How Academia's Echo Chamber Problem Could Be Reduced

There is a gigantic problem in today's universities and colleges: the fact that the classes of such institutions often act like echo chambers that repeat endlessly the dubious dogmas and "old wives' tales" of academia, which are often groundless triumphal boasts.  Consider a typical lecture hall in a large university. We have many students gathered together in front of some professor, who maybe has a giant screen to make his dubious truth claims. Typically there will be no student comments allowed until a brief "Question Period" at the end of the lecture. In such a "question period" students are supposed to merely ask questions, not dispute claims that the professor has made. The lecture hall may look like this:

Dumb dogma taught at a college

In such an environment, there is no real opportunity for a student to challenge dubious claims of a professor. If the student stands up and says something of substantial length, he will probably be told to "keep it short" so that other students can ask their questions. Moreover, the student will fear that if he stands up and disputes the professor's teaching, that this will negatively impact his grade. 

We have in such an environment an "echo chamber" effect. The students are all being conditioned to think that good students accept whatever the professor teaches. A student may fear very much standing up and making some point or discussing some experience that may cause him to be ridiculed as an oddball or an outcast. Imagine the professor is claiming that people who report psychic experiences are all liars or mentally disturbed.  Will a student dare stand up and make a statement like this:

"No, professor, you are engaging in a shameful gaslighting of  witnesses of the paranormal. Many millions of respectable people are such witnesses, and they tend to be regular, good-thinking people just like me. I myself once saw the apparition of my dead father, before I learned that he died. And very many other people have had the same type of experience." 

Will a student dare stand and say such a thing, knowing that the professor will probably make some facial expression that serves as a "laugh, students, laugh" signal, leading to a cascade of ridicule and scorn? Probably not. In such an environment an echo chamber will be preserved. 

But I can imagine some ways in which the echo chambers in academia could be busted, so that real debate could occur. One way would be to have a two-screen system. Any professor giving a lecture could use the large screen shown on the left in the visual below. The large screen on the right would be reserved for student comments, which would be displayed as soon as the comments were typed and submitted. It would be an anonymous system, so that any student could type a comment without anyone knowing that he had sent the comment. Since all the students would be taking notes on their laptops or digital pad devices, no one could know which student had sent the comment. 

We would then have healthy situations like the one depicted below, in which the comment on the right is an anonymous comment by one of the students in the class. 

Academia's "echo chamber" problem could also be reduced by having all-electronic college textbooks, textbooks that allow any student to anonymously insert a comment at any point in the textbook, causing all other students to read his or her comment when they read from that page. So if page 233 of a textbook teaches some silly old legend of academia, and student John Smith recognizes why the page is making a dubious claim, John Smith will have the power to insert a comment into page 233 of that textbook, causing all of his fellow students to see his comment when they come to that page. 

Academia's "echo chamber" problem could also be reduced by encouraging online student newspapers that include anonymous essays. In such essays students could make negative commentaries on any college lectures they received that had shortcomings of credibility.  A typical essay might have a title such as "Why Professor Smith's Biology Lecture This Week Was Largely Unbelievable Nonsense." 

Another idea for reducing the "echo chamber" problem of academia would be to phase out or sharply reduce the moldy old custom of requiring students to attend professor lectures. The custom of educating students by having students assemble for lectures in front of some teacher is a custom that made sense before the invention of the printing press. In the age of the Internet and very powerful and affordable digital devices, the custom no longer makes much sense. Almost anything you want to learn you can learn by reading information online and by watching free online videos; so professors giving in-person lectures are no longer needed for most fields of study. Advances in AI do very much to make conventional classroom habits outdated and unnecessary.  It is becoming less and less necessary to even have professors to grade papers, as such routine work can be largely automated by AI systems. 

