Science and Math Have A Job To Do

Why Fighting Bigotry and Misinformation Isn't Just A Job For the Humanities

Perhaps you followed the recent kerfuffle about the following headline, which appeared in the New York Times:

The headline went with a story in which Trump, in full Hitler mode, talked about migrants “poisoning the blood” of the nation. The Times was rightly excoriated for pussy-footing around the former president’s full-throated racism, but that’s not why I’m bringing it to your attention now. Nor do I want to lament the recent polling that found a third of Americans agree with him, a fact that makes me want to curl up in a dark room for the rest of the century. Instead, I want to talk about what schools can do to keep this kind of toxic pseudoscience from taking root.

Let’s start with another scary statistic, this one courtesy of the Center for Counter Digital Hate, which polled one thousand 13-17 year olds in 2022 and found that 43% of them agreed with this statement: “Mass migration of people into the western world is a deliberate policy of multiculturalism and part of a scheme to replace white people.”

For teenagers who were heavy social media users, that figure rose to 52%.

The statement, if you’re not familiar with it, is a paraphrase of the Great Replacement Theory, a racist conspiracy theory pushed by white nationalists. It’s a mish-mosh of a lot of bad ideas, but the bad idea I want to focus on today is the notion that there are meaningful genetic differences between the races.

Teenagers are interested in genes. They want to know who they are and why they are and how much of their identity was determined at birth. They want to know why some people have natural abilities and aptitudes. They want to know why people look different.

But these legitimate lines of inquiry can easily be exploited by eugenicists, white supremacists, and Neo-Nazis. In my book Accountable we meet Jon, one of the followers of the racist Instagram account the book describes.

“It was all born out of curiosity,” Jon said. "I like science. I read about science every day. I'm a math major in college. It's what I would like to do for the rest of my life." He didn't remember now exactly why he'd started googling race back in high school, but he thinks it was because he was white and all of his friends were Asian. He wanted to know why they looked so different from him. His investigation led him to some unexpected places.

“Online you can find websites that rank different races according to different metrics," he explained. "Like income, scores on pychometric tests, various physical attributes." He trailed off, as if hoping to soften the impact of what he was about to say. "With that information, a kid can do a lot of damage. He can start making assumptions about people based on this information. I did that and I told my friends about it and they started doing it."

Years later, Jon continued to believe in the racist rankings he’d discovered online, in part because it masqueraded as genuine science. He was a science guy, after all, and the websites he’d found online looked to him like legitimate science.

“Scientists from very prestigious universities, they’ve said they do believe these sorts of things and I don’t even like to use the word believe, because you don’t believe science,” he told me. “There’s the facts. There is the logical process that led to these facts being produced.”

Jon isn’t unusual in being bamboozled by fake science. I’ve written before in this newsletter about how easy it is for all of us to be taken in. (Often, the problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know.)

The Washington Post reported this week on research done by the Digitial Inquiry Group with students and professors at Stanford University, who might be presumed to be more sophisticated than a high schooler when it comes to sorting fact from fiction. But, as it turns out, both the students and the professors shared a vulnerability with Jon: a mistaken belief that they were too smart to be fooled.

Sam Wineburg has run experiments with students at Stanford University that show we’re often overconfident in our ability to judge whether online information is true or false.

Wineburg, co-founder of Digital Inquiry Group, a digital literacy nonprofit, showed students a website and gave them a few minutes to decide if it’s trustworthy. The students often fall for the trap of a website of gussied up junk science. Participants do best when they have the humility to recognize they can’t accurately evaluate information that sounds like it could be true.

How Science Education Can Help

I write in Accountable about the peer-reviewed scientific education that can be used to inoculate young people against racist pseudo-science. Recently, by sheer coincidence, I had an opportunity to see the results of a similar program in action.

I was having lunch with a group of students at a high school where I had come to talk about my work. Earlier that morning, a panel of students had interviewed me on stage, and now we were chit-chatting about a range of topics, from our favorite books to the problem of racist humor to their experiences with online learning during covid.

