Science and Exposition

Great Debates
1

One quality that I admire most about top level scientists is their manifest insistence on precision. Unfortunately, their rigorous requirements for self-discipline do not necessarily trickle down.

Compare this…

with this…

Guess which of the above two quotes appeared on a website that has taken on the task of fighting ignorance. How did dopamine, a pleasure stimulator, become confused with serotonin, a behavior inhibitor? Why didn’t the the writer bother to look up the spelling of the chemical that he mistook for another chemical? Why won’t the writer capitalize the first person singular pronoun? What point is the writer making?

You might be surprised to learn that the writer is attempting to support his assertion that science has removed the mystery of God. After all, he read an article (which he did not document) in Newsweek, where the writer says, “Some scientist guy had a ‘revelation’ but he explained it all by what happens in the brain,” and in doing so supports the writer’s guess that, “now [scientists] are finding out what god really is”. Uh huh, well who was the scientist guy? What exactly did he say? How does brain activity imply anything whatsoever about God? Mind you that the writer gave his opinion immediately after the opinion of a neurosurgeon, V.S. Ramachandran, MD, PhD, who said, “just bear in mind that one could use exactly the same evidence — the involvement of the temporal lobes in religion — to argue for, rather than against, the existence of God.”

Certainly, Straight Dope has some scientists who can explain scientific matters in cogent ways. Chronos is an excellent example. He has such highly developed expository skills that he can explain things like relativity and quantum mechanics in no-nonsense and very understandable English. My wager is that Chronos has studied the English language enough that he not only knows what he is talking about, but he is able to talk about it. Spiritus Mundi is another example of a person who effectively communicates scientific data and its implications. Is it a coincidence that Spiritus also has a firm grasp of formal logic and philosophical elements like metaphysics and epistemology?

My debate is about whether scientists should have a grounding in disciplines outside their own — grammar, literature, formal logic, and philosophy, for example — so that they can effectively explain what it is that they know. Kimstu has made the excellent point that it is the responsibility of the writer, at least as much as it is the responsibility of the reader, to effect comprehension. As regards philosophy, I have been told here that an understanding of epistemology is unnecessary toward an understanding of science! [incredulous stare…] Excuse me? Theories about the nature and source of knowledge are unnecessary toward an understanding of a methodology that tests hypotheses?

Is Carl Sagan right? Are scientists merely making the public more ignorant? Is there room in the field of science for a specialization of explaining science to lay people? Wouldn’t science benefit from this? Your thoughts, please.

2

Based on the Sagan quote, I don’t see where you are getting that he is blaming scientists for public science ignorance.

3

Upon whom is the onus to explain a thing, if not upon the person who claims to understand it? Sagan was a smart man. I doubt that he expected Pat Robertson, for example, to explain to us what Stephen Hawking is saying. But I think Sagan is observing that that’s exactly what’s happening, i.e., no arrangements have been made for the exposition of science. That is a matter for which scientists are responsible. If scientists don’t bother understanding language, logic, and epistemology, what hope do they have of ever making people understand science and technology?

4

If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with…

There is little question (at least in my mind) that many scientists don’t hesitate to make themselves sound as incomprehensible as possible to the general public, while still making sure that they can withstand the scrutiny of peer review.

That is, if you can make the average person believe that your skill set is beyond their reach (or even comprehension), you effectively avoid any challenge to your hypotheses. However at the same time they are alienating they people who could, and should most benefit from their work.

Each group needs to meat the other half way. Yes, scientists need to be able to communicate plainly, but they can only go so far before they lose clarity. The general public needs to take it upon themselves to become educated enough to understand the sentence “Chronic treatment with antidepressant drugs produces a variety of changes in dopaminergic neurotransmission” without having to look up the words neurotransmission, antidepressant and chronic.

I’m tired of the network news acting as surrogate PR for major scientific announcements.

I would be afraid that before long, such a profession would become corrupted with biased viewpoints, kickbacks from scientists & swayed by political influence. I would view such a profession with skepticism.

5

What nonsense. The general public includes a broad spectrum of people who run the gamut from the intellectually challenged to those who can learn anything. The average citizen isn’t going to get within light-years of trully understanding “neurotransmission”; and while we might wish that a relatively simple term like “chronic” would be understood by an average person, you can’t just understand terms piecemeal and understand the whole, as the sentence quoted in the example above shows (after all, what the hell is dopaminergic neurotransmission as opposed to other types of neurotransmission?).