Having people listen to lectures is not even a very efficient way for above-average students to learn. For anyone with good reading skills, reading tends to be a faster way to learn things than listening. Reading also has the advantage that you can go back and re-read some passage, and vary your reading pace, reading more slowly the more important and hard-to-understand parts, and skimming over  "boilerplate" material of less importance. You can't do that while listening to a professor lecture. 

So in an age when people can educate themselves very well at low cost through independent study without going to college lectures, why do universities still teach students as they were taught thousands of years ago at Plato's Academy, by having a group of about 30 students gathered around taking notes while some expert talks? It is partially for profit reasons, to justify exorbitant tuition fees. A college or university may try to maintain the no-longer-true idea that you need to learn by listening to some highly paid professor, as a justification for some $40,000 annual tuition it charges. 

Another reason is that the old outdated tradition of having students listen to endless in-person lectures from authorities is one that helps with the ideological indoctrination that is a huge factor in the business of today's universities. We must always remember that colleges and universities are ideological enclaves, belief communities dedicated to the propagation of old belief traditions such as Darwinism and materialism. If you are someone trying to preserve some old belief tradition, the last thing you want is for people to study a topic by independent inquiry involving seeking out information and opinions equally from very many diverse sources. Instead, what you want is to preserve some old authoritarian teaching tradition that helps to enforce a conformist echo chamber, and that encourages a semi-mindless kneeling to authority. So we continue to have endless college and university lectures in biology and psychology that can be schematically depicted like this, with the "blah blah blah" parts representing cherry-picked facts or dubious boasts:

The authoritarian "mind-kneel to your master" dynamics in such a conformist lecture hall are exactly the same as in the conformist lecture halls of seminaries training preachers or priests, with the "suppression of dissent" effect and the "follow the herd" effect being ruthlessly effective. It's a crappy way for people to learn about topics such as biology and psychology, but great for enforcing old socially-constructed belief customs. 

Science Educators Are Doing a Poor Job of Educating the Public

Based on my frequent reading of poor-quality literature written by science professors and science journalists, I had the strong suspicion that a large fraction of the general public have a poor understanding about basic facts of science and fundamental theories of science.  I tried to get some data confirming this suspicion, but this turned out to be very hard work, "like pulling teeth." It seems that our science educators are very bad about polling the general public to determine how well average people understand basic facts of science. I could not find a single paper or article involving a poll in which the general public was asked something like 100 multiple-choice questions to determine how well they understand basic facts of science. 

But after spending hours looking for information, I was able to find a few revealing indications of just how poor a job our science educators have done.  One was a Pew Research poll which asked people whether electrons are smaller than atoms. One of the most basic facts of physics you can learn is that atoms are composed of three types of particles: electrons, neutrons and protons.  If our science educators were doing a good job, we would expect that at least a majority of the public would answer "Yes" to the question "Are electrons smaller than atoms?"  But according to the Pew Research poll discussed here, only 47% of the US public think electrons are smaller than atoms. 

In the poll discussed here, over 700 people were asked questions testing their knowledge of the location of bodily organs. For each organ, they were shown four pictures, each depicting the organ in a very different part of the body.  Only 46% of the general public could correctly identify the location of the lungs; only 27% could correctly identify the location of the stomach; and only 40% could correctly identify the location of the ovaries. 

In the paper here ("A Study of Common Beliefs and Misconceptions in Physical Science") about 300 people were asked whether this statement was true:

"An astronaut is standing on the moon with a baseball in her/his hand. When the baseball is released, it will fall to the moon’s surface."

Only about one third of the people answering gave a correct answer identifying the statement as true. The statement tests whether someone understands the basic idea behind the law of gravitation, that all massive bodies exert a force of gravity. 

In some cases when the population is asked a rather basic science question, almost all of the people answering will give the same answer, an answer that is wrong. In the paper "Hints of a Fundamental Misconception in Cosmology" we read of a poll in which 167 college students were asked if they had heard of the Big Bang theory. Only 54% answered "yes." That 54% were then asked if the Big Bang theory described an "explosion from pre-existing matter" or an "explosion from nothing." 80% answered "explosion from pre-existing matter," only 1% answered "explosion from nothing," and 18% declined to answer.  The Big Bang theory does not describe any explosion from pre-existing matter. The theory describes the universe suddenly beginning in an expanding state, with its radius or diameter starting out as zero, something that is best described as "explosion from nothing" rather than "explosion from pre-existing matter." 

