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Getting The Public To Listen To Good Science
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Feb 25, 2008 07:44 PM
from the i'm-your-doctor-dammit dept.
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."
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Submission: How To Get The Public To Listen To Good Science by Anonymous Coward
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Yeah, but can you 'prove' it? (Score:5, Interesting)
But how to you start to explain the difference between a priori and a posteriori without people rolling their eyes and walking off?
Entertainment value (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, what is Good Science? A lot of the more entertaining science is Bad Science. For example, Discovery Channel segments on dinosaurs often feature people making roaring extrapolations: 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.
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Re:Entertainment value (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Don't let facts get in the way of good fun (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it really a net positive for science if it gives a very skewed version of what science is and how science works?
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. Perhaps we have a lot of scientists and engineers now, but that is mainly a generational lag thing. Perhaps we know more about science now, but the interest is long gone. The current national obsessions (it there are any) are Britney Spears etc. The USA sure is not seeding the next generation of scientists.
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Re:Don't let facts get in the way of good fun (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Don't let facts get in the way of good fun (Score:5, Insightful)
I've toyed with ideas about programs that would be more corporately focused. For example, what if student loan recipients were chosen by companies? The company would be on the hook for hiring the student after graduation. The student would be responsible for maintaining good grades in a major approved by the company (note: students would be able to pick the company that offered a major that they wanted). Students who flunk out, change majors (without a new sponsor), or who decide not to work for their sponsor have to pay the loan back. If the company cuts back staff and does not hire the student, then the company eats the loan. If the company hires the student, the company is assumed to have adjusted the student's pay appropriately. After some number of years, the student will finish the loan period and can switch companies without paying back the loan.
Another possibility would be to replace federal grants with corporate tax credits. Companies could pay for a student's tuition and mark it down as taxes paid. Obviously it would be more efficient for a company to pay tuition for a student it would like to hire than someone who is interested in an entirely different field.
A big problem with US education before college is the shortness of the school year. Why not take a page from Germany's book and switch to ten 216 day years in elementary and secondary school (the same 2160 days that come from twelve 180 day years)? Then go to a two year program that could be more general than a university degree (i.e. something like Engineering, Science, or Liberal Arts rather than Electrical Engineering, Physics, or Philosophy) and more specific than the final two years of secondary school currently are. Afterwards, students could go to the regular university with a more consistent and focused presentation. For people who aren't college inclined, they could use those two years in a trade school.
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Re:Don't let facts get in the way of good fun (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many problems with this approach. First, fields seen as "not profitable" by corporate leaders would suffer greatly. Fields such as paleontology, philosophy, history and even pure mathematics would go the way of the dodo bird. Next, those who wanted one of those unpopular majors would be forced into a government student loan that has dwindling users meaning the cost would go through the roof (as if it isn't already there) simply because nobody except those unpopular majors are getting them. Lastly, the whole concept of "general education" would die because companies wouldn't pay for classes that don't directly relate to whatever job they have lined up for the student. That is just a small sample of the problems. I''m sure others can think of more.
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Re:Don't let facts get in the way of good fun (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Don't let facts get in the way of good fun (Score:4, Insightful)
Here, here!
My majors (well, if I were studying in the USA, they would be called majors) are English, Linguistics and Information Science, all with a reputation of being "easy".
Information Science, the way it is taught here, really is an easy major, no question there.
Linguistics is a field that is relatively obscure and, in a small country such as Croatia, not very profitable.
As for English — well, everyone speaks English, so everyone can teach English and everybody can be a translator or even an interpreter. Yet for some reason most of them would still make a mistake such as "here, here!" instead of "hear, hear!" (yeah, that was on purpose), or even "shoe, shoe!" instead of "shoo! shoo!" (I kid you not).
I dropped out from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science once upon a time and switched to these "easy" majors, and let me tell you: the only subject that really is easy is the one you enjoy doing. I flunked certain courses in EE and CS even though some of my colleagues, who subsequently graduated, would come to me for explanations — I was simply no longer interested in doing the hard work necessary to pass the exams. And even now, studying the "easy stuff", I see very few people really good at it.
It's all easy if you don't look harder into it.
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Re:Don't let facts get in the way of good fun (Score:4, Interesting)
A friend of mine was working toward a Masters in English. I was working toward a Masters in Biochemistry. After the graduation we compared our theses. Hers was 350 pages and took her one year to write. Mine was 52 pages long. She asked how I could get by "so easily" with only a 52 page thesis. I showed her one page on which was the elucidation of a new chemical which was a non-toxic, broad-spectrum anti-biotic active at 1 mg/L, 3-Amino-3,4-diHydrox-carbostyril. (It's been over 40 years, I hope I remembered that correctly!) "See that page?", I asked. "It took a full year to be able to write that one page alone".
