“Dihydrogen monoxide” joke gets DJs suspended(arstechnica.com) |
“Dihydrogen monoxide” joke gets DJs suspended(arstechnica.com) |
The general public doesn't understand any complex subjects, wether it's chemistry, health, technology or politics (just to name a few). This is why anyone in a suit or lab coat can use field specific terms to assure the public to keep calm and carry on - or panic.
The mainstream media acts as a catalyst to this problem by also not having experts in the required fields reporting on the subjects. And who is to point out the flaws in the those media stories? Blogspot? Twitter? Facebook? Good luck getting anyone to read those that aren't already following of the subject.
Slate magazine did an excellent teardown on this issue, I share this link frequently:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...
No, you can't reasonably expect everyone out there to both 1. understand chemical formulas and 2. understand their long form names (which is a significantly different case, as people here seem to be forgetting).
In my opinion, you also can't blame a couple of DJ's for making what to many of us is just a dumb joke without first considering what many of us would also call an illogical, ill-informed, totally unfounded backlash. They put together a lot of material very quickly and part of their job is being, to a point, controversial.
That this could be construed, through misunderstanding, as something that could be called a felony and termination-worthy... while you can see it (if not agree with it) in hindsight, to suggest that they should have known better seems a bit out of step with reality.
This could and should have been dealt with by way of a mild reprimand and an on-air explanation and apology. That they were fired and that people are discussing litigation (if not pursuing it, which is not clear from the article) is a severe and dangerous overreaction of the sort that's becoming painfully common everywhere.
How many people actually called in? I'm betting a few dozen out of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of listeners.
But it's not. From La Wik [1]:
"Dihydrogen monoxide", shortened to "DHMO", is a name for water that is consistent with basic rules of chemical nomenclature, but is not among the names published by IUPAC and is almost exclusively used in humorous context.
Is this a local or state or federal issue?
Suspension and disavowal probably went too far. A corporate and DJ apology would have been enough.
Instead of proclaiming Americans are a bunch of uneducated idiot, maybe one should find out the base rate for knowing basic chemistry fact like dihydrogen monoxide.
H2O is probably the most widely known chemical formula - go out and ask twenty random people what it is and you will get 19 answers for water.
Ask those same 19 people what dihydrogen monoxide is at 8am on a Tuesday when they are trying to get kids dressed and out the door, then say "contaminated" and the answer will be "I don't know but it sounds nasty"
Yes it's true - half of the population is below average intelligence, but amazingly they still seem to hold down jobs, pay mortgages, drive complex journeys and raise children. And when a public policy issue crops up - don't play silly in jokes but use plain English (like water) and explain - the IPCC has succeeded there.
OpEd politics is like programmin puzzles - it appeals to people who like puzzles. If you don't get a kick out of puzzles you won't concentrate on them. And the latest political oped piece, education or science understanding will just seem to most people as vital to existence as fix buzz. But no one here has a convincing explanation or solution to say US education policy - and neither will the people who did not recognise dihydrogen monoxide - but I will bet dollars to doughnuts they can all tell the difference between a good and bad teacher and want their children to go to the school of the former.
A comment recently mentioned how poor the voter turnout was - but given a introspective and mostly deadlocked congress, apathy is a rational response. Even those below average intelligence can work that one out. Those who refuse apathy are above average I other ways, emotionally, optimistically and more.
Depressingly, how many would they have got if the presenters used H20 instead of dihydrogen monoxide?
So they will call in about the water but will say "oh well" to pollution that doesn't immediately affect their morning.
Jeez, do the US have at least A BIT chemistry lessons in their education system?
A. Thinking about it
B. Spelling the chemical formula out
C. Googling it
This has very little to do with being high-and-mighty. I don't believe the author's point was to illustrate how uneducated the general population is, but rather, highlight how little thinking/work the general population does before complaining/protesting/getting up in arms.
It's preferable to be an informed functioning citizen than an uninformed functioning citizen, despite the fact that they are both capable of doing their jobs every day.
As an aside, "Half of the population is below average intelligence" is false. Half of the population is below the median intelligence.
If intelligence is normally distributed, then the mean and median are equal.
Not false. Median is a type of average. He never said half the population is below the arithmetic mean.
I'd go further.
It's really easy to think the meaning of "dihydrogen monoxide" is obvious if you already know how to parse terms written in that language. But it's far from obvious.
To understand what "dihydrogen monoxide" means, you have to know that "di" means "two", and that "oxide" refers to oxygen. You also have to realise that "mon" in this context means "one" - note that it's not "mono", because if it was "mono" then it would be "mono-xide". Actually, it's harder than that, because you need to know how you should break down the words into their components - e.g. that "dihydrogen" should be broken down into "di"-"hydrogen" but not "dihy"-"drogen".
If you haven't learnt the language used to spell out chemical formula you don't have a way to understand the details. I'm sure there's plenty of smart, well educated people who don't have this specific knowledge yet know full well that water is two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
This issue is more a matter of knowledge than intelligence.
What I love about the US is that there seemed to be very few "pseudo-educated" people or "pseudo-intellectuals", just tons of uneducated people and few smart and educated ones, but without this annoying "middle layer" that seems to suffocate most European countries I know.
