Re: How Scientists Can't Communicate

On 3 July, 14:52, "Ian B" <noemailple...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
pbow...@xxxxxxx wrote:
On 3 July, 12:06, "Charles E Hardwidge" <bo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Ross" <rrasz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:72eadfcf-8edf-4bff-a605-730da13b96e3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

On Jul 1, 11:29 pm, "Charles E Hardwidge" <bo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
http://www.amacad.org/news/scientistsPublic.aspx

This is a convenient follow on to my earlier topic on "Why the
Moffat reset changed nothing". It's not just "storytellers" who
can't put together a franchise but the people whose job it is to
study the nature of the world can't even explain themselves.

And contrariwise, here is a refutation of same:
http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2010/07/lack_of_power_not...

Can't see how. The guy is just bitching about how hard the world is.
It's like a bunch of Linux heads waffling on about some command line
bullshit and telling you to RTFM. Lawyers make more sense.

On balance, I have more sympathy with Mooney's approach, but at the
same time he fails to take on board a point he himself stressed at the
start of his paper - that scientists are heterogenous. Mad Mike has a
point that it's not the fault of a junior faculty member if their
field is being badly-represented; but that surely points to lapses in
the scientific organisations that fail to hire PR specialists who
understand the science.

At the same time, it doesn't help to ignore the heterogeneity of
public attitudes (as, again, Mooney does despite highlighting it) -
"Frankly, you're an idiot" is hardly a constructive approach to
dialogue, but the elements within the public pushing misinformation on
topics like evolution and climate change are hardly people innocently
misunderstanding the science. And in my experience even engaging with
these people and explaining that these issues aren't the threat to
their lifestyle or core values that they perceive (that evolution
isn't antithetical to Christian morality, or that adjusting to climate
change won't destroy the economy/drive them out of business, say) too
often results in rote repetition of party lines rather than any
reciprocal engagement. Mad Mike and the like don't help by giving the
impression that the scientific community is resistant to making the
effort, but he has a point that Mooney is resorting to stereotypes of
the ivory tower academic who actively refuses to get involved.

And it can't be denied that there genuinely is a failure to understand
scientific reasoning by the general public, and that's often at the
heart of misunderstandings about scientific subjects. For instance, I
was recently explaining evidence of climate change to family members,
whose line of argument boiled down to "natural climate change has
happened before, therefore this period of climate change is likely to
be natural". They didn't really understand when I pointed out that
science doesn't work like that - that it looks for specific
associations of cause and effect rather than simple correlations. I
pointed out that every episode of climate change has specific drivers,
the planet doesn't just randomly warm up and cool down, only to get
the response "of course it does". It makes it difficult to explain
anything in science when the target audience is unfamiliar with the
basic logic involved. How do you explain human-induced climate change
to someone whose understanding of climate history boils down to a
modern equivalent of "the volcano god got angry"? That's not an
ideological barrier, it's purely a failing of education.

Well, the basic problem you have there is that the CO2 hypothesis is wrong,
and while scientifically naive people may not be able to justify their
skepticism in jargon, they can smell bullshit a mile off.

My fundamental point is to do with the mindset, not the case study -
this essentially animist idea that the world just does things because
it wants to; you don't need to be drilled in jargon to understand the
concept of cause and effect, or that the function of science is
precisely to distinguish such causal relationships from chance
correlations.

Back to the case study, the evidence for human-induced climate change
doesn't lie simply in the observation that the climate is getting
warmer at the same time we're pumping more carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere, but also in experimental work that indicates carbon
dioxide has exactly such a warming effect, in geological and
palaeontological records that show carbon dioxide levels tracking
climatic changes consistently throughout the geological history of the
planet ... and, most crucially of all, the *failure of any proposed
alternative hypothesis to explain modern rises in either CO2 or
temperature*. CO2 emissions don't correspond with volcanic activity.
The period of greatest warming coincided with the most severe solar
mimimum on record, an event which had the effect of reducing the
amount of solar radiation reaching the planet. Climate warming is
concentrated in the lower atmosphere and is barely if at all
detectable at higher altitudes, the reverse of the trend expected if a
phenomenon external to the planet, such as the sun or cosmic rays,
were to blame. Etc. etc. "Wrong" or not, with no good alternatives
presenting themselves, a hypothesis which proposes an explanation
whose basic mechanism (more CO2 = higher temperature) has been
verified in experiments over more than a century, and that posits a
terrestrial cause, that matches observed CO2 emissions to measured
amounts produced by industrial activity, and given a timeframe for CO2
and temperature rises that largely coincides with a major increase in
the use of fossil fuels to power industry (certainly to a greater
extent than any known natural source of emissions does), the "CO2
hypothesis" is the only scientifically defensible game in town.

