… I guess that’s what happens when you create a “theory” without defining your terms, though. You can always encompass exactly as much territory as is convenient.

The comments arose from a Discovery Institute podcast, wherein they made the claim.

I suspect that wrongophobia is a contributing factor to apathy- for people with a high probability of being wrong, they would be hard to distinguish.

Even in California, my students hadn’t felt enough earthquakes to have well-established ideas about them - at least, not that they told me about. The class wasn’t structured in a way that I had a good chance to ask, and I suspect there is a natural level of embarassment about giving the “wrong” answer, so that if you don’t ask, repeatedly, they’ll never tell you. We also did an exercise translating descriptions into MMI, which was great, though a few students refused to believe that there could possibly be right and wrong answers…

First, a question — that butterfly pattern. I’ve never taken a class from a real seismologist; I took geophysics from Norm Sleep, who is… well, he’s Norm, and very smart, but not a seismologist. I learned about seismology from some books, and from talking to seismologists, but there is an awful lot of fairly basic stuff that I don’t know. So… the butterfly pattern. Is this basically a cool, more intuitive way of explaining the double couple idea? Are you kind of talking about the beach ball diagrams, except that there is more to it than the first motion on a seismogram - the energy varies in other ways besides “pushing” vs “pulling”?

And second, earthquake folksonomy in teaching. I went to grad school in California (and was made homeless by the Loma Prieta earthquake), but I’ve done all my teaching in less seismically active areas. So I’ve got earthquake stories, but my students don’t. (If I taught in California, though it might be really cool to try to come up with some kind of class project to test hypotheses based on students’ earthquake stories.) About ten years ago, I collected a whole bunch of Loma Prieta stories from people on the old ca.earthquakes Usenet newsgroup. Some of the stories have a lot of the kind of detail you describe. I use the stories to have students try to make a map of the Mercalli intensities for Loma Prieta. It doesn’t get into the fundamental mechanisms, but it does illustrate how perceptions of an earthquake can vary from place to place, and how damage can be different. (And it lets me talk a little about how building standards affect what kind of damage occurs, and about liquefaction, and about other things that influence damage — which are probably the most important things for the nonmajors to think about, particularly in the interdisciplinary class I’m teaching right now.)