Do Scientists Understand the Public? 511
Mab_Mass writes "The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has an interesting article on the relationship between scientists and the public. [Here's the paper itself, as a PDF.] Rather than point the finger at an 'ignorant' public, this article chastises the scientists for a poor understanding of how to communicate with non-technical people. With a look at the issues of climate change, nuclear waste disposal, genetics, and the future of the Internet, the article provides examples of how the experts in these fields are failing to present their message in a way that encourages public discussion and support."
The story of our lives... (Score:1, Interesting)
How about the mouth-breathers actually use the muscle between their ears during high school math and science classes so that they are better equiped to understand what scientists are trying to tell them later in life? Truly, you do not need to be a scientist to understand articles written for general consumption. A basic understanding of high school science (biology, physics, chemistry) and math (algebra and statistics) will get you there. While we are at it, I distinctly recall the steps of the scientific method explained in detail (several times in middle and high school), as were the definitions of "theory", "law", and "hypothesis". Jesus Christ people, use your brains.
People are hard (Score:3, Interesting)
I became good at math and physics because I was bad with people.
If we understood people, we wouldn't have become scientists.
Ob. xkcd : http://xkcd.com/55/ [xkcd.com]
Best way is probably to get a politician or diplomat to mediate and translate. Scientists don't like to lie or avoid topics or spin shortcomings; all things that are necessary to control the course of public discourse, which can easily be led astray. The public wants a clear, definitive message from a leader-type. The job of scientists and engineers is to make sure all of the little details and minor considerations are in line and questioned.
Re:Hmmph. (Score:5, Interesting)
In the heady days of yesteryear, it seems science was respected. People went to school for a long time to learn an aspect of science and people respected their expertise. The scientist would come out and say "It turns out X is affected by Y." People listened and anyone who wanted to know more about how or why X is affected by Y could hit the books and find out for themselves.
Nowadays, it seems healthy skepticism has turned unhealthy. Science isn't as respected... in fact, there's a lot of mistrust from the public. A scientist can devote her whole career to puzzling out some fact of the world, only to be second guessed by high-school dropouts. "X is affected by Y." People don't accept that anymore. Explain why. Explain how. Spell it out for me in great detail, this X and Y business. "The detailed methodology is in the research paper." But that's hard to read and involves lots complicated terms and references tons of previous work. Tell me in simple language, preferably in two sentences or less, and don't bore me...
In other words, the public wants to be pandered to and scientists have better things to do than explain in small words every detail of their work to people that have the attention span of a gnat.
Finally understand the Young Republicans (Score:4, Interesting)
All I can say is, "Dang."
This is getting repetitive (Score:1, Interesting)
While not very harmful, this isn't exactly new ground, with the most recent flare-up being centered on "Don't Be Such a Scientist" from last year.
And, like its predecessors, it oversimplifies things and insults most the people who deserve it least. In these sorts of articles, it's usually just The Scientists and The Public. The first are portrayed as total idiots at communication, and the other are portrayed as herd animals with no responsibility or agency. But there's something horribly important lacking from this picture of why science is occasionally poorly-understood: the large numbers of people who WANT the science to be poorly understood. It's like the authors of these articles were writing about the Vietnam war and forgot to mention the Chinese! Creationists, greenpeace, big business, the media itself, there are tons of people whose living or self-worth depends on the science sometimes being distorted or buried. If you want to improve public understanding of controversial issues, any plan of action that ignores the elephant in the room will fail, and in fact will be a sort of the very anti-science it's trying to fight.
Re:Or... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are lots of reasons people have lost faith in science, Chernobyl, Bhopal, Challenger, Vioxx, WMDs, Cold Fusion, and the general lack of trust in authority that has grown since the 60s. Michael Specter makes a good analysis of it here [ted.com]. And really there is no reason to blindly believe scientists or anyone else: it's kind of health to ask for proof, as long as you don't keep denying once you receive it.
Incidentally, you blame corporations, but a lot of the anti-science movement corresponds to the anti-corporation movement as well: the anti-vaccine and anti-GMO propaganda isn't coming from corporations any more than the anti-evolutionists.
Re:Wait... They want them to dumb things down... (Score:3, Interesting)
"The reason Sagan and people like him were popular was that they had such an ability. It is so rare among scientists that having it becomes noteworthy."
