In a previous post, I argued that the public doesn't particularly need a sophisticated scientific understanding of climate change (or evolution, or stem cells) in order to make the right basic policy decisions. A rudimentary understanding, deliverable and understandable by a layman, is perfectly sufficient. We're warming the climate? It's gonna hurt us? Let's stop. Bada-bing, bada-boom.
Given this, and given the fact that such rudimentary explanations of the science are ubiquitous, the obvious question is: why does the public persist in believe in goofy things, and supporting goofy policy?
The assumption of many scientists is: the public needs more facts! More science! More education!
This is the assumption Mooney and Nisbet were trying to dislodge. More facts ≠ more understanding. People begin with a worldview, a set of assumptions and values and predilections, and tend to work backward from there, gathering facts that are convenient. Inconvenient facts just slide right off.
So if scientists want to persuade, instead of just lecture, they must take those worldviews and values into account.
Now, a scientist might say, "well, that's a job for someone with a talent for, or training in, rhetoric -- not for a scientist." And that's a valid point. Indeed, much of the training scientists go through tends to maladapt them to the task of effective public communication.
The reason I think scientists should stay involved in the public realm is that they have a great deal of authority in our culture. When a scientist says something, it's taken seriously, even if it's not a scientific fact or result. That give scientists a great deal of social power. And as all Spider-man fans know, with great power must come great responsibility.
So how could scientists improve public communication? The first step is acknowledging the obvious: the reason they ventured into the public sphere in the first place has to do with their values, and their desired ends. It is not, and never has been, purely to impart knowledge.
Consider RealClimate. Did the scientists involved in the site really start it purely to raise the level of public knowledge about climate change? I think not. They wanted to raise the public level of knowledge about climate change because they thought by doing so they would make it more likely that society would address the problem.
In other words: they want society to act to fight climate change. They want action. That's their ultimate goal. Why pretend otherwise? It's not like that's some nefarious ulterior motive. It doesn't corrupt the science they do. In the practice of science, they can't let their values or desired policies affect their work. But there's nothing that says they can't openly act on their values in the public realm.
They see a huge problem that's going to cause widespread suffering; they want us to do something about it. That makes them decent human beings, not impure scientists.
As for the rules of effective persuasion, well, they're the same for scientists as anyone else. The point to scientists is just: if you go out in public, study those rules. Accept that you are attempting to persuade, not just to impart dry facts, and take responsibility for it. If you don't want to be in the persuasion business, don't speak out publicly. Just don't have any illusions.
‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science
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Comments
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GreenEngineer Posted 4:44 am
13 Apr 2007
Many scientists think (or act as if they think) that infusing the public with a greater level of scientific knowledge will lead to positive changes in policy and attitudes in a near-term context. That is pretty much demonstrably not true, which is one of the points that this article is making.
Many scientists also think (correctly) that the level of general science education and understanding among the public is miserable, and that this is a serious impediment to being able to make informed decisions about policy that relates to scientific issues. In this, they are quite correct.
The distinction here is that educating the public (and most particularly youth) about science is a useful activity in terms of its long term payoff, but not in terms of its short-term policy effects. Also, long-term efforts to improve scientific literacy can, and should, focus on a variety of subjects covering a whole range of fields. Efforts by scientists to influence short-term policy, on the other hand, are necessarily focused on those specific fields relevant to the policy in question.
Maybe I'm berating the obvious here. But from the way the article is written, it almost sounds like you're saying that science education/information is a waste of time. Obviously, it's not. It's just a long-term investment (and one which, had it been taken more seriously in the last 30 years, might have prevented the need for "emergency measures" to focus people of climate change now).
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GRLCowan Posted 5:20 am
13 Apr 2007
But -- pardon my French -- this makes most scientists a variety of civil servant. It's not nice, but it is a fact. So in their outreach efforts, they need to understand that they are reaching out to taxpayers, and taxpayers are a group in which they cannot prudently claim membership. Handing the tax man back $40, or even $50, after he has handed them $100 may seem eminently qualifying to them, doesn't seem so at all to actual taxpayers.
If they understand this, they will understand which of the following alternative formulations will be better received, and why.
(Alternative 1) "The several percent of its income that government nets from fossil fuel sales needs to be increased so that you will have a greater incentive to burn less of them."
(Alternative 2) "Like any fossil fuel profit or profit-like cash flow, the several percent of its income that government nets from fossil fuel sales needs to be trimmed back to zero. In government's case it may be helpful to make the net negative, i.e. actually subsidize fossil fuel use. This will leave more money in your pockets with which you can invest in conservation and substitution, and we who are publically funded will have less of an incentive to impede you; indeed, in the case where government actually pays part of a householder's, for instance, furnace oil bill, all of us civil servants will be eager to help him insulate."
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
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David Roberts Posted 5:55 am
13 Apr 2007
On the former, while I certainly would like to see basic scientific literacy improved, I think some science types have rather unrealistic dreams of every citizen knowing how photosynthesis works, and Newton's four laws, and how speciation develops, and etc. The fact is that most people, for the imaginable future, are not going to know that stuff, no matter what you do. People have a whole range of demands on their attention, mainly work and family and such, and just won't have much time or room for knowledge that doesn't bear on their practical concerns.
