How we can overcome Britain’s problem with scientific illiteracy

It occurs to me that one of the most important lessons we’ve learnt so far during this time of plague is that the majority of the glitterati, TV journalists and armchair epidemiologists on Twitter, are all scientifically illiterate.

This is not a new phenomenon. One of my most precious possessions is a copy of CP Snow’s 1959 Rede lecture on the ‘two cultures’ – science and the humanities. At the time he suggested you had:

‘Literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists, and the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf mutual incomprehension – sometimes hostility and dislike, but most of all a lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground.’

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Sean Thomas

The bitter cocktail of British decline

What he described then is just as bad today.