NOW REPORTING FROM BALTIMORE. A private, non-commercial blog begun in support of the federal Meaningful Use REC initiative, and Health IT and Heathcare improvement more broadly. Moving now toward important broader STEM and societal/ethics topics. Formerly known as "The REC Blog."
NOTE: Comments are moderated, thanks to trolls and bots.
“When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place,” Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, said in 2010. Twelve years later, the world is not in such a great place. Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms may have given everyone a voice, but they’ve also unleashed a storm of negative effects—spreading disinformation, inciting hate, and endangering democracy… It’s not a new phenomenon—“We feel your pain,” climate researcher Michael Mann says to the new victims—but the pandemic and today’s hyperpolarized climate have made things worse. And although an individual troll may be easy to block, the tsunami of abuse triggered by organized campaigns can take a serious toll.
For some researchers, the spread of mis- and disinformation has become a study subject in itself. Evolutionary biologist Carl Bergstrom believes our brains are maladapted for the daily diet of factoids and titillation that social media algorithms serve us, the same way our bodies can’t cope with an abundance of sugars and fat. As reporter Kai Kupferschmidt explains in his story, Bergstrom is convinced that “bullshit” spread online is one the biggest threats facing humanity in the 21st century—and that studying it is as important as climate science…
Don't get me started on Zuckerberg.
When Carl Bergstrom worked on plans to prepare the United States for a hypothetical pandemic, in the early 2000s, he and his colleagues were worried vaccines might not get to those who needed them most. “We thought the problem would be to keep people from putting up barricades and stopping the truck and taking all the vaccines off it, giving them to each other,” he recalls.
When COVID-19 arrived, things played out quite differently. One-quarter of U.S. adults remain unvaccinated against a virus that has killed more than 1 million Americans. “Our ability to convince people that this was a vaccine that was going to save a lot of lives and that everyone needed to take was much, much worse than most of us imagined,” Bergstrom says.
He is convinced this catastrophic failure can be traced to social media networks and their power to spread false information—in this case about vaccines—far and fast. “Bullshit” is Bergstrom’s umbrella term for the falsehoods that propagate online—both misinformation, which is spread inadvertently, and disinformation, designed to spread falsehoods deliberately...
In January 2020, some 2 months before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus pandemic a global emergency, a tweet appeared on virologist Benhur Lee’s smartphone. It linked to a website, virological.org, where scientists had just posted the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2. Lee, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, quickly shared the tweet with his followers, along with the words “Here we go” and an animation of planes taking off. Within days, the pharmaceutical firm Moderna and the U.S. National Institutes of Health had announced plans to develop what just 10 months later proved to be an effective vaccine, based on the sequence that codes for the virus’ spike protein.
In an earlier age, it might have taken days or longer for such useful DNA data to reach interested scientists via a Table of Contents alert from a journal. But the rise of Twitter and other social media platforms enabled users like Lee to spread the word about the SARS-CoV-2 sequence within hours, sparking global conversations and accelerating efforts to develop vaccines and treatments.
It was an early sign of how the pandemic prompted many scientists—and the public—to turn to social media to share and learn about hot new findings. COVID-19 “changed the game” because the threat “immediately connects with the public, [so] there’s a much bigger natural audience” for information about pandemic science than for most areas of research, says Michael Thelwall, a data scientist at the University of Wolverhampton, City Campus, who studies social media. In particular, Twitter has become a go-to resource for anyone trying to make sense of the torrent of pandemic studies—and for those intent on quickly pushing back against misinformation…
But the pandemic has also helped demonstrate the limitations of social media. It can be difficult, for example, for scientists to be heard over the cacophony of messages on Twitter—some 500 million each day. And although some scientists have used the platform to elevate their online presence, that has rarely translated into concrete professional rewards. Eventually the sizable Twitter followings some have built during the pandemic may fade. And in the meantime, some have suffered from their digital fame, attracting harsh personal attacks and threats of violence. Despite such challenges, many researchers believe that—like it or not—the pandemic has forever altered how certain scientists communicate with each other and the public…
When Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus University Medical Center, visited a museum in Amsterdam with her family last year, she was spotted by the wrong crowd: people who hate Koopmans because of her work on COVID-19. “They started really yelling, banging,” she says. “Security locked the doors.”
Since early in the pandemic, Koopmans has found herself targeted by people who believe the pandemic is a hoax, the virus was created intentionally to cause harm, or vaccines are dangerous. She has received death threats, been accused of belonging to an elite network of pedophiles—a belief held by devotees of the QAnon conspiracy theory—and told she should be tried for crimes against humanity.
Now, Koopmans no longer makes public appearances without first alerting the police. As a frequent guest on Dutch TV, “I cannot go out on the street anonymously,” she says. Her family is not comfortable walking outside with her, and they worry about her ever traveling to the United States, where much of the vitriol originates…
A packed issue. Lots to consider. Goes materially to "#SciComm" topics.
JUST LEARNED A NEW ACRONYM
"MRgFUS"
What? Cheryl hipped me to an ad in Baltimore Magazine touting "Magnetic Resonance Guided Focused Ultrasound" tx now approved by FDA and being offered by the University of Maryland Medical Center (and elsewhere).
A non-invasive ultrasound treatment for Parkinson's disease that was tested in a pivotal trial led by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers is now more broadly available at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC). Recent FDA approval of a device used in the procedure effectively opens up access to focused ultrasound beyond clinical trial participation.