What I think is achievable is a certain basic level of empirical literacy -- i.e., a basic understanding of how empirical knowledge-gathering works, what does and doesn't count as scientific evidence, what exactly scientific "consensus" means, etc. etc.
It's scientific habits of mind I'd like to see more widespread, rather than, say, increased ability to recite scientific facts. After all, most people will never be able to independently verify whether, say, the antarctic ice is melting. But a citizenry that understands science a little better will understand better where to look for that information and who to trust about it.
That make any sense?
www.grist.org
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:00 am
13 Apr 2007
Look at how well Tobacco has done.
_
Oddly thats why I'd say "The Great Global Warming Swindle" was so effective (despite being scientifically bankrupt)
You just need to present it in a way which is "easy to digest" for the public.
You need to translate it into laymens terms.
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GreyFlcn Posted 6:31 am
13 Apr 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg
They just need better PR.
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Mmimika Posted 6:40 am
13 Apr 2007
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gmunger Posted 6:48 am
13 Apr 2007
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gmunger Posted 6:55 am
13 Apr 2007
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Mmimika Posted 7:21 am
13 Apr 2007
But don't you think its easier to explain photosynthesis than statistical inference? Everyone has seen a plant turn brown and die. But even Einstein didn't want to believe that god was rolling the dice.
I guess what I'm saying is that the stats underlying empirical science are completely abstract. You can give examples, but they are theoretical math models... they have no tangible counterparts. And maybe even more upsetting, probability based stats have philosophical resonances about
our ability to have certain knowledge about reality,
our own uniqueness and even
our free will.
That is probably pretty scary for a lot of folks.
I'm not saying that empirical methods can't be taught in high school - just wouldn't underestimate it as a task.
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Delay And Deny Posted 8:19 am
13 Apr 2007
With today's increased population, you would be condemning millions to starve.
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
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josullivan58 Posted 8:42 am
13 Apr 2007
It's more important to let the public know how science works. Tell people that science is based on physical facts that can be objectively shown and tries to remove the personal subjective interpretations. Its not that science does this perfectly, but that is different than most other area like politics, law and business.
Other things are about the day-to-day life of scientists. They are not saying people are warming the planet to get money. One of the scientist at realclimate worked on the IPCC reports and said he spend many hours on it outside is regular job for no money. Another is how dishonesty is treated in science. Making things up the way jabailo does is completely unacceptable in the scientific community.
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GreyFlcn Posted 10:12 am
13 Apr 2007
With today's increased population, you would be condemning millions to starve.
http://www.greyfalcon.net/solar.png
Except that wouldn't be the case, since a majoriety of that warming was caused by solar radiation increases
Imagine if we had the temperatures of the 1970s would be more the case.
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fermiparadox Posted 3:59 pm
13 Apr 2007
The public does needs more facts, at least as long as the deniers spout their nonsense in the public. When someone in a casual discussion says AGW must be false because he read in a Newsweek article by a professor from MIT that 95% of the greenhouse effect is caused by water vapor (you can insert any other canard here, there are tons of them), then people need to know an answer to it. But it needs to be simple enough for laymen to understand, and exactly that is missing in the media. Sure, you can read realclimate and read that it is not just a matter of percentages, but that is over the head of most people not familiar with the matter. It needs to be much easier to digest. And a scientist with authority will have a much larger effect than a hobby blogger like me.
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step back Posted 8:55 pm
13 Apr 2007
The Market will save us.
Technology will save us.
A Higher Power will save us.
...
42. Public education will save us.
All this talk about "educating" the public into becoming more scientifically minded is just a continuation of the Nancy Drew Salvation Series. We are constantly looking for that one saving grace, the one quick fix that will turn this crazy world around. So we create these series of fictions.
"Education will save us" is just another silly hope in a long list of fantasy-based realities. What we forget is that the public has been "educated", over their entire life spans, to become the scientifically illiterate mob they are now. What makes you think you can "re-educate" them at this late state in the game?
Early in their schooling, the "average layperson" was taught that all pigs are equal except that some pigs are more equal than themselves, especailly in understanding the hard hard math stuff and the complicated science stuff. But that's OK because this big world has room for all kinds and a safe space for even the most math-challenged of us. To each according to his abilities and to all according to their consumerist "needs". The magic invisible appendage of the market place will take care of everything and will magically make it all good.
As John Kerry recently said when debating the Grinch-wit: "We need to unleash the genius of the marketplace" [... and it will solve this global warming thing.]
If a smart guy like Kerry doesn't have a clue, what hope do you have to "educate" the public?
Forget education. It's too late. Work on your rhetoric skills. K Street does.
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step back Posted 9:06 pm
13 Apr 2007
"All ya' gotta' do is sign up, if you believe. And we have to save the white polar bear, the only pure animal. Just sign right here (pointing to his petition as he flipped through it). And, we've gotta' ban the bulb. Ban the 'candescent light bulb. Just sign up." LeC. was already trying to get him to sit down after the polar bear remarks, but S. went as far as letting people know that they have to stop third world development. "Just sign up." As tense as the situation was, people couldn't help but laugh. ... Everyone was polarized. S. stood up again and declared, "We gotta kill all the termites, they produce 10 times more CO2 than humans. We do that, and we're good."
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