It is rather clear from these examples that science educators have done a very bad job of educating the public.  There are two main ways in which such educators have gigantically failed us.

Gigantic Failure #1: Indoctrinating the Public in False or Very Dubious Claims

One of the main ways in which a science educator can fail is by teaching doctrines that are dubious or untrue, selling such doubtful claims as "science." Sometimes such a failure is relatively harmless. For decades cosmologists and astronomers have endlessly taught the dubious speculative ideas of dark matter and dark energy. Neither have been directly observed, and neither has any place in the Standard Model of Physics.  Relatively little harm is done by such poor teaching. We are told that the universe consists mainly of invisible dark energy, and that most of the universe's matter is invisible dark matter. Such dogmas have very little to do with who we are or how we got here, so teaching such dogmas does little harm. 

An entirely different state of affairs involves the false or dubious dogmas taught by biologists and psychologists, dogmas that misinform about who we are, how each of our individual bodies and minds arose, and how humanity itself arose. These include the following very dubious or groundless dogmas endlessly repeated by our science educators:

• The groundless legend that a biologist of the nineteenth century (Charles Darwin) created a theory that explains the origin of species such as the human species.
• The groundless boast that biologists currently understand how there arose fantastically organized organisms such as birds, mammals and humans. 
• The completely fictional claim that scientists have some understanding of how life could have originally started on our planet.
• The untrue claim that DNA or its genes have some blueprint or program for making a human body, and that the progression from a speck-sized zygote to the state of vast organization that is an adult human body occurs because of the reading of such a blueprint or program. 
• The unfounded claim that human minds can be explained as being products of the human brain.
• The falsehood that there is little difference between humans and animals, and that humans are a type of animal (the latter claim being one that is "proven" solely by appealing to senseless and arbitrary classification conventions of biologists).
• The unfounded claim that human memory processes such as memory formation, lifelong preservation of memories and instant memory recall can be explained by processes in the brain. 

By teaching these untrue or very dubious claims, our science educators have committed an enormous crime against the general public: the crime of filling people's minds with false or very dubious ideas about who they are, how their bodies and minds arose, and how their species arose. Such miseducation is not merely a failure, but a kind of intellectual crime of a very bad type. Teaching boastful claims that benefit the prestige of science educators like themselves at the severe cost of filling people's minds with the worst type of false or unfounded ideas, our science educators have been guilty of errors as bad as those committed by medieval educators who taught that sickness is caused by demon possession. 

Gigantic Failure #2: Failing to Properly Educate the Public About Many of the Most Important Realities of Bodies, Minds and Nature

Our biology educators have been extremely bad about educating the public about many of the most important realities regarding life, minds and matter.  Such a failure often seems to have a strategic nature. It is as if our biology educators are deliberately trying to teach "crayon sketch" depictions of living things, so that the public will be more likely to believe in ideas of accidental unguided origins. 

Consider the question of the origin of life. Biology educators are constantly using the very misleading phrase "building blocks of life." We constantly get a phony story that goes like this:

"Long ago there was a primordial soup that was rich in chemical building blocks of life. Then with the help of some lucky event such as lightning or heat, life got started."

The idea of simple "building blocks of life" is profoundly erroneous, for reasons discussed in the visual below. 

 

Beside the deceit depicted in the visual above, there is a lot of additional deceit involving claims of building blocks of life. Science educators often claim without warrant that "building blocks of life" would have been abundant in the early Earth, a claim not supported by any experiments realistically simulating the early Earth. Science educators often make untrue claims such as "the building blocks of life are abundant in space." A look at the abundances of units such as amino acids in space will show that they exist in only the tiniest amounts such as 1 part per billion. 