The device, called Exablate Neuro and manufactured by Insightec, was approved in late 2021 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat advanced Parkinson's disease on one side of the brain. UMMC is one of only several sites in the Mid-Atlantic region with the capabilities and expertise to perform focused ultrasound for Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders. The procedure requires a multi-disciplinary team, including a neurosurgeon, movement disorder neurologist, and neuroradiologist...
Of serious interest to me, given that Sinemet still
I also recently ran across news of human clinical trials in Denmark involving genetically modified stem cells engineered to be used as dopamine-generating neurotransmitter replacement brain cells. Apparently going on in multiple countries of late.
I'm ready for something. My Parkinson's is getting increasingly annoying.
On hot-button topics such as climate change, vaccines and genetically modified foods, science denial is rampant – and it crosses party and ideological lines. What are the psychological forces that lead people to disbelieve scientific consensus? Is science denial worse than it’s ever been? How have the internet and social media changed the landscape of science skepticism? Psychologists Barbara Hofer of Middlebury College and Gale Sinatra of the University of Southern California, authors of the book “Science Denial: Why it Happens and What to Do About it,” discuss these and other questions.
8: What Can We Do About Science Denial, Doubt, and Resistance?
Science denial, doubt, and resistance are pervasive and troubling. Numerous surveys show a large discrepancy between what the public accepts as scientifically valid and what scientists accept. Whether the topic is evolution, global warming, or genetically modified organisms, US citizens seem to have a poor awareness of what scientists know, as well as scientists’ level of certainty about knowledge on such key issues.
A refusal or reluctance to accept settled science can impede solutions for many of the problems that face modern society—notably, serious threats of human-caused warming of Earth’s climate and global pandemics. The goal of this book has been to provide the social and cultural context of science denial and the psychological explanations that underlie susceptibility to it. Improving the public understanding, acceptance, and valuing of science can move us all toward saving the planet and improving the health and wellness of all lives and communities...
The authors enumerate a range of tactics stratified by and targeted towardthe breadth of "stakeholders" and audiences. A fine read.
From a piece I saw on Rawstory.com:
"You don't have to go any further than acknowledging the politicization of a pandemic in which more Americans have died than during the 1918 flu pandemic, when medical science was a pale shadow of what it is now, to understand how far from normal things are.
If anything, we are beyond a constitutional crisis. It is now a crisis of survival. Can humanity survive when so many people deny scientific facts, and the world is literally on fire and drowning at the same time? The stakes could not be higher. A recent study from the journal Science reported that if you're under 40, you can expect an "unprecedented" life of extreme heat waves, droughts and floods. You will live through seven times as many heat waves, twice as many wildfires and nearly three times as many droughts, crop failures and river floods as your grandparents. Never mind the pandemic."
We are out of time for science denial and disinformation. We need logic, facts, and evidence.
apropos,
"The Better Arguments Project is a national civic initiative created to help bridge divides – not by papering over those divides but by helping people have Better Arguments. In this sense, arguments don’t have to drive us apart. Better Arguments can bring us together. In partnership with communities and advisers around the country, we have synthesized three dimensions and five principles of a Better Argument."
I participated in a Zoom webinar of theirs today. It was very nice, very well-attended. More on them shortly. Their "method" makes intuitive sense.
I was blessed to get to teach critical thinking and argument analysis at UNLV for a number of years as part of the evening adjunct faculty (I was a risk analyst in a credit card bank at the time). I would always posit a rhetorical question to my students “what if your logic, your facts, and your evidence are all rock-solid, but you fail to persuade others of your case? What have you truly accomplished?”
Notwithstanding that admonition, the overall thrust of my teaching (to the required text) was necessarily more like “OK, here’s how all this stuff works. Take it or leave it. I hope you take it to heart (persuasiveness), but it’s up to you.“
…How do we live with social media without it destroying democracy, public discourse, and public health? I think banning demonstrable misinformation is a reasonable measure. But we can also have a conversation about how best to do this. Perhaps we need public independent panels, including experts, scholars, and public representatives, to make such decisions, with a relatively high bar for what counts as demonstrable misinformation. Decisions should be transparent and reviewable. There are things that we can collectively agree upon, and in specific cases we may need to limit the right not to disagree with reality, but to publicly spread that disagreement along with facts [sic] that are demonstrably wrong.
ON WOMEN
It occurs to me—particularly in light of recent Afghan events—that more than half of the compelling authors I've cited here across the past month and a half are women. Scrolling back through the 500-some titles in my Kindle stash indicates a similar proportion long-term. Never really gave it any thought before. Cogency is cogency, period.
From Twitter messaging with one of my authors recently:
apropos of my [prior] post regarding “behavior genomics.“ I was just struck by how many of my many recent book readings are by women. More than half. I think sadly about the women and girls in Afghanistan now. The Taliban are shooting themselves in the ass. Women are every bit the cognitive equals of men. I would say to Afghan women “come here to the US, where you can get educated and contribute significantly.”
We're likely gonna hit ~800,000 US deaths by year's end. I'm seein' packed sports stadiums, concerts, theater re-openings, schools back in sessions (with endless #FreeDumb fights over mask requirements)... have to have concerns.
Get your vaxx.
ERRATA
Sad.
Starting to see these news items every day. In my uncharitable moments, I call this "U.S. Covid19 Herd Immunity Threshold Denominator Reduction."