While the pharmaceuticals looked at that compound they did not market it because they discovered that my research was public domain because the Welch Foundation Research grants (The Grape people) are all public domain.
I also pointed out that if ANY other researcher published ahead of me I would have to go back to square one and start over because my work would no longer have been original. (The only way she would have to start over was if she was caught plagiarizing but then she could never start over unless another school accepted her, which is doubtful.)
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Re:Entertainment value (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to amend that to remove TLC. Sadly, we're well beyond the days of James Burke's Connections and the like. There's not much science involved in 2-day home renovation shows, fashion makeover shows, or pimp-my-vehicle.
The closest they get is the occasional ghost investigation, which can hardly be called science.
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Re:Entertainment value (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Entertainment value (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Entertainment value (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Entertainment value (Score:4, Informative)
There is actually good and strong science behind such inferences.
Imagine felines are a completely unknown family
Say you have only a tooth fragment of a bobcat. That piece of information alone isn't much to go on, but if you also have a more or less complete skeleton of a house cat, and a skull and left hind foot of a lion skeleton, these three pieces of information together now tell you a lot about the likely size and general shape of the bobcat, and from the size relative to the lion and the house cat, you can probably draw general conclusions about the kind of prey the bobcat could hunt.
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Re:Yeah, but can you 'prove' it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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.
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People don't believe in it anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
What we have here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:What we have here (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What we have here (Score:4, Insightful)
I want to scream at some points when the students are doing labs/I'm grading their labs.
"Data is king! It determines truth. If it doesn't match with what you expected, one of two things is going on. Either your expectations were wrong or you didn't do a good enough experiment."
You'd be surprised (or maybe not, this is Slashdot...) how many students think "I did the experiment once, my data is perfect, nothing could have possibly gone wrong." If they would shut up from talking about how their weekend went and actually think about what they're doing it would all be so much easier.
Ok, I've gone off topic. My apologies. But seriously, stop, examine data and where it came from. Don't go by who told it to you, go by what was told.
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Re:What we have here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:What we have here (Score:5, Insightful)
...which causes people to make unsupported assertions, and then speak in anecdotes and generalities...
:>)
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Re:What we have here (Score:5, Interesting)
What we have here is a marketing failure.
The average person is not very bright, is superstitious/religious, and only relates to the world in emotional terms. Instead of trying to change them, figure out how to do what their leaders do and "sell" them what you want them to think. Scientific method is for reaching future scientists/geeks/techies, but we need to get some leverage with the average schmuck on the street.
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Re:What we have here (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. Having a basic rational understanding of the world is absolutely "for everyone". If someone can't and won't understand the basics of the scientific knowledge that we as a species have struggled for all of history to figure out then they *should* be made to feel stupid - ignorance certainly isn't a virtue to be respected.
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Man In The Sky (Score:5, Insightful)
Think globally, act locally (Score:5, Interesting)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/20/0340238 [slashdot.org] http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/03/1644252 [slashdot.org]
and uninformed editorializing like this:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/20/0031238 [slashdot.org]
schools (Score:4, Insightful)
Root of the Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is, the majority of the "ruling class" in management, government and all other areas are generally not scientifically inclined nor are they actively promoting science. They influence education policy and funding for research, which trickles down to the education system and the public's view of science.
I personally found algebra and calculus to be interesting and challenging, the latter is what drove a lot of my friends away, when I first learned it ages ago. I know that if I had worst teachers or if my father weren't an engineer, my feelings towards would have been quite different. Until scientists are more popular than movie stars and mathematicians are more well known than recording artists, the root of the problem will still be that science is just not popular enough to be seen as interesting or useful.
The fact that people actually care about Paris Hilton is also a nice solid data point in my suggestion that people's perspective on what's interesting and important is just waaaay off the mark from reality.
Simple. (Score:5, Interesting)
The hard part would be implementing it. Standardized testing that can be agreed upon is probably a pipe dream for something like this, but if it could be done you'd never see parents take more of an interest in their child's education.
Fuck em! (Score:3, Informative)
The idiots at The Star ran the story with a straight face, including the financial backing that the "inventor" has raised. Now, I don't know if the "inventor" is an honest kook or a fraudster, but the sad fact is that a major newspaper has no one on staff who ever took a physics course or has any scientific knowledge. YOU CAN'T GET ENERGY OUT OF NOTHING!!!
