Saturday, March 15, 2008 | Reason : In the News | print version

Selling science to the masses

by New Scientist

Thanks to SPS for the link.

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortsharpscience/2008/03/selling-science-to-masses.html

Selling science to the masses

What comes to mind when you hear the word "science"? Nerds in lab coats? Chalkboards crowded with indecipherable equations? How about multi-billion dollar particle accelerators that you can't quite remember the name of?

It's fun to play around with stereotypes, but bloggers Chris Mooney, a freelance writer, and Matthew Nisbet, a professor at the American University, think such ill-conceived views of science are a big problem. The best way to remedy the situation, they say, is nothing short of an overhaul in how scientists and science writers talk to the public.

That was the gist of their talk, "Speaking Science 2.0: A New Paradigm in Public Engagement", which they gave earlier this week at the University of California, Berkeley.

Why is this important? Politics. Author of the best-selling book The Republican War on Science, Mooney stressed that scientific issues are increasingly intertwined with everyday life. Whether embryonic stem cells or climate change, science that has the potential to save - or harm - millions of lives depends heavily on lawmakers and other members of the lay public, who often aren't familiar with the underlying science.

The natural response is, of course, to shout "more science publications, more educational programming for the masses!" If we inundate people with information, people will educate themselves, and make better decisions about important scientific issues.

Not so, says Nisbet. People make decisions based on what they can relate to, and when they can't relate to stem cells or greenhouse gases, they simply don't care.

The way to solve the problem is by framing the issue. Here's a quick multiple choice question:

Which of the following scenarios best convinces you that climate change is a problem caused by people that leads to catastrophe?

A) The movie poster of An Inconvenient Truth (pictured above). It's a smokestack spewing out a hurricane.

B) Members of atmospheric science community who until recently said things like: "Well, um, we think it's somewhat likely to be probable that certain anthropogenic emissions are causing increased solar energy to become trapped within the atmosphere???"

If you picked B, you probably have a PhD. And that's fine - we need you all to keep doing your incredibly important work! We'd be lost without you.

But get real: Choice A is a show stopper. Choice B, a conversation stopper in all but the most erudite circles.

Framing is where it's at. You want to convince people to vote to fund stem-cell research? You need Michael J Fox on camera, shaking with Parkinson's and saying "this research could save my life, and thousands of people like me."

Nisbet and Mooney's point was broad, spanning not just journalists, but academics, too. They encouraged the scientists in the room to think about how to tell their stories of discovery, and to emphasise that scientists are people too, not some hyper-intelligent beings locked away in their labs all day and night.

So yes, I???ve ranted, let me leave you with a line from Nisbet that stuck in my head:

"Sometimes the best way to talk to the public about science is not to talk about science at all."

Michael Reilly, New Scientist consultant

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1. Comment #144139 by Deepthought on March 15, 2008 at 7:29 am

I read another article about the public presentation of science recently. http://discovermagazine.com/2007/nov/a-modest-proposal-for-science-end-it-don.t-mend-it

It says some fairly interesting things but I like how the author says that scientists should, instead of a white lab coat, wear "Perhaps a white cape. Or a black cape. Or something else entirely."

edit: I think the proposal to change the public image of science in the "Blinded by Science" article(that seperate branches of science should be "thought of as self-contained pursuits, like telemarketing or cooking") would deal with the physical chemists trying to fault things done in the field of evolutionary biology.

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2. Comment #144144 by Animavore on March 15, 2008 at 7:50 am

Also we need more good looking cool scientists like Brian Cox, Lisa Randell, That Polish woman, Olga something and Tyson (how cool is that) out there presenting shows and documentrys with cool computer effects and less cardigan wearing Raelian lookin' mo'fo's with trousers around their armpits.

...and the geek shall inheirit the earth...

Get over yerself, jesus-esqe/dr. phil style nice words bear no relation in real life. Sorry L-heads, that's just the way it is.

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3. Comment #144151 by Mitchell Gilks on March 15, 2008 at 8:04 am

This saddens me, and I feel a tad insulted as a lay person as well. Though I fear they might be right...I will fight my reaction to be pissed off at them trying to dumb things down for me, and just pretend that I am excluded from the general public.

Whenever I see them attempting this, I will put my fingers in my ears, close my eyes, and yell "la-la-la-la-la, I'm not listening!" Until they're done.

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4. Comment #144152 by Verylee on March 15, 2008 at 8:06 am

....In the beginning was the nerd,...

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5. Comment #144158 by Geoff on March 15, 2008 at 8:20 am

Um. Not convinced.

He seems to see it as an "either/or" scenario. Why not both? I don't know about the US, but we (in the UK) have very popular TV programmes (like "Brainiac") that do a pretty good job of popularising science.