Agreed. I have come to realize that it's all about the metaphor or parallel understanding that too often exists but we choose to ignore. For example, back in 1999 when someone with a grudge decided to DDOS eBay(and I think CNN?) all of my friends were asking me, since I am an old skewl hacker, what happened. I explained that a ping is like sending someone a postcard with a S.A.S.E., and that someone sent a few million of those postcards to a bunch of random people with the return address set as eBay and that eBay was having a hard time sorting through their mail to determine who was real. You could tell they immediately understood the concept and were thrilled that I could bring them into my world, even if only slightly. That's rare though because usually my wife has to explain to everyone what I just said...
Re:Finally understand the Young Republicans (Score:1, Interesting)
Climate change is no longer about science, it's about politics. There's your answer as to why.
You can blame the assholes that are trying to cash in on fortune and glory for that.
Re:Wait... They want them to dumb things down... (Score:4, Interesting)
The 'hurricanes increase with more patches of warmer water where they form' theory is pretty good, and likely true, but it's a sort of separate rider on the main hypothesis. Specific damage estimates aren't even that, because all the climatology can be right, but there can be flaws in the economic side that make the conclusion off by orders of magnitude. There - that's what's so difficult - you set out to explain the main theory, got sidetracked swiftly into possible tangentals, and by not 'admitting' that you were adding in additional assumptions, look at least a little shady. Of course, you aren't trying to gloss over sources of inaccuracy, you're just trying to sum up without it getting too complex, but some of these people are already thinking you are speaking for the very father of lies, so maybe it makes sense to phrase everything like the person you are addressing is trying extra hard to spot any lies you might tell. As simple as possible, but no simpler.
Let me give you a similar scientific/public situation. There are a lot of not real scientifically educated people who think the Paleontologists actually always do whole reconstructions from a single bone. (Loren Eisley used to complain that he got that question every single press conference "Say Doc, is it true you fellas always work from just a single bone?"). So, it's important for anyone talking to the public about something such as dinosaurs to stress what the raw evidence they have is, as in "We have found the sixth complete fossil of a T-Rex, and we have 35 more partials. With six, we have enough examples to be sure this one was a mature female. So far, the females seem to average a bit bigger than the males, but we'd like to find a few more good specimens to check that".
Really ignorant people won't believe we can tell which specimens were male and which female until they first understand we have more than a single foot bone or something to go on, and less ignorant people will spot a veracity problem if the scientist claims to be as highly confident of how sexually dimorphic the species was, as whether we can tell them apart at all. I've long wished for a child's book on dinosaurs that says "We have over 500 complete specimens of this one, including old ones, adolescents, and infants just hatching." and where needed, "our best fossil for this one is only a front half. Because it seems most closely related to this other one, we are pretty confident it looked mostly like this.". A little honesty openly displayed to the next generation would go a long way in getting people to trust the method itself, and maybe its practitioners.
Re:Hmmph. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's more of a problem with journalists, actually. Someone writes a paper, say, on "50 ml of coffee every day increases the memory abilities of people with AB-type blood". To journalists, this means "NEWSFLASH: Science Says Coffee Makes You Smarter!!!!!". Then, someone else writes another paper: "200ml of coffee every day increases the chance of a heart attack on heavy smokers"; journalists turn that to "NEWSFLASH: Beware! Coffee Can Kill You, Say Scientists!"
The main problem is that people should need some sort of basic scientific training to report on science news. Scientists sometimes may be guilty of being too naïve when explaining their work to journalists. This happened with quantum entanglement effects, where someone may have told a journalist (when working on first principles of entanglement, or an early experiment) that "this works as if we have teleported the particle from one side to the other"; the journalist turned that to "Physicists discover Star Trek-style teleportation!!!". Another example, more recent, happened with some people who modeled the quantum vacuum in a curved spacetime, and they found that this vacuum state could have more energy than we had imagined (and that this vacuum energy can "clump" in some points). Journalists saw the paper, interviewed them, and made a headline out of it: "Physicists Discover a Way To Create Energy Out Of Nothing!!"
Re:Wait... They want them to dumb things down... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sagan was an astronomer. The macroscopic world tends to be much comfortable to the layman than the microscopic world. You can talk to the average person about planets, stars, and even black holes, but the minute you mention quantum mechanics, photons, or quarks you will lose them. In addition, the average person seems to be incapable of really understanding statistics (which is very important for climatology). A intelligent person told me just a few days ago that a skydiver who has 5000 jumps is more likely to have an accident on their next jump than one who has 500 jumps. Her argument was that the more experienced jumper was long over due to have an accident.
Re:Hmmph. (Score:3, Interesting)
...science reporters, as a class, aren't particularly proficient...schools aren't particularly effective...
