Slashdot Mirror
Do Scientists Understand the Public?
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."
I think the interaction between scientists and the public has changed over the years.
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.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
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!!"
"Two decades ago, scientific doomsayers were warning of a global ice age."
No, science gets blamed yet again for shit that journalists pull out of their asses. See wikipedia 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. 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