You want to convince people to vote to fund stem-cell research? You need Michael J Fox on camera, shaking with Parkinson's and saying "this research could save my life, and thousands of people like me."

There are already many ads that do take a similar approach: cancer research, blood donor, stopping smoking etc. The big difference is that these aren't actively opposed by the religious (apart from JW's).

Other Comments by Geoff

6. Comment #144160 by Logicel on March 15, 2008 at 8:25 am

PZ Myers disagrees vehemently with the 'framing' approach of Mooney and has written several lively posts related to this topic. Here's one:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/04/i_like_framing_less_and_less_w.php

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7. Comment #144161 by nother person on March 15, 2008 at 8:26 am

What a crock! Sure scientists need to think (at least some of us) about how we talk to the public, but this article as much as tells us to give up informing the public in favor of propagandizing. Should scientific organizations spend money to hire PR flacks instead of research? The recent successes of books like TGD would seem to indicate the opposite. Speak clearly and you will be heard. It is not necessary to resort to images of whirlwinds in smokestacks and similar emotional (fear based) appeals. Just tell the efing truth!

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8. Comment #144166 by Logicel on March 15, 2008 at 8:31 am

In addition, the lovely bloke at Blogging Around the Clock has a list of all the pertinent links concerning this debate which has been raging for some time now:

http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/04/onestop_shopping_for_the_frami.php

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9. Comment #144169 by aporeticus on March 15, 2008 at 8:38 am

It's hard to read past the word "paradigm". Marketspeak for marketing science. And marketing doesn't give a damn about honesty and reality.

Hurricanes don't come out of smokestacks. A hurricane isn't caused entirely by climate change. Climate change might make them bigger or more frequent, but they could certainly hit US cities without our help. Or you could easily still have a season with few hurricanes, leaving people wondering if scientists really are dishonest about this climate change thing.

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10. Comment #144173 by Bonzai on March 15, 2008 at 8:45 am

Why do they have to use the word "selling" as if it involves something dishonest? I usually avoid people who talk to me because they want to sell me something,

I don't know how Dawkins would feel for the implication that he is somehow on a par morally with a guy trying to sweet talk you into buying used cars from him.

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11. Comment #144177 by Pattern Seeker on March 15, 2008 at 9:07 am

I definitely can relate to where they are coming from. I agree with the idea of making science more relatable and accessible to the masses, but not with their methods.

As an American raised in the North, but now living in the South, I have seen just how different science is viewed in this country. Don't get me wrong, "wackos" live everywhere here, it's just an overt air of contempt for science on all levels in the South. People need to be better educated on science in general, the question is how? Most public schools fail in that regard and the MSM only use it if it fits their agenda, mostly casting a negative light, and not truly informing or educating.

So the question still remains-How do we as individuals who understand and relate to science, get others who don't understand modern science, or better yet, for the most part, those who won't understand science, better informed and educated?

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12. Comment #144203 by Apathy personified on March 15, 2008 at 10:20 am

I tihnk it was Einstein who said, 'Simplify science, but don't make it simple'

As a lot of science is government funded, through research councils, etc, so scientists do have to be able to explain their research to the people who pay, tax-payers, and sometimes taking the time to reformulate something in simpler terms may help your own understanding.
However, this gross trivializing of science can't be the best way to do that, science is NOT a product to be sold, as that's then not many steps away from science being abused, we all know what that can do....

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13. Comment #144207 by AmericanGodless on March 15, 2008 at 10:28 am

We all know what Richard thinks of this -- see The God Delusion, the section on "The Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists".

One of the people mentioned when Richard discusses that "school" is Eugenie Scott, of NCSE. Richard doesn't talk about this directly, but to me, Scott's promotion of "methodological naturalism" is one of the worst examples of abandonment of scientific integrity in favor of public relations. Naturalism is not a "methodology," that can be left in the lab like the PCR machine and the lab coat, but a central theory that unifies all of science. And, when I asked her after one of her lectures if she didn't agree that naturalism was part of the cluster of theories tested every time an experiment is done in science that turns out not to require the "supernatural" to explain its results, she agreed with me, and further agreed that it is probably the best-tested theory in all of science.

Deepthought, in the first comment in this thread, suggests (following along with a Discover Magazine article by Bruno Maddox) that science might better frame itself as a collection of disparate and scattered fields of study, and that this might insulate evolution from criticism by physical chemists. But this is impossible, because evolutionary studies depend upon physical chemistry

Maddox, in his article in Discover (see Deepthought's comment for the link) asks, "What benefit is currently accruing to the scattered fields of botany, Mars exploration, quantum physics, and so on, by being thought of as mere branches of a greater, more boring whole?" Just how are you going to explore for life on Mars without a grounding in the chemistry of earthly plant life? And how will you understand mutation rates in plants without some understanding of the quantum chemistry of the tautomeric shifts in DNA bases that are the random (truely random -- you can't get more random than quantum physics) cause of many mutations?

