue generation apart from subscriptions or access fees. And whlie most of us learn in school a little bit about being able to evaluate the claims of things like commercial advertising, we don't get the same cursory instruction (or any instruction at all) when it comes to evaluating the content of political advertising. Maybe a little bit about fact-checking gets picked up in other contexts, but one of the things we really should have learned in school (had anyone been paying attention) is how to evaluate the emotional context and content of ads. A slick liar who makes you feel like you're a patriot and your opponent's supporters are terrorists or worse will get elected, sometimes in spite of the fact that everyone knows he's a liar. The best ads aren't the best because of their factual content, but because of their emotional appeal.
Shouldn't we be teaching our upcoming voters how to figure out whether they're feeling good about this guy (and they're almost always guys) because of his policies or because his ads are triggering your emotional centers?
Of course, if we did that, we might have to admit to the primacy of the scientific method in disciplines other than the hard sciences. (Although, even there, there are people who demand that myth and religious belief be taught as scientific conclusion, rather than as myth and religious belief. While I'm all for cross-disciplinary work, this is one of those cases that doesn't.) That would mean acknowledging that marketing departments, think tanks, advertising agencies, and political campaigns all test thousands upon thousands of hypotheses on actual people every day, interpret the results, refine their products, and test again in an iterative cycle that could (and probably should) be used as the textbook examples of how the scientific method produces replicable results, which can be analyzed to draw conclusions and make a profit.
Far too many people don't see the application of science to their everyday lives - even in their churches and on their pulpits. Because they believe that they can't be swayed that easily, even as they have examples of just that around them.
Which leaves us only to mention that another thing that we really need to be better at is understanding risks and chances. Most of us are fairly innumerate when it comes to statistics, probabilities and the likelihood of events occurring. We think that when it says that we have a 1 in 3 chance of winning, it means that we have a good chance of winning the grand prize, when it really means we're likely to win the food prizes, if we win anything at all. We don't get why, when Monty (or Wayne, or Howie) reveals a curtain and says "so, do you want to change or not?", that the smartest course of action is to change your choice. We play in casinos and at lotteries, thinking that a dollar a week isn't a major investment for the chance of willing millions. We'll spend billions chasing "terrorists" and setting up chokepoints that would be much better targets for terrorists, all over one statistically unlikely event, when we're far more likely to die of an automobile accident or of an unhealthy lifestyle causing myocardial infarction. We're afraid of things that are spectacular, but otherwise rare, like lightning strikes, and utterly unafraid of the most common killers of people, like tobacco usage.
So, Whad'Ya Know?
(This has been a Shadow Idol entry for Prompt 13: Current Events. It probably wouldn't qualify under the official Idol guidelines for this week, but Shadow Idol doesn't have to follow all the rules when it doesn't want to, and I think this idea was too good not to write.)