At some point in our conversation, without any prompting by me, the students started reminiscing about a unit they’d taken in 10th grade on Human Diversity. I later learned that the unit was only four days long, but wow, did it make an impression on these kids. Now juniors and seniors, they remembered specific lessons that showed that race is a social rather than a scientific concept, including the fact that a Black student and a white student had more genetic similarities than two Black students did.

In other words, over those four days students had learned enough about Human Diversity to be effectively inoculated against the pseudo-scientific falsehoods commonly propagated on the Internet by white supremacist and Neo-Nazi groups. I feel pretty confident that if Jon had taken that class, he would have been far less vulnerable to the propaganda he encountered.

Intrigued, I asked the school for more information about the unit. They told me they developed it in-house for use in every tenth grade biology class. The unit comes after students have already been given lessons on genetics, DNA, and evolution, so that they are familiar with some of the important underlying concepts. It’s an ungraded unit where students receive credit for participation. The hypothesis for the unit is: “Race is not biological. It is a social idea.”

Here’s how the school described the unit:

• Day 1 focuses on gauging where students are at in their conception of race and trying to come up with a working understanding of what race is and isn’t.

• Day 2 Students compare/count mitochondrial DNA sequence differences between persons from different continents and within continents. We quantitatively and qualitatively explore the idea that there is just as much/more genetic variation in human populations within a continent (like Africa) as between different continents.

• Day 3 Students learn about the connection between latitude and skin color and explore the factors that may have influenced / given rise to the variety of human skin colors seen today.

• Day 4 is the unit wrap up: Bringing together the history and the science, historical perspective on how politics and culture intersect with science in the context of beliefs about the human race.

In describing these details for me in an email, the school’s librarian noted, “Each day ends with a student exit survey just to check in to see how students are doing. The general feedback from the students is positive and the majority show growth and understanding.”

If you are interested in adding this kind of information to your own school’s curriculum, start here, with the work done by Brian Donavan, who I profile in my book.

What Science and Math Teachers Can Do

History and Language Arts teachers have been thinking about how to make their curricula accurate and inclusive for quite some time. Now it’s time for math and science to do their part. Not only can science give students accurate information about race and gender, it can also help them resist banana-pants rumors like the ones about the government controlling the weather that have been interfering with state and federal efforts to respond to hurricanes in the southern U.S.

As the New York Times wrote in 2022:

For a study published last year, researchers at Stanford University asked 3,446 high school students to evaluate several types of content. They did not do well. In one example, a website claimed to offer facts about climate science, but was actually tied to the fossil fuel industry. It duped nearly 97 percent of the students.

A group of scientists and educators at Stanford who have been working on this kind of curriculum have pointed out that none of us can possibly have the expertise required to evaluate complex scientific claims. Therefore, they say in an article in the journal Science, the goal of scientific education should be to make “competent outsiders” of every student:

Every one of us, when lacking detailed knowledge of any scientific topic (including scientists outside their own specialism), requires an understanding of three key concepts to evaluate any scientific claim successfully. These are (i) the social practices that the scientific community uses to produce reliable knowledge (10); (ii) the criteria of scientific expertise; and (iii) the basics of digital media literacy.

And math? Regular readers of this newsletter might already know how passionately I believe that nothing prepares you more for being a citizen of a democracy than a basic understanding of statistics. White supremacists are fond of using crime statistics, for example, to push false ideas of Black criminality. Manosphere types like to use statistics about scientific achievements to argue that women aren’t suited to STEM. These kinds of arguments can feel irrefutable if you don’t have an understanding of how statistics work and how they can be manipulated.

This blog post, by a math teacher, gives four examples of mathematical tools for battling disinformation:

1. Critically Analyze Data Visualizations

2. Understand Correlation and Causation

3. Explore the Raw Statistics Beyond the Headlines

4. Challenge the Likelihood of a Statistic

Mathematics is also a key place to develop an understanding of reasoning, logic, and probability, as well as the mental shortcuts like recency bias and confirmation bias where our own brains can lead us astray.

The sad fact is that when there are so many people working so hard to manipulate us with disinformation, those of us who are Team Reality have to work even harder to combat them. That doesn’t mean we just tell students not to be bigots. It means we give them the tools in every discipline and at every age to be critical thinkers. The humanities have been answering the call for a while. Now it’s time for math and science to step up.

With a sigh,

Dashka