The enterprise of science has two crucial virtues: its method, and its unity. Maddox dismisses the scientific method as being, by now, just part of "common sense," as most people know by now instictively that they must have evidence to back claims. But just gathering evidence is not the scientific method. The "method" is nothing more or less than a collection of steps that scientists have found helpful in their efforts to avoid fooling themselves. If you don't bother with controls and peer review, if you ignore negative results, if you cull the data, or allow any of hundreds of other sources of self-delusions to color your conclusions, then you are not doing science. Gather all the evidence you want, you can still fool yourself.

And one of the greatest assurances that you are not fooling yourself is when you find that some other line of research from someone else working on something quite different dovetails with what you are doing, and the reality of science springs out at you, because you realize you are looking at the same thing from two different directions. If you "frame" science by breaking it up, you will never see that the dance of chromosomes you see in meiosis under the microscope fits perfectly with the dance of the genetic symbols in transmission genetics; and you will never see that the timeline of geology fits with the timeline of genetics (see "Your Inner Fish" by Neil Shubin).

And you won't see that the smoke from a stack has a potential connection to hurricanes. No, hurricanes don't come full-blown from smokestacks (nor from butterfly wings), but both metaphors are apt, when considered in a context where the goal is to understand the world as an integrated whole, and where care is taken to avoid expanding the metaphor into self-delusion.

The article from New Scientist quotes Matthew Nisbet: "Sometimes the best way to talk to the public about science is not to talk about science at all." Nonsense. If you are talking about the real world, you are always talking about science. The "framing" problem, as I see it, is that most people fail to see science as a unified whole, and fail to see that science consists of all human thought and communication that bothers to take some care to avoid self-delusion. Which is why, when I hear people talk of "other ways of knowing" beyond science, I always wonder why it is that they think self-delusion is a "way of knowing."

The public mis-apprehension of science, especially in the US, is due to a public presentation that removes science from its philosophical context as a moral system of truth-telling and a unification of all human knowledge. If science is the only road to knowledge, and has no place for their religion, then the public will have none of it, thank you. What they want (and too often get) is a museum with a gift shop full of sparkley toys where the exhibits are the dismembered and stuffed pieces of science, and where the real guts of science, its unifying world view and its moral imperative, have been quietly buried out back.

Richard is in the business of getting to the heart (and the rest of the guts) of the matter.

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14. Comment #144232 by emmet on March 15, 2008 at 12:40 pm

A huge number of people get their information predominantly from television. One thing that I have noticed is that the information content of television documentaries has declined considerably. Most of the documentaries that I see on Discovery Channel (or whatever) contain vast amounts of padding and repetition --- the first few minutes after the ad break is a "synopsis" of the bit before the ad break, but the bits between ad breaks are so short that it amounts to repetition. They are much inferior to the information-rich Horizon, Panorama, and Living Planet documentaries I watched on the Beeb as a kid. I'd even go so far as to suggest that the low signal-to-noise ratio of documentaries, which we might otherwise think of as promoting science, actually contribute to the perception of science as dull and boring.

I don't think the answer is "framing", although I do think that certain issues could be promoted better by the scientific community and we could probably learn a thing or two about marketing and grabbing attention, but science documentaries that are less soporific than the current crop wouldn't do any harm.

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15. Comment #144250 by Apathy personified on March 15, 2008 at 1:14 pm

Good points emmet.

Though unfortunately Horizon and Panorama are declining as well, and badly. A few months ago there was a Horizon documentary on the LHC, i think the Higgs particle was mentioned only once in the 40-45 minute show, most of it was taken up with what Prof. Frank Close (at Oxford) calls 'Factoids', i.e. sciency as opposed to science. The factiods in this particular case were that th LHC will create black holes or worm holes that WILL destroy humanity.

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16. Comment #144318 by Terminally Nerdy on March 15, 2008 at 3:38 pm

Hey guys, we have to realize that even crappy 'sciency' docs are still being watched chiefly by the better informed. I think the framing idea isn't the whole answer, but a good start. Anything and everything we can do to break the wall that the scientifically illiterate build around themselves is a good thing. It doesn't matter how cogent your point is if the recipient shuts down because it sounds like what they think they don't want to hear.

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17. Comment #144322 by TinyRobot on March 15, 2008 at 3:45 pm

Have to say i'm with PZ on this one. I start twitching when someone mentions 'framing'. It seems uncomfortably close to 'deliberate mendacity' to me. Take the global warming example used by the author in this piece - let's scare people into taking science seriously!