In the senior community where my mom lives, death is a frequent visitor. When we talk about a recent loss, the story is often the same: her neighbor fell, and things got worse from there. Falls are the seventh-leading cause of death for adults aged 65 and older in the U.S., and their prevalence has jumped more than 30 percent in recent years, according to a 2018 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even when a spill doesn't cause serious injuries, it can be the beginning of the end for elderly adults, explains Patricia Dykes, who studies fall prevention at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. “They become afraid to move. They'll think, ‘Maybe I shouldn't walk so much.’ Then they get weaker, and their balance gets poorer.” This starts a spiral of more falls, increased injuries and worsening health.
“Fear of falling prevents older people from doing the things that would prevent falls,” she says. There are likely many reasons for the rise in fall-related deaths. For one thing, more people are surviving heart disease, cancer and strokes and living into their 80s and 90s with impairments and chronic conditions that make them unsteady, says epidemiologist Elizabeth Burns of the CDC, who co-authored the 2018 report. “We also know that Americans use more medications than they used to,” she says. Polypharmacy—taking four or more medications—increases the chance of falling. So does taking a drug that impacts the central nervous system, such as an opioid or antidepressant. Age-related changes in eyesight, cognition, muscle strength and balance also raise risk.
But experts insist that falling is not inevitable. Targeted exercises, modified drug regimens and fixing vision problems can reduce the risk. New technology may help, including smartphone apps that analyze gait, as well as AI tools that alert busy health-care providers to fall risks among their patients…
Yeah. I have to remind myself that I am a "senior" now pushing 76. Addled with Parkinson's, and increasingly wobbly. "Elderly." An admitted fall risk (I've had several).19 months of Covid19 restrictions have not helped. After my 2018 SAVR px in California, I'd made it all the way back to the basketball court by late 2019. 5-6 hours a week of 5-on-5 pickup. Check Ball.
On March 13th, 2020, they had to shut down our basketball gym. It remains closed.
My new Baltimore cardiologist had razzed me in December 2019: "Y'know what the number one cause of death is for guys like you? Falling."
POLICY Scientists: When Talking to the Public, Please Speak Plainly Jargon is appropriate when you’re speaking with colleagues, but it’s a turnoff for the rest of us By Naomi Oreskes | Scientific American October 2021 Issue
With the persistence of vaccine denial, as well as many Americans still reluctant to face the facts of climate change even in the face of devastating floods and record-breaking heat, social media has been suffused with theories about why people don't trust science. In my own work, I have talked about how 40 years of partisan attacks on government have led to distrust of government science and then of science generally.
But this past year another issue has been bugging me. It's the way scientists talk. This is not a new concern. Many years ago science writer Susan Hassol and atmospheric scientist Richard Somerville wrote a humorous but serious piece about how the terms that climate scientists use mean one thing to them but often something very different to others. In the climate system, for example, “positive feedback” refers to amplifying feedback loops, such as the ice-albedo feedback. (“Albedo,” itself a bit of jargon, basically means “reflectivity.”) The loop in question develops when global warming causes Arctic ice to melt, exposing water that is darker and reflects less of the sun's warming rays, which leads to more warming, which leads to more melting ... and so on. In the climate system, this positive feedback is a bad thing. But for most, it conjures reassuring images, such as receiving praise from your boss…
Examples of confusing and misleading scientific terms abound. When astronomers say “metals,” they mean any element heavier than helium, which includes oxygen and nitrogen, a usage that is massively confusing not just to laypeople but also to chemists. The Big Dipper isn't a constellation to them; it is an “asterism.” Computational scientists declare a model “validated” when they mean that it has been tested against a data set—not necessarily that it is valid. In AI, there is machine “intelligence,” which isn't intelligence at all but something more like “machine capability.” In ecology, there are “ecosystem services,” which you might reasonably think refers to companies that clean up oil spills, but it is ecological jargon for all the good things that the natural world does for us. And then there's my favorite, which is especially relevant here: the theory of “communication accommodation,” which means speaking so that the listener can understand.
Studies show that alien terms are, in fact, alienating; they confuse people and make them feel excluded. One study showed that even when participants were given definitions for the terms being used, jargon-laden materials made them less likely to identify with the scientific community and decreased their overall interest in the subject. In plain words: jargon turns people off…
…Consider the news this week that now one in five hundred Americans has died in the pandemic; total deaths in the country approach seven hundred thousand. What’s worse, covid deaths—the vast majority of them preventable, avoidable deaths, now that science and the federal government have provided us with free vaccines—are continuing to rise across large swaths of vaccine-resistant Trump country. This is not a tragic mistake but a calculated choice by many Republicans who have made vaccine resistance synonymous with resistance to Biden and the Democrats. The current average of more than nineteen hundred dead a day means that a 9/11’s worth of Americans are perishing from covid roughly every thirty-eight hours. To my mind, this is the biggest news of the Biden Presidency so far, and it has nothing to do with Afghanistan, or the fate of the budget-reconciliation bill, or Bob Woodward’s new book.