...all that said, I still can't stop enjoying the "are you American or something" jokes :) (http://i.imgur.com/OQYYA.jpg)
The only thing specific to the US compared to Europe is the influence of hard core christian on things like evolution. But for every other usual pseudo science crakery like astrology, magnetism, etc... there is little difference (see e.g. http://www.pseudo-sciences.org/spip.php?article1132 where a majority of French and American believe you can heal people with the power of thought....)
The UK is going through measles outbreaks caused by the lies of Andrew Wakefield and an anti-science bias in the media.
(http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html)Also, I suggest asking your father or mother if they understand what "Dihydrogen Monoxide" actually is. The article does not mention the age of the callers...I'm willing to bet they are elderly people.
The fact is that this joke sometimes even temporarily fools people who are familiar with water's molecular make-up (and yes they do teach this in every American high school) because most common substances are not referred to by their chemical name.
US-related news here is mainly about: Tea Party, gun violence, wars, more Tea Party, corruption and dumbness on both popular parties, sheer political idiocy (sequester), and a record amount of bigotry throughout the society.
To the USA: deal with your external image before starting to whine when other people laugh at you.
But this particular issue isn't even that. This particular issue is the fact that Americans have been trained for decades to jump at shadows, to worry about every possible threat. This is partly because frightened people are easy to control, and partly because hidden corporate powers really are allowing their health to be at risk to make a slightly quicker buck.
It's easy to be alarmed about a technical term you've never heard before, and "monoxide" sounds like "carbon monoxide", which everybody knows is an undetectable gas that can kill your children in their sleep.
It's not as simple as just "stupid". It never is.
These guys got punished for making fun of the general stupidity of others. It would be okay if the people weren't so ignorant (or conditioned) that they'd be terrified so easily.
If you think about it, it's not too different from people being afraid of making certain kinds of cartoons out of fear of offending certain groups of people. Think about it.
Punishing them was a simple and convenient knee-jerk response. It should've been used as an opportunity for education instead.
It's funny and sad how often we struggle to educate people on a day to day basis, yet we throw away fantastic educational opportunities like this one. It's not everyday you have everybody's attention. And what do we choose to do with that attention? "Look at this fearmongerer, mocking you people! We shall punish them."
Few politicians have the guts to tell the electorate that they're dumb. THAT'S where it's "not so simple". We perpetuate and participate a system where we will never tell the electorate that they're stupid, uninformed.
It's not as simple as just stupid- it's intelligence being punished for having fun with stupidity, and representatives choosing to ingratiate themselves to the stupids because they're dependent on them for their livelihood.
Sigh
You are of course correct. It is not "stupid" but it is "ignorant" (both of the chemical terms used in the prank and of the critical thinking skills necessary to work out that "dihydrogen monoxide" is just "water")
I mean, it should be widely known that US news organizations often have a massive bias cough Fox News cough, so it should be the first thing to do to do at least a bit of fact checking.
Medical coverage (both insurances, and the quality of the medical service itself), school education levels in standardized tests, financial stability (both the country itself as well as the individual states), average wealth, poor-rich spread, amount and quality of science research... so yes, we Europeans DO get something done. In contrast to the USA, where everything actually important is either blocked off by extremist tea baggers or cut down by the sequester (which is a side effect of the mentioned teabaggers).
...but you also have to remember that high-school was a long time ago for a lot of people, and facts like what the prefix "di" means is hardly something most people are going to need to keep in their heads, so are likely to fade over time.
Since we're on topic of science and ignorance, no it's not.
>> Using cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. counties from 1977 to 1992, we find that allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons deters violent crimes and it appears to produce no increase in accidental deaths.[1]
This whole thread denouncing ignorance is full of depressingly ignorant opinions.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=10129
I can't even remember when the last gun-related school shooting was here in Germany.
Also, let's be fair. Germany is not one to talk about gun violence. Last I remember, Germany was an aggressor in both World War I and World War II. Both wars accounted for roughly a 100+ million dead or wounded. Could you explain how "weapons control laws" could have prevented these wars? Don't get me wrong, I am for gun control...but really, it is not going to help until we fix other, more immediate socio-economic issues.
?? I thought those were two distinct things. The median is the "middle" amount in a set of numbers, while the average or mean is the sum of all the numbers in the set, divided by how many numbers there are.
The most common average in ordinary use is the arithmetic mean, but they are not the same thing and the word average is much more general.
It is definitively correct.
You knew what he meant, you just wanted another jab to back up your argument. If you're going to be pedantic at least be correct.
Let's divide the world into 3 types of people.
Type A. Those without enough mathematical knowledge to pick up on any possible ambiguity. Who probably don't really know what median means in the first place (the majority of people).
Type B. Those with enough mathematical knowledge to understand what he means by "average." (probably the majority of people on hacker news)
Type C. Those who got just far enough in math to realize that there is a difference between arithmetic mean, and median, but not far enough to realize that average is a general term.
Which of those types are going to confused by the term average instead of median?
Or, take the list at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoklauf_an_einer_Schule#Deutsc... - six in the last 11 years, way more (and especially: much more violent!) in the US!