11.15.11
US of Ignoramus
No mystery here that Americans have a bad relationship with science. And the dislike of it has a lot to do with why the country has been so poorly run.
In the recent issue of Rolling Stone the magazine conducts a short interview with the author of Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America, Shawn Lawrence Otto.
A couple questions and responses stick out:
The (unhelpful) role of the news media
Something has happened with the last generation of journalists, who have been taught the postmodern idea that there is no such thing as objective reality. But there is such a thing as objective reality – and we can measure it, and by measuring it we’ve doubled our lifespan, multiplied the productivity of our farms by 35 times, and totally changed the world. By not acknowledging that, reporters end up creating something called, “false balance,” essentially reporting on two sides of a story and letting the audience decide what they think is the objective truth or who is right. That’s really shirking their responsibility to dig and inform people what’s really going on.
How to mend America’s fractured relationship with science
First of all, scientists really need to reengage in our public conversation. Most Americans, when polled, don’t even know a living scientist. That’s got to change. Scientists need to get back out there and talk to their neighbors, speak in churches and talk to people where they go. People need to hear that voice in our political discussion again. The voice of values and religion – those are an important part of our conversation; but we need a plurality of voices and we also need the voice of facts, and reason, and knowledge.
From my personal experience, standard journalism has made it almost impossible to get across anything reliant upon science for understanding.
This has been very true in understanding terror potentials in chemical and biological weaponry. Journalists, like all the people caught with castor seeds, don’t understand what ricin is any more than those backwoodsmen trying to make a weapon out of it.
And it was only by a bit of luck that I was able to spend an hour discussing the matter with Atlanta Journal news reporters last week.
Still, this crept into the news:
“Ricin is a protein … the more you purify it, the harder it is to keep it around. People don’t understand that,??? Smith said, explaining that proteins are easily broken down by heat, ultraviolet light, acids or elements such as lye.
As noted previously, lye was common in US households and high school chem labs when I was a kid. And every college prep student had to take the class. Lye is not an element, it is a compound.
The author is also correct in that scientists have for too long not taken part in public conversation.
And much of the fault of this lies squarely with them. While at Lehigh University and the Penn State School of Medicine, NONE of the scientists I worked with had even the slightest interest in explaining to the public what they did or using their knowledge to help shape understanding of anything in the public sphere.
Add to this the hard fact that many scientists, primary investigators and research directors, are just terrible writers. Being the only person who could write in the labs in which I worked simply resulted in my employment dry-cleaning and working over the research papers and presentations by others.
Writing and good communication were seen as conveniences, tools to be used only for publishing in peer-reviewed journals.
This endemic disinterest has had spectacularly bad results for the country.
At Lehigh University, it resulted in the chemistry and biology departments getting black eyes and besmirched reputations in the residence of Michael Behe, the creationist who packaged his belief in that as the pseudo-science called intelligent design.
Behe could write.
And Lehigh’s hard science departments paid no attention to well after
he’d published Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution , a book that became a bestseller, one that was subsequently used by Christian theocrats to inflict lasting damage on high school biology education throughout the country.
By then it was way too late and now the biology department is stuck with having to put a disclaimer concerning Behe’s beliefs and the actual science at the school, on its website.
And that is only one example of what can happen when a profession doesn’t pay attention, when it, or many people in it, believe that the development of a public voice is of no importance.
Christoph Hechl said,
November 16, 2011 at 8:23 am
I would guess, that this again has to do with the exaggerated protection of so called intellectual property.
But in this case there would be an easy solution: Start a service to do exactly that. A real science blog for multiple authors. Someone must act as an editor to verify the writers themselves, other writers should do the reviews.
If you don’t have the servers, than i can set that up, but unfortunately i don’t have the contacts to get the scientists themselves.
If you find the people who should write, than i think i can convince them to do so and give them an opportunity for that.
There would need to be some kind of wikipedia-like archive for basics, to use as reference or for additional background information.
From a technical point of view this wouldn’t be difficult.
Knowledge increases through sharing.
George Smith said,
November 16, 2011 at 8:42 pm
There are actually a number of science blog collectives here. I just can’t remember the names of them offhand. They’ve actually been responsible for a great deal of the pushback against specious anti-global warming arguments that are common in he said/she said articles in the US press.
Plus, the same thing has been done for evolution. I suppose I should dig them up again.
Christoph Hechl said,
November 16, 2011 at 10:40 pm
Well on my own blog i had done that several years ago. For about a month i presented a new creation theory every day with the explicit statement, that this was open for a scientific debate. Of course this was only meant as satire, but i had lots of fun writing it and got quite positive feedback.
The science blogs i know usually are not written by scientist, but by laymen or, at best, students.
Still none of them seems to go along with the idea, that you stated, which i think is a good one:
Narrow it down to have something like an interview.
What are you working on right now, what gave you the idea, what do you have to take into account, what do you expect this might be useful for…
That way they would have the chance to put themselves into a greater context, probably even something, that might be useful for their work.
The important point in my eyes would be NOT to ask someone to explain some current event, that goes through the media, but only portray their everyday work.