Sadly, the idiocy at The Star is not limited to science. And this "inventor" is going to bilk quite a few idiots out of their savings and/or venture capital.
At some point you have to say there's one born every minute.
True But... (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, it's highly unlikely that the inventor of the "free energy" stuff is actually on to anything. I take his claims with a truckload of salt, but am willing to see what is really going on there.
It is possible that he hit on something, but pretty highly unlikely.
"YOU CAN'T GET ENERGY OUT OF NOTHING"
Very true. But if someone DOES hit on a way to tap into something we've been heretofore unaware of, that doesn't make it energy from nothing, just energy from something we didn't know about before -- the same as fusion, fission, and antimatter anniahlation would have been unthinkable in 1670.
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My method (Score:4, Funny)
A Sisyphean Task (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the problem, at least here in the U.S. (land of self-centeredness and instant gratification) is that science often fails to give people the answers they want to hear, or the results they want to have.
This is especially true when it comes to medical science. As far as medicine has advanced, there are still diseases and maladies that cannot be cured or even mitigated by current knowledge and practices. It can be very hard, if you are someone suffering from something of that sort, to accept that there may be little, or even nothing, that can be done. Desperation can cause even basically level-headed people to seek out untested or even already debunked alternative treatments that may at best have a mild placebo effect, more likely will do nothing to alleviate their suffering, and at worst can worsen the condition or hasten the person's ultimate demise.
Religion, obviously, can be a powerful impediment to acceptance of science as well. If your faith stands or falls with a literal reading of Genesis, then you will not, indeed CANnot accept scientific evidence to the contrary.
Finally, one thing I've always noted about humans is that we don't like "grey areas." We want answers that are complete, definitive, and satisfying. The fact that science can sometimes be wrong, and theories changed as more evidence is gathered, is unsettling to those who don't understand the scientific method, and leads them to have little faith in its conclusions.
This can only be remedied by not only pushing basic science courses hard and early in school (something way more comprehensive than that which produces the mere ability to answer a few multiple-choice questions on some standardized test), but instruction in reasoning and critical thinking as well. And I don't see that happening, not by a long shot. If you have a child, and want him or her to be scientifically literate, you pretty much have to teach them yourself. Schools today are about establishing minimal (very minimal) levels of ability, and high (very high) levels of conformity. Teaching too much science threatens the former goal, while instruction in critical thinking thwarts the latter.
Socrates was right (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: Sophistry trumps logic in public debate.
Exudes a sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
Still is pending how you distinguish good from bad science, of both can be presented in similar ways. Maybe some trusted authority/organization/etc can say that it is good, or at least, that the followed methodology is right.
Geek to geek (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you listen to someone who views you in that way?
People don't listen to geeky experts because
- The average person has much greater emotional intelligence than the average geek. I had to learn that the hard way. We think we are communicating factually, and the average Joe is hearing something completely different, because he is listening on a broader and higher level. The things he is hearing don't invite trust.
- Experts are so 1950's. I grew up in the 60's, when "Question Authority" was a radical slogan to put on your bumper. Now days, no one accepts authority automatically, but I remember when they did. Bottom line, the experts put forth a lot of bad information that led many people to do things they deeply regretted. Remember the insulin treatments in "A Beautiful Mind"? That's why I don't trust experts, either.
- People learned long ago that experts are just as political and dogmatic as fundamentalists, and they can be just as misguided.
BTW, some of the postings make me embarrassed to be a geek. I don't see disrespect as a sign of intelligence.Re:Just do what Global Warming Advocates Do (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Just do what Global Warming Advocates Do (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, I rarely get to see so many strawman arguments in one post.
Anyway, this does raise an interesting question: is it ok to use such sensationalism even though it's based on good science? It seems to be the only way to get people to listen.
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Re:Just do what Global Warming Advocates Do (Score:5, Insightful)
All science is tentative, but thus far the denier community has tried to push that to an extreme, and are even invoking similar kinds of arguments (invoking conspiracies, questioning the peer-review process, getting lists of "scientists" who disagree with global warming that often include non-climatologists and even non-scientists) that evolution-deniers use.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:One name: Isaac Asimov (Score:4, Funny)
What, you mean like Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics [britneyspears.ac]?
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Re:Mandatory IQ and other cognitive ability (Score:4, Funny)
The moment you say "do not" someone will. Therefore that chainsaw manufacturer is helping humanity.
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Re:easy mode (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:immunization (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm irritated that my health plan doesn't properly cover real medical expenses like wisdom tooth extraction or eye exams, but it does cover naturopathy. Why do I have to pay for someone's placebo habit?
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Re:immunization (Score:5, Insightful)
Presumably because they're cheaper than real medicine.