America spent twenty years fighting wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East because of 9/11. The 2001 attacks reordered American foreign-policy and national-security thinking for a generation. Does anyone believe that something comparable will happen as a result of the pandemic’s catastrophic death toll, which is far vaster than that of any other crisis in the modern era? It’s hard to imagine, especially because the continuing loss of life is a result of G.O.P. political strategies that intentionally undermine the success of Biden’s policies. How can this President, or any President, reset from that?…
Introduction: Why Science Communication? Dan Kahan, Dietram A. Scheufele, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson #SciComm
Part One • The Science of Communicating Science
1. The Need for a Science of Science Communication: Communicating Science’s Values and Norms Kathleen Hall Jamieson 2. Overview of the Science of Science Communication Heather Akin and Dietram A. Scheufele 3. On the Sources of Ordinary Science Knowledge and Extraordinary Science Ignorance Dan Kahan 4. How Changing Media Structures Are Affecting Science News Coverage Mike S. Schäfer 5. What the Public Thinks and Knows About Science—and Why It Matters William K. Hallman 6. Science Controversies: Can the Science of Science Communication Provide Management Guidance or Only Analysis? Bruce V. Lewenstein 7. A Recap: The Science of Communicating Science Joseph Hilgard and Nan Li Part Two • Identifying and Overcoming Challenges to Science Featured in Attacks on Science
8. Science as “Broken” Versus Science as “Self-Correcting”: How Retractions and Peer-Review Problems Are Exploited to Attack Science Joseph Hilgard and Kathleen Hall Jamieson 9. Publication Bias in Science: What Is It, Why Is It Problematic, and How Can It Be Addressed? Andrew W. Brown, Tapan S. Mehta, and David B. Allison 10. Statistical Biases in Science Communication: What We Know About Them and How They Can Be Addressed John P. A. Ioannidis 11. Is There a Hype Problem in Science? If So, How Is It Addressed? Peter Weingart 12. Is There a Retraction Problem? And, If So, What Can We Do About It? Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky 13. A Recap: Identifying and Overcoming Challenges to Science Featured in Attacks on Science Joseph Hilgard
Part Three • Science Comunication in Action: Failures and Successes
14. A Comparative Study of Communication About Food Safety Before, During, and After the “Mad Cow” Crisis Matteo Ferrari 15. Cross-National Comparative Communication and Deliberation About the Risks of Nanotechnologies Nick Pidgeon, Barbara Herr Harthorn, Terre Satterfield, and Christina Demski 16. Communications About Biotechnologies and GMOs Across Europe Heinz Bonfadelli 17. A Tale of Two Vaccines—and Their Science Communication Environments Dan Kahan and Asheley R. Landrum 18. A Recap: Science Communication in Action Heather Akin
Part Four • The Roles of Elite Intermediaries in Communicating Science
19. Science Communication at Scientific Institutions Tiffany Lohwater and Martin Storksdieck 20. The Role of Scholarly Presses and Journals Barbara Kline Pope and Elizabeth Marincola 21. The Role of Governmental Organizations in Communicating About Regulating Science Jeffery Morris 22. Science Communication and Museums’ Changing Roles Victoria Cain and Karen A. Rader 23. The Role of Funding Organizations: Foundations Elizabeth Good Christopherson 24. Promoting Popular Understanding of Science and Health Through Social Networks Brian Southwell 25. Designing Public Deliberation at the Intersection of Science and Public Policy John Gastil 26. Translating Science into Policy and Legislation: Evidence-Informed Policymaking Jason Gallo 27. A Recap—The Role of Intermediaries in Communicating Science: A Synthesis Asheley R. Landrum
Part Five • The Role, Power, and Peril of Media for the Communication of Science
28. The (Changing) Nature of Scientist–Media Interactions: A Cross-National Analysis Sara K. Yeo and Dominique Brossard 29. New Models of Knowledge-Based Journalism Matthew C. Nisbet and Declan Fahy 30. Citizens Making Sense of Science Issues: Supply and Demand Factors for Science News and Information in the Digital Age Michael A. Xenos 31. The Changing Popular Images of Science David A. Kirby 32. What Do We Know About the Entertainment Industry’s Portrayal of Science? How Does It Affect Public Attitudes Toward Science? James Shanahan 33. How Narrative Functions in Entertainment to Communicate Science Martin Kaplan and Michael Dahlstrom 34. Assumptions About Science in Satirical News and Late-Night Comedy Lauren Feldman 35. A Recap: The Role, Power, and Peril of Media for the Communication of Science Nan Li and Robert B. Lull
Part Six • Challenges in Communicating Science in a Polarized Environment
36. Countering False Beliefs: An Analysis of the Evidence and Recommendations of Best Practices for the Retraction and Correction of Scientific Misinformation Man-pui Sally Chan, Christopher Jones, and Dolores Albarracín 37. Using Frames to Make Scientific Communication More Effective James N. Druckman and Arthur Lupia 38. Philosophical Impediments to Citizens’ Use of Science Jonathan Baron 39. Overcoming Confirmation and Blind Spot Biases When Communicating Science Kate Kenski 40. Understanding and Overcoming Selective Exposure and Judgment When Communicating About Science Natalie Jomini Stroud 41. Overcoming Innumeracy and the Use of Heuristics When Communicating Science Ellen Peters 42. Overcoming Biases in Processing of Time Series Data About Climate Bruce W. Hardy and Kathleen Hall Jamieson 43. Understanding and Overcoming Fear of the Unnatural in Discussion of GMOs Robert B. Lull and Dietram A. Scheufele 44. Protecting or Polluting the Science Communication Environment?: The Case of Childhood Vaccines Dan Kahan 45. Overcoming False Causal Attribution: Debunking the MMR–Autism Association Nan Li, Natalie Jomini Stroud and Kathleen Hall Jamieson 46. Overcoming the Challenges of Communicating Uncertainties Across National Contexts Michael Siegrist and Christina Hartmann 47. A Recap: Heuristics, Biases, Values, and Other Challenges to Communicating Science Heather Akin and Asheley R. Landrum
Conclusion—On the Horizon: The Changing Science Communication Environment Dietram A. Scheufele, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Dan Kahan
Ironically, those communicating about science often rely on intuition rather than scientific inquiry not only to ascertain what effective messaging looks like but also to determine how to engage different audiences about emerging technologies and get science’s voice heard. For decades, one plausible explanation for this state of affairs was the relative absence of empirical work in science communication. This is no longer a problem. As the essays in this volume confirm, researchers in fields as diverse as political science, decision science, communication, and sociology have examined how science can best be communicated in different social settings and in the process have evaluated different approaches to cultivating societal engagement about emerging technologies. A central task of the work in this handbook is distilling what they know about the science of science communication and unpacking how they know it.