Speaking as a member of an order of specialists often accused (correctly) of intentionally using confusing terms and language specific to the practice, I can concur with the notion that anyone attempting to communicate with the general public bears the onus of accomplishing that goal. You don’t try to communicate with a four-year-old using words of four syllables (at least, not if you intend the child to understand you), so why would you attempt to communicate with the general public without using terminology that can be understood by someone without four to eight years of specialized training?

If it becomes needed, one should simply say, “If we give a person drugs that fight depression over a long period of time, they will have changes in brain activity. There will be increased/decreased [choose one as appropos] nerve impulses involving dopamine.” One could then explain simply what results from this, that is, better or worse behaviour, etc.

Communication is the transmission of information in a form which can be understood by the target audience. While the audience bears the burden of paying enough attention to actually receive the information and process it, the person attempting to transmit the information bears the burden of giving it to the audience in a decipherable form. This inherently means that the makeup of the audience will influence the terms used in the communication. Just as the speaker would use French to communicate to people in France, and English to communicate to Americans, so, too, should the actual terminology used reflect the audience to which the information is pitched.

But Libertarian is arguing a point more esoteric that this. As I understand the expressed assertion of the OP, scientists need to learn something other than science to be able to effectively communicate scientific thought. But it seems to me the real assertion of the OP is that there are many scientists who bury themselves in knowledge of ‘science’ and don’t relate that knowledge to other important thought processes, such as philosophy (if you are discussing cosmology, you’re discussing philosophy, whether you like it or not), and logic (a grounding in which would probably help many of them make the needed distinction between science and belief). In the absence of such knowledge, a scientist runs the risk of becoming unable to relate the specific details of his/her studies with the “real world.”

I hardly see much need to debate this point. I doubt anyone can effectively step up to the plate and argue, “No, scientists should maintain an artificial barrier between their knowledge and the general public, resulting in the search for knowledge and understanding of the physical processes of the universe becoming an abstract and archane part of human culture, practiced only by modern-day witch doctors, alchemists, and magicians.” But I DO think that Attrayant, while missing the mark on the communication point, comes close to the actual solution: a better education of people. If scientists were exposed to a broader field of important studies (e.g. logic, philosophy, etc.) prior to inevitably becoming seduced into narrowing their learning down to the specific area in which they intend to live their lives, perhaps there would be a better ability to relate the result of their learning to the “real world.” Then, perhaps, a discussion of religious philosophy as it is affected by scientific discoveries wouldn’t be quite so ineffective.

6

No offense Libertarian, but I’m not at all certain about the properties you ascribe to these neurotransmitters. Low levels of serotonin can cause depression, so I can at least understand how the poster you quoted got the ideas he had. I checked this on Encyclopedia Britannica, just to make sure that I wasn’t misremembering what I learned in psych class many years ago. I don’t recall hearning anything about dopamine being a pleasure stimulator, but I do recall that excessive quantities in the brain may be a factor in schizophrenia. Low levels of dopamine can result in Parkinson’s Disease.

I hope you aren’t offended by my pointing this out. It’s just that, given the nature of this thread, I felt that this misunderstanding should be cleared up right from the start.

I would suggest that all people, not just scientists, should have a grounding in disciplenes outside their own. For non scientists, I would include some knowledge of scientific method and discovery in this basic education.

Whose responsibility is it to explain science? Well, there already exists a profession whose job it is to learn about a disciplene and pass that knowledge on to others: teachers.

The lack of good science education may be due to the fact that it’s so easy to teach science poorly. In my opinion, the question “what do we know about X?” is not nearly so important as the question “how do we know that about X?”. The first question gives you a fact, which may or may not be useful later in life. Things like, “how heavy is the moon?” or “how many types of spoor are produced by a lagomorph?” The second question gives you a method, and I practically guarantee that this will be useful, even if not in direct application.

Most of the science teachers I had throughout school favored questions of the first type to questions of the second. They could recite page after page of facts and figures, without mentioning once how these numbers were obtained. In my opinion, this style of teaching portrays science as a mysterious, inscrutable process. Students do not learn to question things or to investigate; instead, they learn simply to accept “facts” passed down to them from those on high.