And this is plainly another area where communication of scientific
subjects is lacking - the failure among many segments of the public to
understand the process leads to repeated refrains to "consider the
alternatives", failing to realise that scientific orthodoxy only
becomes such after a painstaking process of eliminating said
alternatives. Are scientists themselves to blame for this lack of
communication, or is it the fault of a media that wants to be able to
make unequivocal statements and of special interest groups wanting to
use the results for their own ends? One thing that emerged from the
family conversation was that the objections they had had nothing to do
with the empirical science, and everything to do with a dislike of
taxes politicians used the issue to justify, and of tub-thumping
pressure groups - most of whom, like the majority of organisations Mad
Mike disparages in his piece as groups chopping down trees to urge him
to save the environment - have no professional scientists on staff,
and often little interest in science (Greenpeace has about three, I
believe, and these days is actually among the better-informed of these
organisations).

It took me a long while to realise- having been a kind of Dawkinsian science
loyalist in my younger days- that when people start moaning about the
"public understanding of science", what they are actually expressing is an
anger that the greater population just won't beleve what they are told to
believe. It took me about as long to realise that when such people talk
about "science" they aren't talking about science, the method, they are
talking about Science, a network of institutions who seek intellectual,
ideological and poltiical hegemony.

That may sadly be true - as above I'm strongly opposed to any
politicisation of science, and the failure of science communication
may have more to do with the promulgation of particular results by
special interest groups with well-funded PR machines than scientists
themselves. Mooney's paper lists a headline "Public trusts scientists,
scientists fault public and media" or somesuch - intended to support
his contention that scientists are the ones at fault for their
dismissive elitism. But it's unwelcome and lazy to read "Public trusts
scientists" and think "Ah, job done!" Trusting someone doesn't entail
either listening or understanding them.

What's needed more generally is improved critical thinking skills in
identifying who and what to accept. The notion of authority figures is
antithetical to the nature of science - it isn't holy writ to be
handed down from on high. I've railed against this attitude mostly in
the context of charlatans who make appeals to the aura of authority
granted by science to peddle gibberish. As Mad Mike's article points
out, pseudoscientists love to employ the language of science. And I
can be driven to despair by people lapping up the words of a
creatonist with a PhD in physics or mouse genetics, subjects unrelated
to evolution, because he's a 'scientist', or an astrophysicist with
pretensions to expertise about the geological climate record. But as
recent events with the IPCC and East Anglia's climate unit have
highlighted, when people conflate their authority figures - scientists
- with the science they represent, anything that causes them to lose
trust in the former will influence their attitude to the latter,
however unrelated. So while it's about as logical as deciding that,
say, a home secretary can't do his job because he has an extramarital
affair, a misplaced comment about Himalayan glaciers, a specific case
of a speculated climate impact, suddenly discredits evidence of
general climate impacts to which it is wholly unrelated. Suggestions
of improper management or manipulation of data are taken as evidence
against hypotheses that data was never used to support in the first
place, and so forth. And increasingly scientists in positions of
influence seem to buy into the same myth - take David Nutt, a former
UK science advisor. Infamously, the Labour government sacked him for
making recommendations unpopular with ministers, but the fact that his
treatment was unjustified shouldn't be allowed to obscure the fact
that he went beyond his remit - making policy suggestions based a
conglomerate index that had nothing scientific about it beyond being a
standardised scale. Yet his dismissal was taken by the broader
scientific community as an attack on science, despite the fact that
it's the job of that very community to subject anything claiming to be
science to close scrutiny.