Actually, I'd have doubts about that example too. Does anyone know of any research showing that scaring people is an effective means of communication for anything? (Genuinely curious about this).

In the end, i think well-written books and articles and well-spoken talks are the way to go. I dislike the fact that some publishers think quirkiness, vapidity, boorishness and sensationalism are required to sell popular science books (we've all seen the cringe-worthy titles). Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker et al are on the right track: serious works, capable of being read by layman and professional alike.

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18. Comment #144330 by the_ultimate_samurai on March 15, 2008 at 4:03 pm

i kinda agree on this...personaly im a person who picked B...but i realize most people science goes right over their head...i know because they are everyone else in my family and most of my close personal friends. like they said up there i dont even talk to them about science...they wont get it.

but if you point to something in mythbusters...they will get that.

and i think that would have been a better explanation:
which of these two programs you think the average person would be more familiar with:
A: nova
B: mythbusters.

now im not saying anything is wrong with mythbusters..i happen to quite like that show, i state it because it popularizes science..and thats always a good thing. (sadly for the lay-person..if you want to get across science...you about need something like bill nye..children level..)

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19. Comment #144359 by shaunfletcher on March 15, 2008 at 5:48 pm

What is so sad is that people WILL watch and enjoy and learn from really good science TV. They will, they always did, but the media people wont provide it because they think the audience is 100 times stupider than it really is.

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20. Comment #144363 by Dr Benway on March 15, 2008 at 5:58 pm

TV ad:

Pam: Hey who's the new guy?
Jan: I dunno. But I heard he's got a small carbon footprint.
Pam: Really! giggles You know what they say, 'small footprint, big...
Jan: Shh! He's coming this way!

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21. Comment #144367 by lievemebe on March 15, 2008 at 6:23 pm

I am with you, AmericanGodless. Too often I have seen science sold like the latest clothing fashion, dumbed-down with gross repetition,and "brilliant scientist working at xx famous institute". Religions have been extremely successful because they have captured the big questions: Why am I different from kangaroos, where did I come from, what made the world? Science needs to capture this universal context and make reason and evidence the starting point of discourse.

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22. Comment #144381 by sarah95 on March 15, 2008 at 9:40 pm

uggh. I cringe everytime this issue is brought up because the communication and literacy problem between scientists and lay-people should NOT always have to be blamed on scientists!! WHY is it that no one even bothers to propose what lay-people might do to help the situation? They just get to sit there while scientists have to dance around the room and impress THEM enough to get them to un-glue the eyeballs from American Idol?

No. I may sound crass, but if you're going to ignore science and work actively to stigmatize it, then you deserve to get burned. All science needs to do is communicate clearly and factually and with a unified voice when an issue needs to be examined or legislated on by lay-people.

Otherwise, if people want to stick their heads in the sand against the advice of the rational man in a labcoat who doesn't speak in soundbites and slogans, they shouldn't come crying when a seagull bites their ass. I know there are some circumstances in which this doesn't apply because we all really can be "in the same boat" at times, but when the US economy tanks and people loose their jobs to techies in India, they can blame the PUBLIC's lack of interest and respect for science education, and kindly stop whining to scientists.

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23. Comment #144388 by robotaholic on March 15, 2008 at 10:41 pm

I love Chris Mooney!!! He's a great speaker. If you havn't seen anything he's done, look him up on youtube. It's worth it.

And I can see what they're saying. I must say I get irritated when you turn it to the science channel and the narrator is speaking to you as if you're in 9th grade. I wish there was *MORE* substance to many science programs-but I'm a scienceholic!

Geoff - what adds are actively opposed by JW's? - I'm just wondering...

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24. Comment #144397 by bucketchemist on March 16, 2008 at 12:18 am

One of the problems, as I see it, is the perceived gap between science and 'normal' thinking. As long as science is purely associated with white coats and chemical formulae then a large number of people are going to feel disenfranchised. T.H. Huxley wrote a really nice article called 'We are All Scientists' drawing out the routine use we all make every day of the same ways of thinking which characterise science. I would say that getting people to feel ownership of the scientific method, and to recognise the power that it has in their own lives, would be a positive step.

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25. Comment #144415 by BicycleRepairMan on March 16, 2008 at 3:06 am

Three words: Your Inner Fish.

That book is how you can sell science, watch Neil Shubin's interview on The Colbert Report:
(http://www.videosift.com/video/Your-Inner-Fish-Neil-Shubin-on-The-Colbert-Report)
Its wonderful. Shubin manages to put the science in context, and to answer those questions we often think of as naive or strange with a straightforward answer.. This is a great approach.