By the science of science communication, we mean an empirical approach to defining and understanding audiences, designing messages, mapping communication landscapes, and—most important—evaluating the effectiveness of communication efforts. The science of science communication, as a result, relies on evidence that is transparent and replicable, theory driven, and generalizable. In short, evidence is derived by the scientific method, drawing on theories and methods from disciplines including economics, sociology, psychology, education, and communications science. What makes science communication distinctive is the fact that science’s way of knowing places constraints on communication that are not present in the same way in other forms of communication—for instance, communication about politics…
The audience we envision for this book includes scholars and students interested in understanding the pitfalls and promise of a scientific approach to science communication as well as, but not primarily, those on the front lines tasked with communicating complex and sometimes controversial science to policymakers and the public on consequential topics ranging from nanotechnology and nuclear power to the need for vaccination.
The Science of Science Communication In 2012, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine took a leadership role in connecting a community of social scientists who were conducting empirical research on different aspects of science communication. Two Sackler Colloquia and two special issues of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences devoted to the “Science of Science Communication” were the result (Fischhoff and Scheufele 2013, 2014). Their intent was both to heighten awareness among bench scientists about empirically based approaches to better communicating science and to promote the exchange of ideas among social scientists working on problems related to science communication in various (sub)disciplines.
Built on the foundations laid by those Sackler Colloquia, this volume is predicated on three major assumption. First, science is not monolithic. Second, the aspects of science or its applications that are being communicated or debated are a function of the nature of the science itself, the types of applications made possible by science or their societal implications, and the social dynamics surrounding emerging science. Finally, communication is an inevitable part of the process of characterizing scientific findings, engagement among scientists about them, and the process of sharing them with policymakers and diverse publics…
(2017-05-08T23:58:59). The Oxford Handbook of the Science of Science Communication (Oxford Library of Psychology). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMIES
Since its inception, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Public Face of Science Initiative has sought to understand and strengthen the relationship between science and society. The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed the critical role science plays in ensuring the well-being—indeed, the very survival—of both individuals and society as a whole. As we face this crisis, we can take some encouragement from the findings of the Public Face of Science Initiative, which show that confidence in scientific leaders has remained relatively stable over the last thirty years. It is worth noting, however, that this confidence varies based on age, race, educational attainment, region, political ideology, and other characteristics.
The current crisis has underscored the importance of a society in which everyone has equal opportunity to learn from, engage with, and participate in science. However, revenue losses and budget cuts are having an enormous, and still-evolving, impact on the professional writers, educators, museum curators, outreach organizers, and researchers who are dedicated to building the connections between science and society. While the goals and suggested actions identified throughout this report are more important than ever, they are even further from being realized due to diminished resources and field-wide layoffs. For those with the power and capacity to support the institutions and organizations that provide access to science, now is the time to act. The priorities and goals in this report highlight important means for local science engagement efforts, science journalists, and the scientific community more generally to communicate and engage more effectively…
In a "democracy," citizens are properly among the core decision makers. Hence, science literacy, particularly in the policymaking context, is rather important, ja?
There's no shortage of exigent realities in need of adroit, rational evaluation and decision-making. For starters, beyond pandemic prevention and mitigation, climate change adversity will not disappear.
More from Oxford:
Identifying and Overcoming Challenges Featured in Attacks on Science The overall credibility of science and scientists is higher than that of many communities (Scheufele 2013), with only military leaders eliciting greater public confidence than the scientific community in 2014 (General Social Survey 2012). Nevertheless, popular understanding of how scientists generate knowledge is freighted with misleading simplifications. The gap between how people think science works and how it actually does can itself generate confusion that undermines public confidence.
Climate science communication furnishes a case in point. The popular conception of the “scientific method” envisions scientists “proving” or “disproving” asserted “facts” through conclusive experiments. The contribution that climate science makes to policymaking, however, consists less of experimentally corroborating basic climate mechanisms, most of which are well-known, than it does of establishing how they interact with one another. To generate such understanding, climate scientists use dynamic models, which are iteratively refined and adjusted to take account of new data. Discrepancies between model forecasts and subsequently observed data are expected—indeed, they are the source of progressive improvements in understanding. By design, dynamic modeling enlarges knowledge through its failed predictions as much as through its successful ones (Silver 2012).