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Re:immunization (Score:5, Informative)
Take mumps for example (probably the least dangerous of the group). In that outbreak I mentioned, with the tainted vaccine, there were three people who had mild allergic reactions. No long term damage. The nasty side effects from mumps are fairly rare, but without a vaccine the disease used to be VERY common, so those rare complications affected a good number of people. Far more than are hurt (even in minor ways) by the vaccine itself.
I realise I'm probably wasting my time replying, but you never know.
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Re:immunization (Score:4, Insightful)
Thimerosal preservatives haven't been used in vaccines for children in years. Long enough, in fact, that the much ballyhooed (but never demonstrated) link between that and autism has been disproven because autism rates haven't decreased since the discontinuance of thimerosal.
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Re:Article: Most scientific papers probably wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
"When I read the literature, I'm not reading it to find proof like a textbook. I'm reading to get ideas. So even if something is wrong with the paper, if they have the kernel of a novel idea, that's something to think about," he says."
Also, the author of the paper points out that replication is more important than the original finding. Generally things aren't elevated to the level of scientific "truth" on the basis of one study. If the public wants to peruse scientific journals or if publish by press conference is going to become an accepted standard, then the public should understand this.
But when your oncologist recommends chemotherapy he is not speaking from the results of one small, unregulated study.
Note also that even if "most published scientific results are wrong," those results are still more likely to be correct than any other result.
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Re:Bull. People want "Truth". (Score:5, Insightful)
I've watched friends become church-goers; kneel before a priest and promise to believe in biblical claims. How can anybody "promise" to believe anything? Isn't belief the final product after a process observational and logical cross analysis has taken place? All you can realistically promise to believe is what your mind tells you is true. And since we are constantly learning, then we cannot promise, ever, that our belief system will not change when new information enters our awareness. Such promises can only be kept if we effectively stop learning and stop cross analyzing. --So either my friend was just nodding and repeating what he was told to say at his religious confirmation ceremony without thinking about it, or he was actually really promising to limit his rational thought processes to only those which would allow continued "belief" in biblical doctrine; a virtual lobotomy. Either way, it was a very disheartening event to witness; this is a guy who is otherwise smart and aware and caring. Luckily, it's possible to change your mind, and so all I can do is continue being myself and allow him to grow as he best sees fit. But it has been a challenge to remain respectful.
I'd been invited to his confirmation and he really wanted me to be there, so I went. It was my first time inside a church in many years, and I was reminded again why I cannot stand religion. --I was the only person, I think, in a church filled with almost my entire community, sitting there thinking, "This is all absolutely fucking insane. All these people are crazy! Aren't they hearing this stuff? Don't they SEE what is going on here?" --I've read the bible, and I've studied the other various religions, I know how cults work, I know how social control works, I know how mind-programming works, and I know enough psychology to know how and why people can be seduced, or worse, how (as you point out), they WANT to be seduced. I can tear the whole thing apart like the sand castle that it is, and I've done this over and over. Anybody with a brain can do it; it's fish in a barrel stuff.
But I held back on that day. I'd been invited by my friend, who knows full well my views on this, so all I could do was agree to watch him do this thing.
Brrr. I'm sorry. I'm venting.
Or perhaps I should say. . .
Fucking 'A'.
-FL
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Re:Obscurantism (Score:4, Interesting)
If Dr. Smith from Bob Jones university gets on Fox news and says "Stem cells are made of ground up newborn babies and have absolutely no scientific merit, they just like killing babies," I can write angry letters but I can't actually arrest him (legally). There's no recourse there.
The poisonous lies are already out there, readily absorbed by anyone who is inclined to be opposed to stem cells because their pastor says they're wrong, cementing their opinion into place. Even if someone competent were to appear on that same show and immediately point out the flaws with that, people would walk away with what they wanted, which is not always the correct rebuttal. They'll remember "Stem cells are babies! That's terrible! Ought to be a crime!" And they'll vote.
Also, I think saying "anyone claiming 'the debate is over' on an area of active scientific dispute should be ignored" is pretty circular. Furthermore, debates are often over on a serious academic level while to non-academics the shouting match has just begun. Evolution is a good example of that. The debate is over, but the fundamentalists though will continue to argue for years to come.
As for consensus, most of the public won't spend more than 5 minutes thinking about something. It would be great if we could get them to realize the truth in scientific facts through education, but if you try to teach someone about the fundamentals of natural selection, walk them through the proof, they're going to change the channel rapidly and still be swayed the other way. If you point out that 99.999% of scientists agree on natural selection, they're going to be resistant to that
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