Many people lack basic scientific knowledge

How valid is it to assume that (approximately) everyone who got the heliocentrism question wrong got it wrong by "guessing"? If 18% got it wrong, then your model says that there's 36% who had no clue and half guessed right, but at the other extreme there's a model that everyone 'knows' the answer, but 18% 'know' the wrong answer. I'm not sure which is scarier - 36% clueless or 18% die-hard geocentrists - but I don't think we have enough information here to tell where on that spectrum it is. (In particular, if "I don't know" was an option and only 3% selected it, then I think this is some evidence against the extreme end of 36% clueless?)

Forget about science. Most people can't use computers really.

What Most Users Can Do

(Skill level 1), [60% of users]

- Little or no navigation required to access the information or commands required to solve the problem

- Few steps and a minimal number of operators

- Problem resolution requiring the respondent to apply explicit criteria only (no implicit criteria)

- Few monitoring demands (e.g., having to check one’s progress)

- Identifying content and operators done through simple match

- No need to contrast or integrate information

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_9789264258051-en 

You might like this classic 4chan greentext: link.

Well it's definitely related to the other topic this week : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gP8tvspKG79RqACTn/modern-transformers-are-agi-and-human-level [LW · GW]

Apparently "human level" isn't too hard to reach at least in the domain of "question and answer".  I wonder how often the 'gotcha' questions that current LLMs usually fail can be solved by even 50% of Americans...

What do most people gain from knowing this trivium? It's useful if you're signaling that you're on the side of "Science!" (which requires you to similarly "know" a lot of things that're a lot more dubious, and many things are are meaningless or outright false) but otherwise, unless you're an astrophysicist or similar, it makes no difference to you one way or the other.

Is there a list of "basic scientific knowledge" somewhere? I am imagining a project where someone makes a 1-minute video for each item in the list, and then... dunno, the playlist is played on repeat e.g. in every bus all day long.

Trying to determine what your point here is.

Since "intelligence" (thorny definition) could be said to be distributed in a normal distribution (if it's even possible to plot "intelligence" (let's say, "intellectual" or, dear me, "IQ")), and those people below the median would be less likely to be well educated (making assumptions here), then it would be expected that a significant proportion of every population will have people that won't answer these questions as well educated people with higher intelligence (to me these are obvious points, though maybe I'm missing something here).

I think a lot of people in high school (and otherwise) had little motivation to learn, so their knowledge may seem painfully inadequate compared to that readers of forums such as this. But, then, if you ask these people what practical use is knowledge of genetics or whether a star revolves around a plant of vice versa, their answer would probably not surprise you.

But, then, perhaps they could gut a fish in 30 seconds or fix the carburetor on your car as the zombies are closing in (faster than you* or I would whilst we're frantically speeding up the youtube video or sending the photo to chatgpt), so pluses and minuses (I won't judge in which direction the pluses and minsues tally for any person at any particular time in any particular universe).

On the other hand: Idiocracy (2006)

• I make the assumption that you can't fix a carburetor. I'm not sure I spelled it correctly.

If the subtitle of the report is as quoted, the report writers are even wronger than that.