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26. Comment #144452 by hungarianelephant on March 16, 2008 at 5:12 am

There's some good sense in this article, and then he goes and ruins it all with

The way to solve the problem is by framing the issue.

That might work temporarily, but in the long run, people work out when they are being bullshitted. And that damages the whole case, because the people you are trying to convince might never believe another word you say again.

This is partly why science and scientists have a dreadful reputation in the world at large. Most of us here are reasonably scientifically literate, and delighted to read about progress in our understanding of the universe we find ourselves in, and how science can improve people's lives.

That is not most people's experience of "science". The mass media feed them a diet of "reports" about what is good for their health, or their children, or their environment, and quite often directly contradicts what they were told by other "scientists" last week. Sometimes they are being told things that are so far detached from reality that it is laughable. Does anyone really think that two pints of beer constitute a "binge"?

The public may not understand science, but they are well able to understand when politicians are using it as a justification to increase taxes and interfere more in their lives. And their only contact with anyone approaching a real scientist is their doctor, who gives them 8 minutes of time and a prescription which is frequently useless.

Prof. Dawkins sees alternative medicine as a symptom of lack of rationality. I think he is wrong. In my experience, people turn to alternative medicine because they are suspicious of conventional medicine. It is a form of rebellion against a status quo which doesn't work properly. The precise form may not be rational, but the underlying sentiment is understandable.

Much of the problem lies in the huge gulf between science as perceived and science as actually practised. Most people are never going to understand what particle accelerators do, or why. But on the other had, if people had a better understanding of the scientific method, they might have a better idea of how science can be used, and a clearer / more rational notion of when it is being misused. (I also agree with 24. Comment #144397 by bucketchemist.)

If scientific method is actually taught in school, I missed it, despite taking up all the science options. I would bet that not one person in 100 could give a passable description of it.

Try starting there.

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27. Comment #144475 by Henri Bergson on March 16, 2008 at 7:00 am

So Americans are so extremely thick and uneducated now that they have to use pretty pictures to make a scientific case...

The solution is the re-introduction of a sterilisation programme.

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28. Comment #144488 by Steve Zara on March 16, 2008 at 7:59 am

Comment #144381 by sarah95

All science needs to do is communicate clearly and factually and with a unified voice when an issue needs to be examined or legislated on by lay-people.

How is that supposed to happen, when the very nature of science is that it is never a unified voice?

When science is as unified as it ever can be on a subject (the safety of vaccines, global warming), all it takes is one or two dissenters, and the media "presents the controversy".

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29. Comment #144491 by dlitt on March 16, 2008 at 8:08 am

Carl Sagan was my hero for communicating science to the masses. I am also interested in anything Neil deGrasse Tyson has to convey.

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30. Comment #144494 by Bonzai on March 16, 2008 at 8:23 am

In Canada the public doesn't have the same hostility towards science that some posters describe in the Southern U.S., but their understanding is still quite distorted based on what I see in the media,--with the caveat the media image may be distorted. There are several things I notice in particular.

1.Very often science is confused with technology.
So there is this idea that science = gadgets.

2.science is "sold" primarily as a ticket to economical prosperity. The news tell us we need X number of graduates in science for a knowledge based economy, never mind the fact that the fastest growing sector is the low waged, low skill service sector.

This is a horribe idea. As they say you learn to hate what you have to do solely to get your pay cheque.

Children are sent the message at a very young age that science is just a good meal ticket with some bonus of playing with cool machines. If I were told that everyday I would be turned off from science too,

3. Science is often presented as some kind of gala tricks on a par with magic show, That kind of presentation doesn't necessarily enhance one's scientific understanding in a meaningful way.

4. Science is cold and boring. It is all about mechanically applying formulae and following procedures, it is only for a kind of particularly austere individuals,--nerds or geeks,-- who have neither imagination nor social skills. Many intelligent and educated people in the humanities have that impression.These intelligent people in the humanities who hate science may end up working for the media and influence public opinions with their negative stereotypes about science and scientists.I think the way science is taught in high schools probably contributes a lot to that impression.

A local newspaper once came up with a list of questions to test the readers' scientific literacy. Half of the questions were about who discovered what. They were not even science questions! The people who came up with the test themselves didn't know what science is.

I don't have a specific answer to what should be done to communicate science more effectively, but I think it would be misguided to present science as simply a collection of fun facts and neat tricks..It is a systematic world view. It is a set of methodology to understand the world. A guy who can rant off a long list of scientific facts in trivia pursuits does not necessarily have a very good knowledge of science. Facts are useless if you don't know what to make of them.

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31. Comment #144500 by Dr Benway on March 16, 2008 at 8:41 am

bucketchemist: T.H. Huxley wrote a really nice article called 'We are All Scientists' drawing out the routine use we all make every day of the same ways of thinking which characterise science. I would say that getting people to feel ownership of the scientific method, and to recognise the power that it has in their own lives, would be a positive step.