Our science educators habitually make untrue claims suggesting progress in understanding a natural origin of life, something that has not at all occurred.  The reality of investigative failure is rarely described. 

Our science educators routinely present to us the most preposterous claims about the origin of life, such as claims that life can originate from non-life when some "spark of life" occurs from something like lightning. Our science educators can get away with such deceptions because they have committed the most appalling failure to properly educate people about the vast complexity and enormous organization of even the simplest living things. 

Our science educators routinely fail to properly educate the public about the complexity of cells. Such educators fool people into thinking that cells are thousands or millions of times simpler than they are, by using deceptive diagrams of cells, diagrams that make cells look very simple.  Human cells are so complex it is sometimes said they are as  complex as factories or cities. 

 

Continuing to teach the outdated and groundless legend that the origin of species was explained in the 19th century by Charles Darwin, our science educators fail to educate the public about the enormous hierarchical organization of the human body. That organization is listed in the table below. The items in yellow are facts that Darwin never knew about during his lifetime.

HUMANS CONSIST OF HUMAN BODIES AND HUMAN MINDS.	Human minds have displayed a vast number of capabilities, many of which mainstream scientists fail to properly study.
HUMAN BODIES MAINLY CONSIST OF ORGAN SYSTEMS, A MUSCULAR SYSTEM AND A SKELETAL SYSTEM.	The human skeletal system contains 206 bones. The human body has over 600 muscles.
ORGAN SYSTEMS CONSIST OF ORGANS AND SUPPORTING STRUCTURES.	Examples of organ systems include the circulatory system (consisting of much more than just the heart), and the nervous system consisting of much more than just the brain.
ORGANS CONSIST OF TISSUES.
TISSUES CONSIST OF VERY COMPLEX AND VASTLY ORGANIZED  CELLS	There are more than 200 types of cells in the human body, each a different type of system of enormous organization. Cells are so complex they have been compared to factories with many types of manufacturing devices.
CELLS TYPICALLY CONSIST OF VERY COMPLEX MEMBRANES AND THOUSANDS OR MILLIONS OF ORGANELLES.	A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few mitochondria, but cells typically have many thousands of mitochondria, as many as a million. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few lysosomes, but cells typically have hundreds of lysosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict a cell as having only a few ribosomes, but a cell may have up to 10 million ribosomes. A cell diagram will typically depict one or a few stacks of a Golgi apparatus, each with only a few cisternae. But a cell will typically have between 10 and 20 stacks, each having as many as 60 cisternae.
ORGANELLES CONSIST OF VERY MANY PROTEIN MOLECULES AND PROTEIN MOLECULE COMPLEXES.	There are some 100,000 different types of protein molecules in the human body, each a different type of complex invention. Protein molecule complexes are groups of different types of protein molecules that work together as team members to achieve a function that cannot be achieved by only one of the proteins in the complex. Very many protein complexes have so many parts working together dynamically that such complexes are now being called "molecular machines."
PROTEIN MOLECULES CONSIST OF HUNDREDS OR THOUSANDS OF WELL-ARRANGED AMINO ACIDS, EXISTING IN A FOLDED THREE-DIMENSIONAL SHAPE.	Small changes in the sequences of amino acids in a protein are typically sufficient to ruin the usefulness of the protein molecule, preventing it from folding in the right way to achieve its function.  See "The Fragility of Fine-Tuned Protein Molecules" section of the post here for quotes stating this.
AMINO ACIDS CONSIST OF ABOUT 10 ATOMS ARRANGED IN SOME SPECIFIC WAY.	Some amino acids have 20 atoms. Given 10+ atoms in amino acids, and an average of about 470 amino acids per human protein molecule, a human protein molecule contains an average of about 5000+ very well-arranged atoms. Amino acids in living things are almost all left-handed, although amino acids forming naturally will with 50% likelihood be right-handed.
ATOMS CONSIST OF MULTIPLE PROTONS, NEUTRONS AND ELECTRONS.	A carbon atom has 6 protons, 6 neutrons, and 6 electrons.