Not only did science communicators fail to make this element of climate science clear to the public, but over the past decade, many of them adopted communication “strategies” that elided it. To promote the urgency of action, they depicted the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports—particularly those of the Fourth Assessment—as extrapolations from settled and incontrovertible scientific findings. But because this framing was selected to accommodate the popular understanding that science warrants confidence based on experimentally “proven” facts, it made climate science more vulnerable to attack by those intent on undermining public confidence in it when, as was anticipated by scientists themselves, actual data diverged from the climate-science model forecasts… [Oxford Handbook, Kindle loc 502]
'eh?
Interesting: One of the editors and contributing writers in this Oxford Handbook is Dan Kahan. I ran into his name in another book I'm reading.
Yale law professor Dan Kahan surveyed Americans about their political views and their beliefs about climate change. As you would expect, those two things were highly correlated. Liberal Democrats were much more likely than conservative Republicans to agree with the statement “There is solid evidence of recent global warming due mostly to human activity such as burning fossil fuels.”
So far, not surprising. The twist is that Kahan also measured his respondents’ “science intelligence” with a collection of different questions: Some were puzzles designed to test reasoning ability, such as “If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?” Other questions were tests of basic scientific knowledge, such as “Lasers work by focusing sound waves—true or false?” and “Which gas makes up most of the earth’s atmosphere: Hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, or oxygen?”
If knowledge and intelligence protect you from motivated reasoning, then we would expect to find that the more people know about science, the more they agree with each other about scientific questions. Kahan found the opposite. At the lowest levels of scientific intelligence, there’s no polarization at all—roughly 33 percent of both liberals and conservatives believe in human-caused global warming. But as scientific intelligence increases, liberal and conservative opinions diverge. By the time you get to the highest percentile of scientific intelligence, liberal belief in human-caused global warming has risen to nearly 100 percent, while conservative belief in it has fallen to 20 percent.
The same funnel-shaped pattern shows up when you ask people for their opinions on other ideologically charged scientific issues: Should the government fund stem cell research? How did the universe begin? Did humans evolve from lower animal species? On all these questions, the people with the highest levels of scientific intelligence were also the most politically polarized in their opinions…
Finished The Scout Mindset. Enjoyable read. Not a ton of new ground for me, but worthy nonetheless. Useful "Scout" metaphor.
On deck, pre-ordered (5-18 release):
Amazon blurb:
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of Thinking, Fast and Slow and the coauthor of Nudge, a revolutionary exploration of why people make bad judgments and how to make better ones--"full of novel insights, rigorous evidence, engaging writing, and practical applications” (Adam Grant).
Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients—or that two judges in the same courthouse give markedly different sentences to people who have committed the same crime. Suppose that different interviewers at the same firm make different decisions about indistinguishable job applicants—or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to answer the phone. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same interviewer, or the same customer service agent makes different decisions depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical.
In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein show the detrimental effects of noise in many fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, forensic science, bail, child protection, strategy, performance reviews, and personnel selection. Wherever there is judgment, there is noise. Yet, most of the time, individuals and organizations alike are unaware of it. They neglect noise. With a few simple remedies, people can reduce both noise and bias, and so make far better decisions.
Packed with original ideas, and offering the same kinds of research-based insights that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers, Noise explains how and why humans are so susceptible to noise in judgment—and what we can do about it.
All part of a "deliberation science" piece. Whether the topics are judicial, legislative, scientific, or public/social policy deliberations, we need our best honest, objective reasoning efforts, particularly given this time of rampant mis- and disinformation (i.e., shoddy advocacy borne of ignorance and intent respectively).
Finished this excellent, important book across the weekend, and spoke by phone with co-author Amy Aines today.
Highly recommended. Five stars. Not about communicating science to the public, but to decision makers, e.g., philanthropists, grant-making institutions, corporate entities, politicians and government agencies, venture capitalists, etc. #SciComm
"Selling" is the grubbier, lesser synonym of "championing," yeah, I know. The latter connotes educated, credible sincerity.
Let's cut right to the chase, shall we?
ELEVEN TENETS OF CHAMPIONING SCIENCE
…Executed well, these eleven actions can help every scientist communicate ideas to change the world. Throughout the book, we develop these concepts in detail, but if you get no further than absorbing this list, you will be on your way to becoming a more effective communicator and science champion.
Be passionate. Palpable enthusiasm is contagious. It will carry people along for the great ride of science. Sharing what inspires you about your work will help others see its potential.
Build the big picture first. Resist the temptation to dive into the details. Frame what you say by succinctly explaining what exists today, the future possibilities, and how your work will fill the gap.
Know who’s listening. Think carefully about what your audience knows and their prevailing sentiment. Determine what you want them to think, do, and feel after they hear from you. Find out how they like to receive information and adapt accordingly.
Spend more time on why it matters and less time on how you do it. Never promote science for the mere sake of science. Always demonstrate the value to people and the planet we inhabit.
Extract the essence. Formulate your overarching messages and support points. Tell that story. Never dumb it down.
Be understandable. Use plain, common language. Avoid or translate acronyms. Start from where your audience is, not from where you are. Use iconic references to anchor scientific concepts to everyday, familiar experiences.
Balance precision with impact. Choose language carefully to be clear and directionally accurate. Long phrases bog down the listener. Think and speak in short sentences. There is no need for hype. Learn to deliver a compelling narrative.