Spot on.

Found a link: Huxley essay

I would follow up Huxley's point, that we are all scientists, with examples of the common reasoning mistakes we're all prone to make, e.g.:

1. Our feelings toward the speaker can warp our opinion of the argument being made.
2. We tend to cherry-pick data to fit a favored explanation.
3. We have a hard time weighing relative probabilities.
4. We're not good with second order equations - e.g., rates of change.

In short: all the logical fallacies and statistical errors. Then I'd mention the more psychological issues that can distort our understanding of reality as it exists:

1. Our brains can create illusions - e.g., of agency where there is none.
2. Our sense of self can include many things outside our own bodies.
3. We tend to divide our social world into circles of alliance and enmity.

I'd talk about the things we do to avoid the errors and distortions we easily fall prey to.

Finally, I'd talk about the institution of science and peer review, which establishes a means for us to trust the scientific literature generally. I'd talk about how we could undermine the checks and balances of our scientific institutions, and what life might be like then.

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32. Comment #144505 by Geoff on March 16, 2008 at 9:01 am

Thanks Dr Benway! I remember being given that essay to read in my first year at Uni. Lovely to re-read it now.

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33. Comment #144508 by Bonzai on March 16, 2008 at 9:06 am

T.H. Huxley wrote a really nice article called 'We are All Scientists' drawing out the routine use we all make every day of the same ways of thinking which characterise science. I would say that getting people to feel ownership of the scientific method, and to recognise the power that it has in their own lives, would be a positive step.

I don't know about that. Most people know the wonder of technology and many creationists are engineers,

I think it is a common mistake to think that science is just about gadgets (see point 1 above) but religion is about answering "big questions". It is not a bad thing to alert people to everyday science, it is worthy goal in itself, but I am not sure how that will persuade people to give up religion. The priest has no problem to go to a doctor or a computer service person who uses "naturalistic" means to fix his problems.

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34. Comment #144509 by Steve Zara on March 16, 2008 at 9:09 am

I am going to steel my nerves and disagree with Dr Benway. Science is hard, and non-intuitive - not just in subjects like Quantum Mechanics, but even at the level of sampling and understanding data through statistics. People in general don't have a feeling for matters like probability and risk. These take time to acquire.

People need to realise that science isn't like politics. Truth isn't democratic, and they have to learn to trust scientists. I have no idea how we manage that.

(And by the time I have posted this, Dr Benway has appropriately qualified the original comment)

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35. Comment #144516 by Crystal on March 16, 2008 at 9:19 am

I don't like the idea that science should try to be more emotionally manipulative I already had too much of that in church.

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36. Comment #144523 by Dr Benway on March 16, 2008 at 9:33 am

Yes Steve, science is difficult. Just as we wouldn't want to convey to the public the notion that anyone can practice medicine, we don't want to convey the notion that scientific training is irrelevant.

But somehow we have to stand up to this pernicious idea that science is merely "one way of knowing."

On the witness stand, I once argued that a patient wasn't competent at the time she bought a car. As evidence, I offered that she traded in a car she didn't own at the time of the sale. I opined that it's probably not legal to do that.

The opposing attorney said, "Dr Benway, are you a lawyer?"

"No," I replied.

He said, "Do you consider yourself qualified to render legal opinions?"

"No," I said, but I realized this bloke was trying to bamboozle me, so I quickly added, "But you don't have to go to law school to know you can't sell a car you don't own."

We should grant the public at least a common sense grasp of methodological naturalism.

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37. Comment #144524 by Geoff on March 16, 2008 at 9:36 am

Perhaps, but it's a cliche that "common sense" isn't all that common. It seems to me that most people are all too ready to let emotions override it. Perhaps that's susceptible to education, but I'm not all that hopeful.

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38. Comment #144525 by Bonzai on March 16, 2008 at 9:38 am

We should grant the public at least a common sense grasp of methodological naturalism.

Apparently some U.S judge ruled that Bayesian arguments are not acceptable in court, I will try to find the reference.

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39. Comment #144528 by Steve Zara on March 16, 2008 at 9:40 am

Yes, but it is going to be a battle, as it goes against so much tradition and culture.

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40. Comment #144532 by ThoughtsonCommonToad on March 16, 2008 at 9:59 am

Bonzai
http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/~vignaux/docs/logicalJuries.html

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41. Comment #144533 by Dr Benway on March 16, 2008 at 10:02 am

Yes, but it is going to be a battle, as it goes against so much tradition and culture.

I agree about the battle part. But I think that's down to the fact we've done a poor job equipping the public with the basic tools of argument. They don't know the rules or the boundaries of rational argument.