Yeah, and there's a pattern here. I think we generally aren't good at our jobs and we don't value people who are good at their jobs. We look up to reality TV drama queens. We've lived with the propaganda that "people are only motivated by money" for so long that we actually believe it. We've gotten to the point where reporters and teachers are part of the underclass, looked down on by businessmen and technologists. The teachers and reporters themselves are uneducated and ignorant.
Sorry. All that's completely off-topic and depressing to boot.
Re:Hmmph. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, science gets blamed yet again for shit that journalists pull out of their asses. See wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and read out from there. The money quote: "This hypothesis [global cooling] had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of press reports that did not accurately reflect the scientific understanding..." Despite little, if any support from scientists at the time, it's over thirty years later and we still hear about this. While some might call it a case in point about scientists doing a poor job at communicating, I'm reminded of a book titled On Bullshit [princeton.edu]. Global warming is a problem that potentially affects everybody, just not equally. If you're corporation X that produces large quantities of compounds implicated in global warming, there is naturally going to be pressure on you to cut back. That will cut into your profits, and your profits, like for every corporation, are your sole reason to exist. You're pressured by market forces (and probably by some portions of the law as well) to do everything in your power to keep your ox from getting gored. That can mean anything from touting a fully legitimate study that supports your continued CO2 (or whatever) production byproducts, to a quote mine of a global warming paper, to hiring shills to write crap in unrefereed journals. A corporation doesn't care about right or wrong, it cares about profit, and this disregard for or the simple irrelevance of truth is bullshitting. If bullshitting helps corporate profit, corporations bullshit, and that's part of why we still have to deal with bullshit global cooling.
The other points in your post are similar, but I can't resist two. I work on a protein involved in maintaining proper cholesterol levels in animals. Cholesterol is both bad and good for you. If you were to purge your body of all cholesterol, you'd be dead pretty quickly. Cholesterol is involved in several critically important processes. Cholesterol is converted into other sterols which function as signaling molecules (testosterone and estrogen quickly come to mind). Cholesterol is also an important part of the cell membranes of all animals (at least, it's probably pretty darn important for most other critters), in that it is involved with maintaining appropriate levels of viscosity in the cell membrane, allowing protein receptors, ion channels, and whatnot to move around appropriately, and plays a role in the proper ordering of these structures within the membrane as well. However if you're a person you can have too much cholesterol and build up plaques in your arteries from eating too many tasty steaks, prosciutto, hams, yams cooked in bacon, eggs...{drools}...where was I...Oh yes. Build up plaques of cholesterol, have a heart attack and/or stroke and croak. So both overly high and overly low levels of cholesterol can kill you. Which is the same for a lot of things. Ingesting too much water can kill you just as well as too little...both oddly enough will make you hallucinate like a motherfucker along the way though.
The other item is DDT. I've worked on developing new pesticides. DDT is still in use and this is a good thing because some insect-borne diseases are total nightmares. Off the top of my head mosquitoes carry malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, and several different viruses that cause encephalitis. If you're in an area that either has or is expected to have an outbreak of one of these, your best bet is to control the vector population (mosquitoes), and the most potent means of doing this is to use insecticides. Sadly, that means using DDT (still in use today for this purpose, but banned since 1972 in the US as a crop insecticide) and a horribly limited selection of other compounds, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. DDT will fuck up
Re:Not dumbing down: removing jargon (Score:3, Interesting)
we scientists have developed highly technical vocabularies with precise meanings in order to be able to communicate complex concepts very precisely to each other
When I see a paper that has a really high jargon to English ratio, it often seems to be cause the author is trying to hide his inability to understand what he did. I see it all the time in undergrad technical reports and the like and recently in a journal submission. Other people in academia generally seem to share my opinion.
Re:Not dumbing down: removing jargon (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't forget, for the public even "linear" and "exponential" is jargon -- it is extremely hard to avoid these simple words, and there are a lot of others.
Maybe it would be useful to make a list of these "simple" terms that are unknown for the general public.
Re:The problem is vocabulary and field knowlege. (Score:3, Interesting)
I take it you've never lived in Northern Michigan. When 'Cosmos' was broadcast locally absolutely **NO ONE** that I worked with (car parts factory) watched it.
I grew up in Southern Michigan and worked in the auto industry - including parts factories - for much of my professional career. I can assure you that both white and blue collar auto workers have some very smart people among them, many quite interested in science.
The Henry Ford Museum / Greenfield Village is one of the premier museums of science and technology - including such things as Edison's lab, lovingly disassembled in Menlo Park and reassembled on the grounds. (Henry and Edison were friends and colleagues.) It's a two-day minimum to even skim the place. It's always well attended, and a significant fraction of those attendees are auto workers.