Be human and credible. The integrity of your word must be unquestionable. Verify your facts. Evaluate your sources. Be yourself. Make an emotional connection by showing up as a person first and a scientist second.
Influence patiently. Convincing decision makers is a process, not a single act of persuasion. Use information as a gift. Engage often to build understanding and show the value of supporting your science. Learn what matters to your audience.
Collaborate thoughtfully. Advancing your ideas doesn’t mean you have to go it alone. Seek out advisors, influencers, and partners who can help carry your science further.
Enable your listeners to act. Know the purpose of your communication. Make the ask every time. Leverage each conversation and presentation to build support for advancing your work. Remember that you are ultimately building relationships for the long run.
Aines, Amy L., Roger D., Championing Science, University of California Press. Kindle Edition locations 280- 295.
My advice? Commit these 11 tenets to memory. Repeat them to yourself aloud multiple times.
I read the book with intense interest and enjoyment, and can attest that they made the case thoroughly. I would make this required reading in scientific curricula.
Scientists are great communicators—with other scientists. We are schooled in the exacting art of talking to our professors and colleagues, people deeply steeped in both the importance and the nuance of our topic. We can talk about the incredible details of modern science in an efficient way, condensing complex arguments into short discourses. But once we go out beyond the academic world to make an impact, scientists from every discipline face a brand new challenge—communicating science to decision makers.
Decisions about which scientific endeavors are advanced and how they are pursued usually get made by people who are not experts in the field. Corporate chief technology officers, elected officials, government program managers, venture capitalists, heads of nongovernmental agencies, and, often, senior management have the power to award funding and support new discoveries. These decision makers are well educated, hardworking, sincere, and extremely busy. Over the course of a day, they may be expected to make important decisions on topics spanning a myriad of unrelated fields. It is incumbent on us as scientists to quickly and effectively make our case. We must learn to talk about our work in succinct and compelling ways that convince the people who are pivotal to our success to take action… [ibid, Kindle location 106]
Indeed, indeed. I am pretty well up to speed on the persuasion psych and "critical thinking" literature (with a particular focus on clinical reasoning), but after reading Amy and Roger's book I feel significantly better informed.
Scientists work with a deep sense that their quest for reliable knowledge leads somewhere—that following the evidence and excluding bias help to make sense of the world. It may be a slow process, and interactions in the scientific community are not without friction and false steps, yet scientists are devoted to the quest because they observe that it works. One can make sense of the world. Einstein famously said, “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility,” and scientists understand that evidence-based scientific thinking leads to this comprehension. Scientists could do a better job of sharing this powerful insight.
As I fret over recent challenges to democracy, it seems that a cure for what ails democracy may lie, in part, in science. Citizens are increasingly asserting their values, hopes, and opinions without apparent interest in finding a shared understanding of the actual state of things. Without such a shared understanding, those values and hopes cannot rationally be expressed and realized. Observers speak of “truth decay,” dismissal of expertise, and neglect of evidence. Collectively, these are problems of enormous importance because they threaten democracy itself. Democracy is at risk when it becomes simply a contest of fervently held opinions or values not grounded in evidence…
'eh?
Amy and I had a cool discussion concerning the word "evidence" (I asked what it meant to her). We use it all the time, but do we all mean the same thing? "Evidence," in my view, is simply that which makes a true conclusion more likely -- or, in rare cases proves it outright. Everything else is just noise -- language and data clutter. As such, evidence ranges from "nil" to "dispositive." Envision a bell curve distribution (or a skewed or flat distribution) of "evidence." In popular language we typically refer to evidence in qualitative terms, i.e., nil-to-weak-to-moderate-to-strong-to-incontrovertible. In science, they love their "p-values" (going to probability estimates).
Another tangential point: evidence must not only have "truth value" but also "materiality," topical relevance. Ask any trial lawyer.
For all our careful work, scientists can still succumb to biases and assumptions that sabotage our efforts to engage with the public. Valuable new insights into public attitudes towards science are replacing conventional opinion with solid data. Learn how to avoid falling into the traps that still plague many in the scientific community...
BTW, You may have noticed that I'd accorded the Alan Alda Center a permanent right-hand column link on this blog.
Everything is "branding" these days.
Interesting, from the above webinar:
Christopher Volpe, PhD, @4:13“...For the last 20 years, I’ve really been more of a professional marketer then I’ve been a scientist, and that makes some science folks cringe, but, believe it or not, the scientific method and the marketing method are remarkably similar, they just use different languages...”
"ScienceCounts is deciphering Americans’ complex views about science to develop more effective ways to foster grassroot support for scientific research and exploration."
Cool.
CIALDINI and GARDNER
Championing Science cites Robert Cialdini's "Six Principles of Influence": reciprocity, commitment/consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity.
I am also reminded of Howard Gardner's book Changing Minds and his "7 Re's": seven levers for persuading others to embrace new ideas:
Reason: You present all relevant considerations of an idea, including its pros and cons.
Research: You provide numerical and other information about your idea’s ramifications, or data relevant to your idea.
Resonance: You and your ideas are convincing to your listener because of your track record, effective presentation, and sense of your audience.
Representational redescriptions: You deliver your message in a variety of formats, including stories, statistics, and graphics.
Resources and rewards: You draw on resources to demonstrate the value of your idea and provide incentives to adopt your idea.