Why do our science educators fail to decently educate the public about all these different levels of organization? I suspect because it is such educators may sense that the more you know about the vast amount of complexity and organization in human bodies, the less likely you will be to accept the boast that science educators seem hell-bent on promulgating: the boast that scientists understand how the human species originated. Claims of the accidental origin of something are inversely proportional to the complexity and organization of that thing. The more organized and the more well-arranged something is, and the more well-arranged parts it has,  and the more fine-tuned the arrangement of its parts, the less credible is a claim that the thing arose by blind accidental processes.  For example, someone throwing a deck of cards into the air many times might produce one or two times a "house of cards" consisting of one card leaning diagonally against the other. But if the whole universe was filled with people throwing decks of cards into the air, doing that half of their lives, it would be vastly improbable that even one of them would ever accidentally produce a triangular house of cards consisting of thirty very well-arranged cards.  

We are now in a situation where it is very clear that the wonders of biology are far greater in their hierarchical organization and fine-tuned dynamic complexity than anything that humans have ever constructed. An aircraft carrier is a less impressive work of fine-tuned organization than the human body. Humans know how to make aircraft carriers equipped with all of their aircraft. There is not a corporation in the world or a nation in the world that could construct from lifeless materials a living adult human body. It is notable that humans are completely incapable of creating machines that can reproduce themselves.  There is not a robot in the world capable of building from raw materials a robot just like itself. But self-reproduction is something that occurs throughout the world of biology, as does molecular machinery. 

What we see in biological organism are massive numbers of engineering effects and endless examples of information-rich fine-tuned architecture. Such a reality makes nineteenth century explanations of biology origins sound like old wives' tales. Ink splashes don't produce long functional essays telling how to perform complex tasks; accidents don't engineer things; and random variations don't create novel astonishing works of information-rich fine-tuned architecture. It is not true that we can explain such wonders of biology by a simple principle of "random variations occur, and nature saves the good stuff," because most of the good stuff we see  requires arrangements of atoms so improbable you would never get such good stuff from random variations.  The reason that would never happen is pretty much the same as the reason why ink splashes don't produce well-written essays telling how to do complex things. 

But our science educators keep senselessly claiming that the wonders of biology are not the product of intelligent agency, but mere accidents of nature, as accidental as mountains. They keep telling us that we must follow opinions of the scientist Darwin, reached around the year 1859.  To keep such a legend afloat, our science educators fail over and over again to teach about the reality of the enormous engineering effects in our bodies. As a substitute, they offer the crudest "crayon sketches" of our bodies and our minds. 

Below from page 137 of a PhD thesis is a list of biological systems described as if they were very impressive machinery:

Subcellular assembly	Sample of ‘molecular machine’ language	Source reference
Ribosome	“probably the most sophisticated machine ever made”	Garrett (1999)
Proteasome	“a molecular machine designed for controlled proteolysis”	Voges et al. (1999)
Glideosome	“a molecular machine powering motility”	Keeley et al. (2003)
Spliceosome	“among the most complex macromolecular machines known”	Nilsen (2003)
Blood clotting system	“a typical example of a molecular machine”	Spronk et al. (2003)
Photosynthetic system	“the most elaborate nanoscale biological machine in nature”	Imahori (2004)
Bacterial flagellum	“an exquisitely engineered chemi-osmotic nanomachine”	Pallen et al. (2005)
Myosin filament	“a complicated machine of many moving parts”	Ohki et al. (2006
RNA degradasome	“a supramolecular machine dedicated to RNA processing”	Marcaida et al. (2006)
RNA Polymerase	“a multifunctional molecular machine”	Haag et al. (2007)

An article by scientists discusses molecular machines in the human body:

