Ignorati Honor Roll 2013: Pundit Version
Posted on December 26, 2013
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As 2013 comes to an end, it’s time to review some of the more ridiculous claims and arguments made by pundits and politicians over the course of the past year.
A definition of “Ignorati” is important here:
Elites who, despite their power, wealth, or influence, are prone to making serious errors when discussing science and other technical matters. They resort to magical thinking and scapegoating with alarming ease and can usually be found furiously adding fuel to moral panics and information cascades. [http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ignorati ]
I’m sure I’ve missed many good ones (please do send) and I’ve definitely put more weight in my selection on stuff I’ve come across recently than stuff that appeared at the beginning of the year. I’ve tried to select statements and representations of data that are so foolish that, in my view, they severely undermine the credibility of their source. At least a few of these are statements made by pundits (this post) and politicians (next post) and echoed by the media, that are so patently false and/or foolish that it’s rather surprising that anyone could swallow them whole.
So, without further ado…
Petrilli on PISA and Poverty
Let’s start with two claims made by Mike Petrillli in a recent post at Ed Excellence, in which he opined that bad teachers, not poverty must be causing low PISA scores on Math for U.S. 15 year olds. Mike was perplexed that a) poverty might affect math outcomes as much as (if not more than) reading, thus something else must really be affecting math (bad teachers) and b) that poverty was affecting our 15 year olds’ outcomes, when we all know poverty affects younger kids more!?