I got a book of magic tricks when I was about 10 years old. One trick went like this, "See this piece of rope? I'm gonna hold both ends tight, without letting go, and tie a knot in it."

I got the sleight of hand down perfectly. The grown-ups all went, "Wow. How'd you do that?"

Then I took the trick to school. I was disappointed to discover that most of my classmates weren't impressed. Why? Because it hadn't occurred to them that it's impossible to tie a knot in a piece of rope without letting go of the ends.

People can't distinguish a good argument from a bad argument, because they don't know the rules.

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42. Comment #144534 by Rational_G on March 16, 2008 at 10:07 am

Framing is bs. Dumbing down to people is not the answer. Give it to people straight. And as PZ Meyers says, the problem is more with media and people in general than science. People "relate to" the bullshit they are fed on television. Whose fault is that? Is it the scientists' fault that people are more interested in Paris Hilton's party habits than the actual real world around them? Or that the they have a millisecond attention span? Or that they'd rather watch "Survivor" than witness a lunar eclipse?
Or have knee jerk communication via blogs (present site excepted of course)?

Not really. It's media and it's the lack of imagination in the people themselves - their imaginations dulled by media, consumerism, the cult of celebrity personality and mediocre education.

Give it to people straight - don't try to make it "cool'. That is dishonest. If people actually want to learn something about the real world they are going to have invest the time and be satisfied with not being instantly gratified. There are plenty of scientifically savvy people willing to communicate the richness and beauty of the real world clearly and directly.

Did Sagan dumb shit down? Does Dawkins? No.

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43. Comment #144536 by Bonzai on March 16, 2008 at 10:08 am

TCT,

Thanks for the link.

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44. Comment #144543 by Steve Zara on March 16, 2008 at 10:15 am

I agree about the battle part. But I think that's down to the fact we've done a poor job equipping the public with the basic tools of argument. They don't know the rules or the boundaries of rational argument.

Absolutely. It is also the fault of a largely science and rationality-illiterate media (which results in nonsense like that recent Gray article in the Guardian being published unopposed).

I am afraid I am not optimistic.
The answer has to be education, but I wonder if we have the time. Major decisions on issues like global warming have to be made over a timescale of years, rather than decades.

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45. Comment #144548 by ThoughtsonCommonToad on March 16, 2008 at 10:22 am

The answer has to be education, but I wonder if we have the time. Major decisions on issues like global warming have to be made over a timescale of years, rather than decades.

A decision to tackle global warming will be made when its profitable to do so, or necessary to make profits. You make the common fallacy of believing decisions by people in power are made for reasons other than power.

Education would help in changing peoples lifestyles, but the big changes, look to money and you'll see what decision will be made.

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46. Comment #144644 by Steve Zara on March 16, 2008 at 1:57 pm

A decision to tackle global warming will be made when its profitable to do so, or necessary to make profits. You make the common fallacy of believing decisions by people in power are made for reasons other than power.

If that were true, the international consensus on the reduction of CFCs to prevent destruction of the ozone layer would not have happened.

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47. Comment #144663 by ThoughtsonCommonToad on March 16, 2008 at 2:32 pm

Steve Zara I would have cited CFCs in support of my argument.

Problems with CFCs were reported in 74. The Montreal Protocol wasn't enforced until 89.

Proves my point no?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_protocol#History

In 1973 Chemists Frank Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina, then at the University of California, Irvine, began studying the impacts of CFCs in the earth's atmosphere. They discovered that CFC molecules were stable enough to remain in the atmosphere until they got up into the middle of the stratosphere where they would finally (after an average of 50-100 years for two common CFCs) be broken down by ultraviolet radiation releasing a chlorine atom. Rowland and Molina then proposed that these chlorine atoms might be expected to cause the breakdown of large amounts of ozone (O3) in the stratosphere. Their argument was based upon an analogy to contemporary work by Paul J. Crutzen and Harold Johnston, which had shown that nitric oxide (NO) could catalyze the destruction of ozone. (Several other scientists, including Ralph Cicerone, Richard Stolarski, Michael McElroy, and Steven Wofsy had independently proposed that chlorine could catalyze ozone loss, but none had realized that CFCs were a potentially large source of chlorine.) Crutzen, Molina and Rowland were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work on this problem.

The environmental consequence of this discovery was that, since stratospheric ozone absorbs most of the ultraviolet-B (UV-B) radiation reaching the surface of the planet, depletion of the ozone layer by CFCs would lead to an in increase in UV-B radiation at the surface, resulting in an increase in skin cancer and other impacts such as damage to crops and to marine phytoplankton.