"A molecular machine (or ‘nanomachine’) is a mechanical device that is measured in nanometers (millionths of a millimeter, or units of 10^-9 meter; on the scale of a single molecule) and converts chemical, electrical or optical energy to controlled mechanical work [1,2]. The human body can be viewed as a complex ensemble of nanomachines [3,4]. These tiny machines are responsible for the directed transport of macromolecules, membranes or chromosomes within the cytoplasm. They play a critical role in virtually every biological process (e.g., muscle contraction, cell division, intracellular transport, ATP production and genomic transcription)...Myosin, kinesin and their relatives are linear motors that convert the energy of ATP hydrolysis into mechanical work."

We do not learn about such impressive realities from the vast majority of our science educators.  Instead of teaching about such sophisticated realities, such educators have endlessly repeated childish "old wives tales" about how a human body originates. The main such tale has been the lie that a human body arises from a reading of a blueprint in human DNA, a blueprint of how to make a body. No such blueprint exists in our DNA, which does not even tell how to make any of the cells in our body.  And if such a blueprint existed, it would not explain how we get our bodies, because blueprints don't build things. 

Our science educators should have very humbly confessed the truth, saying: "We don't understand how humanity originated; we don't understand how any human mind originates; we don't understand how any adult human body originates; and we don't even understand how human cells are able to reproduce."  But instead, having crowned themselves as Grand Lords of Explanation, our science educators kept telling whatever lies they needed to tell to get people to believe their achievement boasts. 

A large part of the failure of science educators has been the failure to teach the public about many important observations having the greatest relevance to the nature of the human mind: observations of spooky events that humans can't explain and anomalous human mental powers that scientists can't explain. Senselessly our science educators declared such observations to be taboo, largely because they help undermine the dogmas that such educators try to promote, such as the dogma that the mind is merely the product of the brain.

When teaching about the brain, our science educators routinely fail to tell us about some of the most important facts we could learn, such as the very heavy signal noise all over the place in the brain, the unreliable transmission of signals across chemical synapses, the lack of any microscopic discovery of learned knowledge in human brains, the lack of any understanding of a neural system by which memories could be encoded, the lack of any thing in a brain that could explain instant memory recall, and so forth. We were not told about such things because our science educators wanted us to believe a dogma that they cherished, that minds are merely the products of brains. 

Some of the main science educators are science journalists, who these days are notorious for their production of misleading clickbait stories with frequently phony headlines. 

Nowadays science journalism is a kind of "anything goes" hall of mirrors in which the chief object seems to be to attract clicks on interesting-sounding headlines that lead to pages containing ads, pages that generate revenues for various parties. 

In the area of physics and cosmology, our science educators had the most meaningful and interesting account that they could have told: an account of a universe mysteriously appearing out of nothing, in an incredibly fine-tuned state, equipped with very many fine-tuned fundamental constants and fine-tuned laws necessary for the existence of creatures such as humans.  But our science educators failed to tell that story properly. Instead of learning of such an account in high school, which would have kept students interested, our high school physics students were tortured by boring calculation problems.  

Our science educators taught us a naive, authoritarian model of science, a kind of triumphal "scientists keep gloriously marching towards the truth" story. This was not a correct description of the "a loop of two steps forward, and one step backward" reality of science: the reality that scientists are conformist members of belief communities that often promote outdated dogmas that are balls-and-chains inhibiting the progress of science, and that groupthink and herd behavior frequently chains scientists to bad old ideas that keep being taught way past their proper expiration date. Our science educators constantly advanced a profoundly erroneous "they can explain all the big stuff" portrait of scientists at odds with the reality that human knowledge is merely fragmentary, and that what humans know is very tiny compared to what they don't know. 

When it comes to science education, the public has been very badly misled. The public put its trust in science educators, entrusting them with the enormous responsibility of acting as guides to help understand who we are and what kind of universe we live in.  Very many or most of our science educators have badly betrayed that trust.