A friend of mine in high school was a bit skeptical when the teacher told us the temperature of the sun’s surface. He reasoned that no thermometer could survive in that kind of heat, so therefore no-one had ever measured it, so the number the teacher gave us must have been no more than a guess. I explained to my friend what little I knew of spectroscopy (my parents had a subsciption to Science Year), explained how theories about spectroscopy were confirmed by experiments and from that how we could be fairly certain of the sun’s temperature (I am very glad he didn’t ask for cites). I’m pretty sure I got a lot of the facts wrong, but at least I introduced Bill to some of the methods involved. That’s more than our teacher can claim.

In today’s world, I think that the ability to evaluate a scientific or pseudoscientific claim is a very important ability to have. To that end, I suggest that teachers should make a greater effort to teach philosophy of science.

7

Science writers already exist, as do scientists who write for popular consumption. Some of them are quite good, and I believe science benefits greatly from them.

It seems to me that we have two issues being raised in the OP: should scientists be trained in areas of reason outside of their specialties and should scientists accept the onus for communicating scientific ideas to the general public.

Short answers: Yes and no.

Longer answers:
I think that every person who aspires to education should be introduced to philosophy, logic and hetoric. Actually, I personally am attached to the old-fashioned idea of a liberal arts education, but at a bare minimum i tis a travesty for anyone to feel they have “completed” a higher education without at least an introduction to the ways in which knowledge is defined, refined, tested, and applied.

As for communication of scientific ideas to the general public, I do not see that as a role which every scientist must undertake. As I noted above, some scientists seek out such a role voluntarily. Some writers similarly seek out enough scientific understanding to approach the job from the other side. For many scientists, though, communication with the public is something they are neither required nor inspired to do. As pyrrho12 pointed out, education is the job of teachers. Now, America as a nation is doing a lousy job of teaching scientific principles to the masses. We are also doing a lousy job of teaching logic, math, language, common courtesy, and how to play nicely with others. I don’t think the answer is to turn every scientist into an unwilling Bill Nye.

Now, that is not meant to say that “science” as a mythical monolithic enterprise cannot do some things o improve matters. In particular, I would like to see a more even distribution of money, position, and prestige between pure researchers and excelent instructors. But we need those pure researchers, too.

8

My educated guess would be that most people cannot really comprehend the portion of the peer review abstract that was quoted in the Opening Post. And I don’t think they should be expected to understand that sort of jargon. But what happened was that, somewhere along the way, the technical understanding of how dopamine works got down to a California teenager who then used what he knew of the matter to form an argument against the existence of God! I mean, please!

I would like to know how that happens and what can be done to stop it.

You’re so right! In fact, he runs the risk of not even understanding the specific details himself. If he does not even comprehend the epistemological limits of the scientific method or the basic laws of implication, he might draw conclusions that are wild at best and dangerous at worst.

Absolutely not offended in the least! That’s what science is all about. If a statement is unclear, it needs to be cleared up. And I suppose the writer who thought dopamine levels in the brain have something to do with God’s existence can be forgiven for confusing dopamine with what he called “ceratonin”. But he could have looked it up himself. There is something about the way science is being taught to him that has made him lazy.

That’s a good point, Spiritus. As always you make a cogent and resonable argument. I wish that at least the major scientific associations would see to this need before Sagan’s Prescription is taken to the pharmacist.

9

Attrayant wrote:

How come I never get invited to those kinds of parties?

10

Within light years? I would hope that the average person (with at least a 10th grade education) would be able to look at the parts of the word “neurotransmission” and at least be able to make an educated guess as to what the word referred to, so as to have a snowball’s chance in hell of beginning to grasp the gist of the aformentioned bio-babble. I wasn’t suggesting that we all need to minor in biochemistry.

Am I asking too much by expecting the average person just to have a clue?

Are you a vegetarian by any chance?

11

This is a topic near and dear to me, as I am a scientist and a writer/public speaker.

I think that everyone, including scientists, should have as much knowledge outside their field as they can. People that only know one thing become tedious very quickly. They also have no perspective.

