Teachers: do you believe the moon landings were a hoax?

[noblegiraffe]

I was just on Teacher Tapp and found the results from this poll pretty horrifying: 15% of teachers polled don’t disagree with the statement “I believe the moon landings from 1969 to 1972 were actually a hoax”.

What now? Nearly 1 in 6 of us??

BertrandRussell

No, you weren't. You were supporting Noble in her belief, which you called rational, that the probability of the ML being faked was on a par with the probability of (I can't remember the numbers) a simple mathematical certainty being proven incorrect. 1 + 1 is always 2. That is a certainty. The ML being faked? Not.

BertrandRussell

I wasn't using the convention. I was using the words according to their actual meanings, and with sufficient emphasis that I think it was obvious that I didn't mean "unlikely".

@visitorsentrance, have you therefore changed your mind on the existence of chemtrails?
I think it suits some people to claim conspiracy theorists are bonkers and lumping all theories in together means people question less.
I am not convinced by the moon landings.

I think the issue with encouraging children to question everything is that in many cases it means encouraging children to draw equivalent value between poor quality information and good quality information.

I think this is a really important point. If teachers encourage students to question - which they absolutely should - that is only really worthwhile if they are also teaching them how to evaluate sources, how to interpret data, how to think critically, how to cross-reference.

Anyone can sign up to Teacher Tapp. According to their FAQ, so long as the school name and postcode is real, nobody is checking whether or not you are an actual teacher. How reliable that makes the survey is anyone's guess.

have you therefore changed your mind on the existence of chemtrails?
I do now agree that they have been used in the past. I was unaware of the details that you linked to. Interestingly I was born in one of the areas mentioned during the time scale mention and am infertile. I don’t think that chemtrails are to blame.

However that is a far cry from some people who claim that the government still use them and that every mark in the sky is a government funded chemtrail.

I don’t think the Teacher Tapp question was intending to provoke a philosophical discussion about whether anything is truly knowable just a dirty reckoning of whether you thought the moon landings were a hoax.

This whole ‘oh but there’s a vanishingly small possibility that we might discover comprehensive documents explaining how the whole thing was a fake covered up by hundreds of people for decades and the reflector on the moon was actually left by an alien’ sort of thing is something we battle against in maths lessons on probability.

‘What’s the probability you roll a fair dice and get a 7’? ‘Well it could be a trick dice or someone could have coloured in an extra dot or...’ ‘FGS put the answer as 0 and stop wittering’.

Thisis I would have ticked "Disagree".

Good to know. From your posts at the start of the thread it looked like you were angling for ‘don’t know’, hence the robust line of questioning.

simple mathematical certainty being proven incorrect. 1 + 1 is always 2

That’s not what I said. I said someone thinking the solution to 3x+2=8 was x = 3. Faulty reasoning leading to an incorrect conclusion. I wouldn’t say ‘that’s an interesting point of view’.

Whether the moon landings were a hoax or not has a definite answer. That’s for certain, it’s not a matter of opinion like ‘do you think this dress is nice?’.

noblegiraffe

'I don't know' surely refers to 'I don't know whether I disagree'? I do know. I disagree that they were faked. That doesn't mean I know they were genuine.

noblegiraffe

I can't believe you teach Maths. Whether the ML were faked does NOT have a definite answer, and you are being ridiculous.

Er, you don’t believe in an objective reality?

The question "were the moon landings a hoax" does have a definite answer. The question "do you agree that the moon landings were a hoax" may not.

What subject do you teach farce?

What I mean, is that the definite answer is not definitely yes.

Or, I suppose, definitely no. It is one or the other, but to say it definitely wasn't faked, shows a poor mathematical understanding in my view.

Tursiopstruncatus

Why?

I am just hoping it isn't Maths or Science.

poor mathematical understanding

Like I said in maths we tend to assign a probability of 0 to impossible events, on the understanding that we don’t have to constantly account for magic, or aliens, or other wildly implausible scenarios.

Tursiopstruncatus

Why?

noblegiraffe

But you do know that this event is not impossible, don't you?

It is possible that aliens faked the moon landings and it’s possible that we’re all living in the matrix, but dear god it’s tedious to make that disclaimer every time we discuss events. So normal people don’t.

noblegiraffe

But the fact that you think the idea that we are living in the Matrix has the same mathematical probability (i.e. approaching zero) as a political conspiracy that bends no known laws of Physics is...well, really weird.

political conspiracy that bends no known laws of Physics is...well, really weird.

The idea that you think politicians are clever enough to pull off a massive hoax involving 7 moon missions and hundreds of people fooling scientists for decades with moon rocks and laser reflectors is...well really weird.

noblegiraffe

It's stunning to me that, however unlikely it is that's politicians might turn out to be smart, you think the Keanu Reeves scenario is equally likely. You think people are smart enough to get to the Moon, but not smart enough to pretend to get to the Moon.

Bizarre.