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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?
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?