I do not think every scientist should be forced to discuss their work with the public. I know quite a few scientists, and while the majority would be adequate to explain some scientific observation to a layman, there are some that should be bound, gagged and thrown into a dark room and never allowed to utter a word to a taxpayer. They would do more harm than good.

This is not an aspersion on scientists; I think the ratio of speakers to non-speakers would be the same for most professions (most; lawyers, TV personalities and the like would be the obvious exception). However, it might be a good idea that each project of a given group have a speaker involved that can explain what they are doing. The public deserves not only to know what scientists are doing but they should understand it as well. It takes a good speaker to do that…

… but it takes an educated public as well. It’s not necessarily scientists’ fault that the public is overrun with fuzzy thinking such as astrology, creationism and the like (no hijacking, please). We have to meet halfway. Scientists need to learn how to communicate more effectively, and the public needs to learn how to think critically and rationally. When these happen, things will improve.

12

Then that teenager should be debated. He should be pointed to adequate resources. He should be cajoled. Perhaps he should even be derided. Give him incetive to make him learn. The scientists on this board try and do just that. Some of them do it quite well. Some of them try but flail (guilty as charged).

The reason we flail so often is because our profession depends on precise language. Precise language usually leads to low readibility for those without a science education, as it is not immediately obvious why certain words were chosen. In my field, this includes lots of great words like “ectopic” and “nascent” and “putative” and “epistatic” which have precise meanings in science but little outside of it. Jargon is the only way to convey the precision. Just as lawyers do, we must precisely define terms before we can use them. Sometimes normal English words (like “necessary” and “sufficient”) are co-opted. I would never say a gene is “necessary” for a process unless I specifically demonstrated that removal of the gene’s function ablated the process. Most of science writing is geared towards such precision with the fewest possible words, so what we end up with is often uninterpretable for the common person.

We do this because the main point of publication is not educating the public, but conveying our message to fellow scientists.

There are good ways to enter into reading the primary literature – magazines such as Scientific American and news articles from Nature and Science are geared to versed laypeople and scientists not in that realm of research. One can easily learn enough from these types of articles (as well as textbooks and courses) to begin to read the primary literature. At the end of high school (I was an honors student so I am not claiming that this is typical), I was able to read and understand articles in Scientific American. I do not think that it is an unreasonable goal to strive for this basic level in science education in the USA.

It is not the job of a scientist to provide basic education to the general listening public. That is the job of an educator. If one can both educate and conduct science effectively it is very commenable. They are two different skills, though, and in some ways they are opposite. Scientists seek to distance themselver from any particular worldview (removing observer bias and letting the data speak for itself) while educators seek to define said worldview. Few of the best science writers are top notch scientists. Carl Sagan spent a lot of time educating but not much time doing science. Double Nobel laureates like Fred Sanger aren’t out there producing works for popular consumption. A few come to mind (Stephen Jay Gould) but they are the exception rather than the rule.

13

Oooooo, is this ever the perfect thread for bringing up the book I just got last night. In Citizen Scientist, well-known Princeton public policy physicist Frank von Hippel makes the excellent point that due to the increasing complexity of science and technology, scientists are now just as necessary to the shaping of important policy as lawyers are (although not in such large numbers). But whereas lawyers are thickly distributed throughout all the three branches of government in the US, science advisors are concentrated in the executive branch. Whereas lawyers get professional support for pro bono work (though this is dwindling, I believe) to put their legal expertise at the service of individual citizens, scientists get little or no support for “popularizing” their research beyond whatever commercial value they can squeeze out of the “popularizations” (which except in the case of a few people like Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould isn’t very much).

von Hippel asserts that this creates a serious “information deficit” about science among the general public, and I think he’s right (it’s a deficit that’s exacerbated by poor teaching and the universal afflictions of laziness and indifference, of course). The problem is not so much that there aren’t enough scientists who can communicate these things to the lay public as a whole—there are many who work very hard at it and do an excellent job—it’s in the lack of professional support for such activities. (Despite the example under discussion, I bet that medicine is actually probably the least ill-served scientific discipline in this regard, since at least doctors do talk to individual patients and so-called “science” sections in general publications are heavily slanted towards medical/health issues.) von Hippel suggests that scientific professional organizations and universities should fund researchers to do “peer reviews” of government technical studies and communicate them in an understandable form to the public, in order to give citizens a fighting chance at influencing good policy decisions in a heavily technocratic society.

