Not Understanding Science doesn't make you Dumb

A lot of people are rude and dismissive to people who have scientific misconceptions. Often, they belittle people who don't understand how, say, seasons work. They say this makes a person unusually stupid. This seems wrong to me, both on a descriptive and moral level. Ethically, people are rarely blameworthy for being stupid, so they should not be made to feel bad about it. But, equally, not understanding science does not make you stupid. Intelligence is only tangentially related to how learned you are. Many intelligent people are too busy to learn about science. Or perhaps they live in a place where myths abound and knowledge is hard to come by — Aristotle was a genuis, but he still thought the Sun orbited the Earth. In our age of smartphones and AI chatbots, this is less true than it used to be. But, through no fault of their own, many people still get poor educations and inhabit social worlds where learning is not valued. This attitude also betrays a certain niaveity about how much…