Real-world events: You monitor events in the world on a daily basis and, whenever possible, draw on them to support your idea.
Resistances: You devote considerable energy to identifying the principal resistances to your ideas (both conscious and unconscious resistances) and try to defuse them directly and implicitly.
As I reflect on all of the foregoing, I should again note that I am not a scientist. Just an aware, concerned citizen. We have serious pressing issues that will be in ongoing need of science and public support for it. I would put climate control science at the top of the list. Failure there will exacerbate of host of other serious global social, public health, political, and economic problems, perhaps irremediably so.
I have no illusions regarding the difficulties involved in "selling science" where it butts up against powerful economic interests with huge stakes in an unsustainable status quo. We gotta Bring Our A-Game.
A REFLECTION
I've been pondering science issues for a long time, particularly in the medical space. From my "One in Three" essay in the late 1980s concerning my late elder daughter's cancer illness:
Is science the enemy? To the extremist "alternative healing" advocate, the answer is a resounding 'yes'! A disturbing refrain common to much of the radical "alternative" camp is that medical science is "just another belief system," one beholden to the economic and political powers of establishment institutions that dole out the research grants and control careers, one that actively suppresses simpler healing truths in the pursuit of profit, one committed to the belittlement and ostracism of any discerning practitioner willing to venture "outside the box" of orthodox medical and scientific paradigms.
One e-mail correspondent, a participant in the internet newsgroup alt.support.cancer, vented splenetic at length recently regarding U.S. authorities' alleged hounding, arrest, and imprisonment of alternative healers. He railed that law enforcement, at the behest of the AMA/FDA Conspiracy (a.k.a. the "corrupt AMA/FDA/NCI/ACS cartel"), had made the practice of alternative medicine illegal in the U.S. Moreover, he considered the fact that medical science can only claim "cures" for approximately 10% of the roughly 10,000 classified human diseases an a priori indictment of the mainstream profession.
I know: this is akin to the U.N. Black Helicopters/One-World-Government Conspiracy stuff of the not-too-tightly-wrapped…
Those anti-science attitudes have hardly gone away.
UPDATE: OF ACUTE RELEVANCE
Just came across this book via a MSNBC interview segment. Downloaded it and started my study.
…Perversely, decades of climate denial and disinformation have made global warming not merely an ecological crisis but an incredibly high-stakes wager on the legitimacy and validity of science and the scientific method itself. It is a bet that science can win only by losing. And in this test of the climate we have a sample size of just one.
No one wants to see disaster coming, but those who look, do… all told, the question of how bad things will get is not actually a test of the science; it is a bet on human activity. How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly?
Those are the only questions that matter…
Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 219). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.
From the foregoing page 219 near the conclusion of David's book, let us return to his onset, page 3.
It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.
None of this is true... [ibid, pg 3]
David expresses a bit of qualified caution at the beginning of his end notes section (which comprises roughly 30% of the book's volume).
NOTES
All science is speculative to some degree, subject to some future reconsideration or revision. But just how speculative varies from science to science, from specialty to specialty, indeed from study to s study.
Within climate change research, both the fact of global warming (about 1.1 degrees Celsius since humans first began burning fossil fuels) and its mechanism (the greenhouse gases produced by that burning trap heat radiating upward into the planet’s atmosphere) are, at this point, established beyond any shadow of a doubt. Exactly how that warming will play out, over the next decades and then the next centuries, is less certain, both because we don’t know how quickly humans will drop their addiction to fossil fuels, and because we don’t know precisely how the climate system will recalibrate in response to human perturbation. But the notes that follow are, I hope, a road map to the state of that science, in addition to being a bibliography for this book. [ibid, pg 233]
Since I posted the foregoing, I've run into some pushback from noted climate scientist Michael E. Mann (whom I've cited before).
"The evidence that climate change is a serious problem that we must contend with now, is overwhelming on its own. There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness."
More on all that in a bit. Are we to be continually stymied by "analysis paralysis" / credibility contention going to complex issues of science having significant economic and ethical policy implications?
UPDATE: I finished The Uninhabitable Earth. Riveting. Sobering. It will have to have its own review post.Highly recommended.
In his ongoing war with U.S. intelligence agencies, President Donald Trump is now challenging the military’s longstanding conclusion that climate change poses a serious national security threat to America, appointing a fringe climate science denier to lead the effort…
UPDATE
apropos of the climate issue, ran into what looks to be another interesting book (available on Feb 26th).
The Amazon preview looks very intriguing.
For the entire globe, the era of plentiful water appears to be over.
Forget energy price shocks, mass unemployment, fiscal crises and financial failures. Even biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, human-made environmental catastrophes or the spread of infectious diseases pale in comparison…
Water problems are also strongly linked to two other prominent global risks—climate change and food insecurity. By 2050 more than 40 percent of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed regions, which is around 1 billion more people than live in such areas today. Around 2.7 billion people are also affected by water shortages each year. Meanwhile, 663 million people—one in ten of the world’s population—lack access to safe water and 2.4 billion—one in three—do not have use of a toilet. These water stresses and shortages will only worsen with the rising temperatures, more frequent droughts and variable rainfall that will accompany global warming. Growing water scarcity will, in turn, magnify the economic and environmental impacts of climate change.
Barbier, Ed (2019-02-25T22:58:59). The Water Paradox. Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