14

And that means my favorite hobby horse is in first place, after all! It’s a well-known scientific fact!

I think the fault, dear Libertarian, lies not in our science teachers, but in our logicians. I spend many hours a week reading articles beyond my comprehension. Peer review journals in fields where I have no credentials. I enjoy this activity greatly, and often find myself excitedly sharing the new learning with others. To describe their reaction as nonplused is inadequate. Purple stripes and feather in my nose would not seem so incomprehensible to them as my interest in science. Yet the same people will seize upon the most trivial mention of “evidence” presented by a “scientist” as proof that pigs really do fly, provided they already thought so before the proof was offered.

Logic is, for the overwhelming majority of people, a way to win an argument. If you win, then obviously your logic was better. Loud logic is very powerful, and loud logic backed by scientific proof is the best.

Science is only a method to obtain information. You really can’t argue with it, for it, or against it. Well, you can, but it doesn’t change anything. When someone speaks of science as if it were the opposite of spirituality, or spirituality as if it were the opposite of science, it means that they misunderstand either science, or spirituality, or both. When people start confusing politics with science, it turns out just as bad as when they confuse religion and politics.

You can’t change someone’s mind, unless their mind is able to make changes. That is very hard to do. Learning how hard it is for you is the first step in learning how to help others do it. Really stupid people do have opinions, and it turns out that those opinions have every bit as much emotional significance to them as smart people. The hardest lesson of all is that really smart people have stupid opinions too. They are called prejudices, and don’t involve thinking much at all.

Tris

“The sky is not falling! The sky is not falling!” Edwin Hubble

15

Nice post, TBA. My wife is a scientist, and we’ve discussed this issue. She wouldn’t want to be a speaker, because it’s not her bag and she’s too busy doing science.

It’s unfortunate that pseudo-scientists are the another exception to your general rule. The ratio of speakers is high, because promotion is their product. As a result, scientists always seem to be outgunned in public policy debate and lobbying.

16

That’s an excellent point. They have to beat their own chests, because no one else will (well, figuratively, at least). They are very loud, though usually in a vast minority. Astrology excepted, perhaps.

17

Way back in the corner of my mind is the memory of a sophomore Sociology class. My professor, Bruce Weng, a bear of a man, who had opinions so loud they often brought the other professors to the door asking him to please tone it down, said something about how we were fast becoming a nation of “technical barbarians”. The implication being that there people were specializing themselves out of a broad range of education. You can be an expert in a certain scientific field, but if you dont know how to write well or speak in a way that is understandable, how are you going to tell the world about your amazing discoveries?

18

This is hardly a problem only of scientists. Dense garbled anguished masses of english (and, I presume, of every other language) can be found in any academic field.

One of the clearest courses in my memory from college remains a Literary Criticism and Theory class. Some of the writing in that course was enough to make a grown man weep–in mourning for what was done to the language. The professor herself had some love affair with her own vague understanding of Wittgenstein, and therefore wrote like an impenetrably bad translation of German–or more precisely, a horrid imitation of a translation from dense German. Lucky us, her own book was one of the texts required in the class. At least dense scientific writing at least tries to mean something.

But anyway, everyone should try to communicate as clearly as possible, no matter what sort of work they do.

19

One thing. I know some people (Yes, I’m talking about you objectivists) are hung up on epistemology. But I think this is something of a mistake. Yes, we have to have a good understanding of how we know what we know. But we never start from an epistemology, declare axioms, and then proceed to derive the the rest of the universe.

In reality, we start in the middle. Here we are, a bunch of humans standing around, trying to figure out ways to get enough food and have sex every so often before we die.

A scientific epistemology is one that allows science to occur. But why is that important? Well, it just so happens that if science occurs, then we get more food, have sex more often, and die later. But why is this good? We just know that it is, we don’t know why.

But then it turns out that using this method, which we thought would never explain this, actually does explain this, see Charles Darwin. But in order to accept evolution, which explains why we want to survive, we must accept some kind of scientific epistemology, which there is no reason to accept unless we believe it will help us to live.

In science, we start with observations, which lead to theories. Except that the observations aren’t very good in the abscence of good theory, since you don’t know what to look for or what is important. You need both, but you can’t start from the beginning.