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Getting The Public To Listen To Good Science

Posted by kdawson on from the i'm-your-doctor-dammit dept.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "We all know that false or misleading science headlines are all too common these days and that misleading media combined with an apathetic and undereducated public lead to widespread ignorance. But the real question is, how can this trend be reversed? At a session at the recent AAAS meeting, a study was discussed indicating that what matters most is how the information is portrayed. While people are willing to defer to experts on matters of low concern, for things that affect them directly, such as breast cancer or childhood diseases, expertise only counts for as much as giving off a 'sense of honesty and openness,' and that it matters far less than creating a sense of empathy in deciding who people will listen to. In other words, it's not enough to merely report on it as an expert. You need to make sure your report exudes a sense of honesty, openness, empathy, and maybe even a hint of humor."

10 of 419 comments (clear)

  1. Yeah, but can you 'prove' it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The biggest problem is getting the public to listen to good science is to make them understand the scientific method and the philosophy of science. Otherwise it is just another type of belief to them.

    But how to you start to explain the difference between a priori and a posteriori without people rolling their eyes and walking off?

    1. Re:Yeah, but can you 'prove' it? by Aglassis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So what is the belief system that suits moral atheist agenda?

      Simple, as atheist's selfish agenda is to hate God and deny his revealed truth, no atheist can be moral. Nobody "doesn't belive in god" they know he is real, they just deny him, which is evil and therefore immoral.

      You cannot be moral without God, therefore you cannot be a moral atheist nor a moral atheist agenda Utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, etc., don't require you to worship some supernatural entity in order to make moral judgments. Some people like to pretend than morality only exists with obeying some made up deity, but that only shows how shallow their imaginations are that they need to read what actions are explicitly allowed or disallowed from some book to know whether they are acting good or bad. Two moral judgments that illustrate this point are the treatment of homosexuals and the issue of stem cell research. No non-deistic moral system would condone averse treatment of homosexuals or the banning stem cell research. Only those who don't have a moral 'system' but instead some arbitrary list of dos and don'ts would. Another example is prevention of cruelty to animals. The religious folks adjusted their dogma only after the lead of the 'immoral' atheists who pointed out that it was not a moral action to stage cockfights, stage dogfights, place livestock in cruel conditions, or torture animals.

      I think I'll be just fine with my atheistic moral system. It forces me to think why an action is moral instead of searching for some verse in a holy book that I can interpret to my whims.
      --
      Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
  2. People don't believe in it anymore by Gothmolly · · Score: 5, Insightful

    People have been taught, for several generations now, that causality is optional, that science is for geeks, that geeks are there to serve the jocks, that man needs to serve the state, and that perception is reality. Why would they care about your silly little experiments?

    --
    I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
  3. What we have here by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Is a failure to communicate ...

    Unfortunately, this is a war that we are unlikely to win. The hearts and minds of the populace are mostly centered between the stomach and groin. What the AAS report is basically saying is that science has to "advertise" - just like everything else.

    Then it's not "science". It's just one more religion / belief system in a pile of others out to get converts.

    The only thing we can do is teach the scientific method - in schools, at home, in conversations. It's the only weapon we've got, however small.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    1. Re:What we have here by isomeme · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The only thing we can do is teach the scientific method - in schools, at home, in conversations. It's the only weapon we've got, however small.

      Of course, one big problem is that the scientific method is usually taught incorrectly. People frame it as if the scientific method explained everything about how actual scientists do actual science; there's this weird image that scientists just mechanically follow a set of steps, and science results.

      In fact, of course, the scientific method is merely (though crucially) a way to apply rigorous tests to the results of intuition and imagination. Kekule dreamed that benzene was a ring; no amount of mechanical scientific-method application would have ever resulted in that golden idea. But, having had that idea, he then went into the lab and applied the scientific method to test it, to measure his confidence in the results of those tests. He published his results in a form which allowed others to reproduce his experiments, and to analyze his proposed explanation for the results of those experiments. All that is how science manages to be more than opinion.

      But the interesting part, the human part, the part that gets people interested in science, is the very part that isn't subject to the scientif method. I believe it was Brecht who remarked (paraphrased from memory) that science is not a gateway to infinite wisdom, but rather a guard against infinite folly. That's the best summary of the scientific method I've ever run across.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
  4. Think globally, act locally by bperkins · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Stop running crappy stories like these:
      http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/20/0340238 http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/03/1644252

    and uninformed editorializing like this:
      http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/20/0031238

  5. Re:Entertainment value by johnsonav · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Look how Discovery channel etc get hyped and dramatized and facts removed to make for a more entertaining package. Even the news is infotainment. I think this is a perfect example of how the situation is improving. Before things like TLC or Discovery, there were almost no infotainment outlets. Even though the balance is skewed more towards the "tainment," and less toward the "info," it is still a net positive.

    Science education, world-wide if not in the US, has never been better. Scientists and engineers make up a larger share of our society than ever before in the history of mankind. Religion and ignorance have lost ground, while knowledge and understanding have gained.

    Is there more to be done? Are we where we want to be in terms of scientific understanding? No, but we are on the right track as a species. The only things we can do is continue pushing the veil of ignorance steadily back, and doing our best to educate children in the way science actually works.
    --
    ... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
  6. Re:easy mode by Unclemort · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you put all idiots on an island and make a reality tv show out of it, who would watch it?

  7. Re:Don't let facts get in the way of good fun by johnsonav · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I would argue that the USA's peak of scientific interest was during the late 1960s when the space program was a national obsession and every second kid had a Nasa poster on their bedroom wall. You're probably right. But, I'm sure there were plenty of people back then that thought there were too many kids interested in The Beatles, not science. If anything, I believe that what has been lost is a generation of physicists and biologists to the siren's song of computer science. If the Apollo program was what drew them in the '60s, then dot-coms and OSS draw them now. There is no other field today where the barriers to entry are so low that almost anyone can make a real contribution.

    The first step towards solving the problem, in my opinion, is stop making college degrees the minimum requirement for employment, regardless of major. There are too many people attending college today simply looking for any degree. This results in over-enrollment in so called easy majors, and less funding for science and engineering. You don't see nearly as many foreign students in those programs because, for them, the job market back home requires real knowledge, not just a piece of paper.
    --
    ... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
  8. Re:Entertainment value by ResidntGeek · · Score: 5, Informative

    find a tooth fragment and say that they have found something from a dinosaur that would have been 25 ft long and run at 40 mph. What bullshit.
    Not a paleontologist, are you? Teeth are very diagnostic, and very often well-preserved and documented. If you find a tooth dead center in a Kimmeridgian-stage formation which perfectly matches a tooth from the holotype specimen of Stegosaurus armatus, for example, it's not bullshit to say the tooth came from a dinosaur with 17 armored plates on its back - even if it sounds like it.
    --
    ResidntGeek