Over the last two years of pandemic, I have seen science widely discussed in the public arena and misunderstood. People are confused. At times they are puzzled, but more often they are angry and distrustful of the scientific establishment. Making the situation worse, new social media platforms have given birth to a whole crop of individuals who have no formal training in science and have advanced bizarre conspiracy theories. They’ve channeled this anger and dragged researchers through the mud. They’ve dug through publicly available data trying to find evidence of designed sequences in viruses that “prove” that these were created in a lab for nefarious reasons. Others have conducted similar “investigations” on the mRNA vaccines. It’s all nonsense.
At the same time, the new social media platforms have encouraged the proliferation of science communicators who practice “Sci comm”. I subscribe to many of their podcasts, read their twitter feeds and watch their YouTube videos. Many of them are great. But most are mundane. Worse of all, there is this belief that Sci-comm should simply take in scientific findings, process these into easily digestible forms and wrap them up in a nice sugary coating so that they can be easily digested by the masses. This is what I like to call the “golly-gee-wiz” presentation of science. A less charitable description would be the infantilization of science. Ultimately, the scientific endeavor is never really discussed in a serious manner in the public sphere. But science is vital for the future of humanity. We live in a world shaped by technology whose development rests on countless scientific findings. Scientific thinking will be key to solving many of the world’s critical problems. But most citizens of planet earth are cluless as to how science really works. And if they attempt to find out, they are confronted with a wall of infantilized Sci-comm.
There are exceptions. A few that come to mind are “The Skeptics Guide to the Universe”, “This Week in Virology”, and Sabine Hossenfelder’s “Science without the gobbledygook”. So why are these so different? What do they do right?
At their core, these Sci comm productions have one critical element in common that embodies the greater scientific ethos. They spend a lot of time critically evaluating information. Should we trust this data? Should we believe this model? Does the big picture make sense? Are individuals overstating their case? How does this fit in our world outlook? How do we assess sources of authority and their motivations? Establishing credibility and ascertaining trust are central elements in scientific thinking. If you are not doing this, you are not practising science.
Most scientists intuitively know this. We implicitly train our junior researchers to use this mindset when we discuss the scientific literature in our “journal clubs”. We learn to doubt ourselves when confronted with our own data and our own biases. We learn that we easily fool ourselves. We learn to be careful. Ultimately, in the lab we learn how to establish trust. How do we establish whether a result is real? Do we believe in a given scientific model or theory? Does this makes sense in light of others’ data/models/theories? This struggle to establish trust is science.
What I’m saying is nothing new. It has been documented by historians of science such as Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (see this episode of CBC Ideas for a great overview of some of their work). Scientists intuitively know this. Indeed, of the three Sci-comm productions described above, all are hosted in whole or in part by practising scientists and/or physicians.
What we need to do now is make this explicit. We need to teach this not only to our graduate students, but also our undergrads, and even our high school students. We need Sci-comm to practice this and embed it into their outputs.
“Truth” is achieved only when we have established trust. To establish trust we need to rationally and skeptically evaluate information. For a scientist, this means to rationally and skeptically evaluate data and theories generated by ourselves and our peers. For the public, this means to rationally and skeptically evaluate sources of authority.
Some of Sci-comm should continue to be “golly-gee-wiz” presentations of science. But if it wants to truly educate the public, a Sci-comm production really needs to give additional content where the hosts delve into the messy business of establishing trust. This is hard, because science is hard. This is why the Sci-comm outfits that do it well are produced largely by card-carrying scientists. Having said that, having first hand experience with the scientific endeavour is not a strict prerequisite. Of the five hosts of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, only two have first hand experience with science. Despite that, all of the hosts constantly raise important issues when discussing new scientific developments - issues such as confirmation bias, and rational skepticism. If Sci comm really wants to educate the public, they should take note. If we as academics want to educate our undergrad students, we should take note as well.