But the Rowland-Molina hypothesis was strongly disputed by representatives of the aerosol and halocarbon industries. The Chair of the Board of DuPont was quoted as saying that ozone depletion theory is "a science fiction tale...a load of rubbish...utter nonsense". Robert Abplanalp, the President of Precision Valve Corporation (and inventor of the first practical aerosol spray can valve), wrote to the Chancellor of UC Irvine to complain about Rowland's public statements (Roan, p 56.)

After publishing their pivotal paper in June 1974, Rowland and Molina testified at a hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives in December, 1974. As a result significant funding was made available to study various aspects of the problem and to confirm the initial findings. In 1976 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released a report that confirmed the scientific credibility of the ozone depletion hypothesis. NAS continued to publish assessments of related science for the next decade.

Then, in 1985, British Antarctic Survey scientists Farman, Gardiner and Shanklin shocked the scientific community when they published results of a study showing an ozone "hole" in the journal Nature �" showing a decline in polar ozone far larger than anyone had anticipated.

That same year, 20 nations, including most of the major CFC producers, signed the Vienna Convention which established a framework for negotiating international regulations on ozone-depleting substances.

But the CFC industry did not give up that easily. As late as 1986, the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy (an association representing the CFC industry founded by DuPont) was still arguing that the science was too uncertain to justify any action. In 1987, DuPont testified before the US Congress that "we believe that there is no immediate crisis that demands unilateral regulation."

Relating to Climate Change:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12771

"In the late 1980's the world's most powerful corporations launched their "globalization" revolution, incessantly invoking the inevitable beneficence of free trade and, in the process, relegating environmental issues to the margins and reducing the environmentalist movement to rearguard actions. Interest in climate change nevertheless continued to grow. In 1988, climate scientists and policymakers established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) to keep abreast of the matter and issue periodic reports. At a meeting in Toronto three hundred scientists and policy-makers from forty-eight countries issued a call for action on the reduction of CO2 emissions. The following year fifty oil, gas, coal, and automobile and chemical manufacturing companies and their trade associations formed the Global Change Coalition (GCC), with the help of public relations giant Burson-Marsteller. Its stated purpose was to sow doubt about scientific claims and forestall political efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The GCC gave millions of dollars In political contributions and in support of a public relations campaign warning that misguided efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions through restrictions on the burning of fossil fuels would undermine the promise of globalization and cause economic ruin. GCC efforts effectively put the climate change issue on hold."

QED

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48. Comment #144679 by AmericanGodless on March 16, 2008 at 3:16 pm

Dr Benway:

I question whether anyone can even consistently define, let alone defend the notion of "methodological naturalism" (a phrase which was invented by Alvin Plantinga, religious philosopher and a supporter of ID). As far as I can see it is an incoherent theistic attempt to dismiss as a mere "methodology" the natural world view that has proved itself successful as part of the explanatory cluster of theories tested in almost all scientific experiments. Bayesian logic, operating on the successes of naturalism and the failures of supernaturalism, tells us that naturalism as a theory of reality (not a "methodology") is as well confirmed as evolution or quantum physics.

But Bonzai tells us that Bayesian arguments are not acceptable in US courts. With that, most of science can be dismissed out of court.

(EDIT: ThoughtsonCommonToad gives a link that seems to be from a New Zealand source, not US. In any case, I am pleased to see that the linked article argues that "There cannot be two different ways of thinking about evidence." If only courts and theologians might agree.)

Dr Benway says later: "People can't distinguish a good argument from a bad argument, because they don't know the rules." Quite right. Carl Sagan, on the one occasion I was honored to talk to him, agreed with me that a big part of the problem with the public perception of science is a lack of any education in scientific epistemology. "But unfortunately," he said, "My plate is full."

Which is why I appreciate the efforts of Richard (and also especially Dan Dennet.) so much.

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49. Comment #144878 by AtheistAspy on March 17, 2008 at 12:28 am

Does anyone have a solution to Hume's Problem of Inductivism? I've been racking my brains for a solution but have yet to come up with one. The problem is as follows:

(1) We can only determine from past observations that the past has been consistent, not that patterns observed in the past will continue into the future because it is conceivable that the future will be different.
(2) Inductivism is not tautological like logical axioms are.
(3) Any attempt to justify inductive reasoning by reference to inductive reasoning begs the question.

This argument means that we cannot form even probabilistic conclusions, and was originally laid out by David Hume.

A discussion can be found here (you'll need to set up an account):
http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=1278916#1278916

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50. Comment #144882 by Steve Zara on March 17, 2008 at 12:46 am

Comment #144878 by AtheistAspy

I believe our scientific understanding of the universe has made this argument redundant. The only way the future could be dramatically different from the past is if you are going to scrap all the laws of physics and allow magic.

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