Jon Carroll on the Galileo problem:
My correspondents seem to be taken with the image of the lone scientist battling for truth against the bigwigs and their lackeys. “They laughed at Edison,” one told me. Maybe so. They also laughed at a lot of people who turned out to be laughable. Being laughed at is not necessarily a sign of intelligence.
Kit Stolz has a great look at drought in Southern California, with a particularly nice bit of business from Bill Patzert, the region’s most quotable climatologist:
Patzert had a more personal reason to doubt the forecast. In his backyard he has an old oak tree, and for years he has noticed that the tree seemed to drop far more acorns before wet years than dry years. This past fall his tree produced virtually no acorns.
Could an oak tree foresee a weather pattern that scientists couldn’t?
update: oops, forgot link
I knew my talk Friday worked when, during the Q and A at the end, one of the grad students asked for a show of hands.
“How many of you believe humans are the primary cause of global warming?”
Probably 90 percent or more of the hands in the room went up.
“How many of you know the scientific evidence in support of that assertion?”
Maybe a quarter of the hands went up.
It was a) a pretty honest answer from the audience members, and b) a clear demonstration of the point I had been trying to get across – that information consumers rarely have the time and inclination to understand an issue’s details in any depth. They’ve got to take information shortcuts. They’ve got to be cognitive misers. Most of these cognitive misers happen to spend their days in a university department of earth and planetary sciences, so those not actually studying climate take the perfectly reasonable shortcut of believing the scientific consensus. Reasonable, but a shortcut nonetheless.
In the blowback over the Nisbet-Mooney pieces about communicating science, there has been entirely too much focus, I think, on their proposed solution – “framing” – and not enough on their diagnosis of the problem, which is that most people do not approach the acquisition of information about science (or anything else) the way scientists think they do:
In reality, citizens do not use the news media as scientists assume. Research shows that people are rarely well enough informed or motivated to weigh competing ideas and arguments.
Speaking from personal experience of years of talking to scientists, I believe Nisbet and Mooney are spot on. In “scientized” political controversies I write about, the scientists imagine that if I only would explain the science as they understand it, the public would respond in the appropriate fashion. They get frustrated when it doesn’t play out that way. In their frustration, they’ve begun to take their case directly to the public, with things like RealClimate, PZ’s Pharyngula, Panda’s Thumb, etc. There’s nothing wrong with those efforts, as long as the scientists involved aren’t laboring under the misapprehension that those efforts have a chance to actually fix science’s public communication problems.
This, I think, is Matt and Chris’s most important contribution to the discussion. The raging confusion over “framing” suggests that no one is quite clear on what sort of a solution they’re talking about, but unfortunately that raging confusion has served to obscure what is, I think, their incredibly important diagnosis of the problem. Their criticism of Richard Dawkins’ assertive atheism has only worsened the problem: everyone seems to be arguing about that now, rather than talking about the problems of science communication and their potential solutions.
A friend came up afterward and said the next time I give the talk, I’ve got to figure out what this “framing” thing is. I made numerous references in the talk to Matt and Chris’s piece, but my friend counted five times I said that I wasn’t quite sure I understood “framing”. I intend to try to figure it out. But in the meantime, I’d like to suggest that those interested in understanding the problem cruise the Chapter 7 of the National Science Foundation’s Science and Engineering Indicators, which provides a striking body of data on what people in the U.S. and elsewhere do and don’t understand, both scientific facts and questions of scientific methodology. A teaser: you’d be amazed how many people don’t know an electron is smaller than an atom or, more importantly, why you need a control group when you’re testing a new drug. (Those of you with fancy university library access can see Miller 2004 for a nice summary of what we know about what folks know and don’t know.) That’s the reality our attempts to communicate science face.
I don’t understand framing yet well enough to understand whether it is a well-posed answer to the problem. But it is clear to me that whatever solution the science community pursues, it must recognize the reality scientists face: that simply explaining the science as they understand it is not the answer.
Not really. It takes more than one storm. But I had 0.7 inch in my rain gauge this morning, and check out the snow down in Silver City. Using my new Pagano scale (the daily regression model run by Tom Pagano at the NRCS), the last week’s cool, wet weather has been worth 90,000 acre feet in the Rio Grande. Not enough to pulls us back to normal, but better than having a lit cigar stuck up your nose.
Science has done a cool thing: resources for high school biology teachers, accompanying today’s monkey gene publication. Pass the word.
I cried this morning over my granola. Best explained with something I wrote a few few years back:
On Christmas round about 1973 or so, my sister, Lisa, gave me Breakfast of Champions, which changed my life in unaccountable ways. I holed up with the book all afternoon Christmas and into the next day, and came out the other side convicted to writing.
I gave that book away – to Lisa as a wedding present – so Nora a couple of years ago gave me a new copy of Breakfast of Champions, and I read it fresh with whatever wisdom I’ve acquired in the decades since. It held up well. I ended up thinking Vonnegut is wrong in fundamental ways, all dark determinism I simply can’t embrace. But he is funnier, if anything, than when I read him a quarter century ago, and the funadamental insight I had then endured, richer for the years.
The insight is this: The written word is written by someone. The book has an author. A writer has a voice.
Additional wisdom:
Along the lines of the land use change issues Roger Pielke Sr. has been discussing, an interesting paper today in GRL looking at the differences between turning the Amazon rain forest into pasture, versus turning it into soybeans:
Results show that the decrease in precipitation after a soybean extension is significantly higher when compared to the change after a pastureland extension, a consequence of the very high albedo of the soybean.
From the Daily Express, across the rapidly rising pond, but adjacent to the smaller and rapidly shrinking pond, apparently:
BRITAIN could be plunged into drought misery within months because of the record hot summer that’s on the way.
Experts gave the warning yesterday as sailors, left, made the most of a full Bewl Water reservoir, the largest stretch of open water in South-east England.
Perhaps UK natives in the audience could help me understand better the remarkable predictive powers of your forecast community, or the remarkable journalistic standards of the Daily Express?
The vigorous discussion over the Nisbet-Mooney Science piece on science communication (too many to link, see Matt’s blog for a rundown) is a perfect setup for a talk I’m giving Friday at UNM: “Communicating Science: What the News Media Can Do, and What it Can’t”, or words to that effect. For the cognitive misers in the audience, I’ll be explaining that Matt and Chris are right, and that folks don’t really need to pay attention to the details, they should just take my word for it. 🙂
2 p.m., Northrop Hall, room 122 (the big lecture hall on the northeast corner of the building). Free!