The reason the public needs a greater understanding of science is
precisely so they can be better-equipped to form evaluate scientific
evidence for themselves, rather than relying on the testimony of
scientists, let alone of non-scientists portraying their positions as
science.

So somebody who supports this sytem, even if not explicitly (that is,
they're working towards it without overtly stating it in political terms)
sees "explaining" things as evangelism (too much to go into here, but the
"progressive" movement is directly descended from late C18/early C19 puritan
evangelists, and although it dumped God in favour of a perverted form of
science as justification, its methodology and fervour are identical. Anyone
who refuses to agree with them is considered stupid, uneducated, etc.

You only need to look around this newsgroup to realise that this is a
pretty common reaction to disagreement regardless of political
attitudes. You get plenty of creationists slamming those who don't
share their beliefs as stupid as well as heretical, or climate
'sceptics', AIDS deniers or whoever trying to win converts by goading
their opponents (the old tactic "only the stupid and uneducated can't
see this vast conspiracy - but of course I know YOU aren't that
naive...")

For instance, you said,

"adjusting to climate change won't destroy the economy/drive them out of
business, "

This is simply wrong. Everything we know about economics tells us it is
wrong.

In the current financial climate, it seems clear that a great deal we
"know" about economics was wrong... But the above is the considered
opinion of economists (so quite possibly wrong...) The Frost report
projected a cost for responding globally to climate change that would
impact Western economies less than bailing out the banks a couple of
years later proved to. No major energy company has seen profits fall
from investing in cleaner energy sources that I recall, and until the
recession hit the new opportunities trade in commodities like carbon
credits was sufficiently appealing that several US states drew up
plans to introduce similar systems even when federal policy was
against it. For consumers who can afford the initial overheads, solar
power is generally cheaper in the long term than running off the grid.
The adjustments in lifestyle demanded by curbs on emissions are less
than those being experienced in the current recession, which has seen
Western countries' CO2 emissions fall more in a shorter timescale than
anyone is proposing for long-term climate agreements.

But the people who declare such things- and sorry Phil, I have to
include you here because you stated it- *do not understand economics*. They
do not understand how wealth is created; they do not understand the nature
of value, they do not understand the most basic facts regarding economics.

You're falling into the trap I warned about above, of conflating a
particular ideological movement with the empirical evidence. The
evidence tells us what levels of cuts in emissions are likely to be
necessary, what practical adjustments (such as flood defences) need to
be made to secure settlements, ecosystems etc. They don't offer
guidance on the best way to implement those cuts, let alone on the
economic framework in which they should be enacted. It's the same
error of logic that, as you allude to below, led to creationists
equating evolution with eugenics - the fact that the science can be
manipulated for ideological ends doesn't invalidate the science
itself. As your cherry-picked examples below highlight, very few of
the prominent eugenicists (Haeckel aside) were members of the
scientific community, but were mostly ideological laypeople adopting
evolutionary theory as supposedly justifying something they already
believed. Eugenics was no creation of evolutionary theory's disciples,
just an effort to give an air of respectability to the attitudes that
underlay slavery, oppression and slaughter of populations in colonial
territories, and wars against anyone deemed 'impure' for whatever
reason throughout history. Suddenly instead of being superior because
God told them so or they were a more noble skin colour, they could
claim genetics as the reason, but the ideology was the same and so
were the pogroms and many of the same prejudices - Jews had been hated
and persecuted throughout Europe for centuries before anyone thought
of blaming their supposed 'inferiority' on their genes. Once eugenics
went out of fashion, people went back to doing exactly the same thing
justified on the basis that the victims were capitalists, or
citydwellers, or whatever. None of it provides 'good reason' for
objections to evolution; nor should climate science or environmental
science more generally be tarred by association with groups at odds
with one's own ideology.

But will they listen to somebody trying to explain economics to them? No,
their ears are more stopped by orders of magnitude than those who they
themselves complain will not listen.

And, back to the original subject, would you say that that's evidence
that economists can't communicate, or that the public needs to be
better-educated?

Phil
.

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