The Big Fluffy
Another item from Pharyngula. About the fact that scientists talking about the details of a scientific subject can quickly bore an audience.
It’s true: we aren’t trained to be showmen. We are very good at talking to other scientists – I’m sure Wesley’s talk would have been a pleasure for me to listen to, and I would have learned much and been appreciative of the substance – but most of it would have whooshed over the heads of a lay audience. I wrestle with this in my public talks, too. There’s always this stuff that I am very excited about and that I know my peers think is really nifty and that gets right down to the heart of the joy and wonder of biology, but it’s so far from the perspective of the audience that it is well nigh impossible to communicate. And I know that when I try, I usually fail.
And the important thing to notice there is that we’re the ones who are missing out. Necessarily; we can’t know everything, and we’re all always going to have subjects we don’t know enough about to follow detailed discussions with interest, let alone excitement and joy – but I think it’s really important to keep always in mind that that means we are missing out. There’s something there, and it’s joy and excitement to people who understand it. This is kind of basic to the running argument I’m always having with ‘anti-elitists’. With people who accuse me of 1) thinking I know a lot (which is a joke; I know damn well I don’t know a lot; I know damn well I wouldn’t be able to get the joy and excitement in PZ’s public talks) and 2) thinking that means I’m Special. But that’s not it. That’s completely point-missing. No, what I think is that there is joy and excitement to be had in many kinds of knowledge and intellectual exploration, and that the more ‘anti-elitists’ insist that easy obvious poppy stuff is every bit as good as more challenging subjects, the more they encourage people never ever in the whole of their lives to find that out. ‘Anti-elitism’ pretends to be somehow sticking up for ‘ordinary people’ or some such amorphous group, but what it’s really doing is just encouraging them to remain permanently shut out from intellectual excitement. With friends like that who needs enemies, kind of thing.
The two creationists in the series, on the other hand, are simple and clear (and the young earth creationist has the advantage of being entertainingly insane). They don’t have any complex data to explain, so they aren’t tempted to try, and they put everything in terms everyone can follow. An absence of evidence can be an advantage in a talk, because then everything rests on well-honed rhetoric; the scientist’s reliance on actual information means we often skimp on the presentation. I’ve heard Johnson speak, and he’s smooth and confident, and slyly appeals to his audience’s prejudices. Of course, he also lies like a [censored] . It simplifies lecture preparation if you can simply make up glib lies to fill in the holes, another strategy to which scientists will not resort.
And that’s another important thing to keep in mind. Part of the appeal of the religious side is that it’s easy. It’s easy. Never forget that. In fact it ought to play a much bigger part in the rhetorical toolkit. Religion is for lazy thinkers, because there is literally nothing to do. No evidence-finding, no argument-improving, no illogic-detecting. It’s easy. Easy, easy, easy. It’s like lying back in a soft chair watching tv while the cat gently spoons chocolates into your mouth. Got that? Easy. Couch-potato thinking, lazy thinking, easy easy easy. Not impressive. Not buffed. Not butch. Easy.
They won’t like that!
Well I could mention the _Science of Discworld_ series by the triumvirate of Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen, but I’d be preaching to the choir. Question is how do we reach the Others? Especially those who are not great, or even natural, readers?
Getting a cat to feed you chocolates is not impressive? My word.
Cam du J – He’s that special cat from Douglas Adams’ last book… what was his name… ?
I’m a great fan of Dorothy L Sayers and have read ‘Murder Must Advertise’ at least twice. I think that Lord Peter Whimsy would have made himself an expert in any field in which he took an interest. There are loads of things we don’t know because they are unknowable, and there are lots of things we don’t know because we haven’t bothered to find out, but I fail to understand why it is so widely accepted that so much is unknowable to so many because it is ‘difficult’. The point about arguments from authority is very well made in this article and some of the comments. They are easy. They obviate the need to get off ones fundament and gather some information. They let people off the hook of coherence, they are an abdication of epistemic duty.
“We might not stop scientists from using their bizarre form of English when communicating with other members of their discipline, but we could at least train them to speak and write in clear regular language as well.”
I’m always amused at the number of these silly ‘how to communicate science’ courses I’m sent on, where I’m constantly told that we scientists shouldn’t be writing in the silly passive way we do, only to have journals, reviewers and collaborators go absolutely spare if you try to vary the formula. It seems to be something of a waste of money to pay for people to tell you to do something you will never practically be able to do.
“I’m always amused at the number of these silly ‘how to communicate science’ courses I’m sent on, where I’m constantly told that we scientists shouldn’t be writing in the silly passive way we do, only to have journals, reviewers and collaborators go absolutely spare if you try to vary the formula.”
Yeh, I know the problem. It can work the other way too though. Scientists don’t like journal editors to deviate from the formula in their editing. It’s an entrenched culture and I’m not optimistic about changing it. But I still maintain that we’d be much better off if scientists were bilingual – able to talk sciencese to scientists and in their journals, and able to express themselves in regular language to more general audiences. To do this would require more than running the odd course – it’d have to be something woven into the fabric of a science education. Who knows, scientists might actually rediscover some joy in language. I’m convinced that most view writing as a chore and that even their sciencese suffers because of it.
There is an excellent behind-the-scenes view of the Dover trial online now at Skeptic magazine.
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/05-12-20.html
I’m not sure that that image of scientists being interested in important talks is really valid. Famous counterexamples spring to mind — as for instance Goedel’s talk about incompleteness, which was almost completely ignored when he gave it at the 1930 Second Conference on Epistemology of the Exact Sciences. And this was a conference attended by Hilbert.
Myself, I think the expert/laymen dichotomy is false, or at least misleading. Oftentimes, expertise outside of a narrow disciplinary band lapses into laymanship. This becomes especially problematic when a scientist thinks his territory is being encroached upon. If you look at the reception given, in the early nineties, to Gerald Edelman’s work by cognitive scientists — who seemed to resent the hell out of anything that suggested that the brain be approached as a biological entity — you have a great example of how the expert/layman divide doesn’t really help you track the reception of scientific ideas.
So I am not sure if the picture of scientists rapped in nerdish attention as they listen to what sounds, to laymen’s ears, like gibberish, is really true. I think that they mostly listen to what sounds familiar with rapt attention, as almost everybody does, until the unfamiliar creeps upon them enough to be recognized.
“So I am not sure if the picture of scientists rapped in nerdish attention as they listen to what sounds, to laymen’s ears, like gibberish, is really true. I think that they mostly listen to what sounds familiar with rapt attention, as almost everybody does, until the unfamiliar creeps upon them enough to be recognized.”
(Not like gibberish, but like something one doesn’t know how to hear, thus boring. Like a foreign language, perhaps, rather than gibberish.)
Anyway – what are you basing this “I think that they mostly” on? Just some counterexamples? But PZ didn’t say that’s what scientists always do, particularly; he said that’s what it’s like when that’s what it’s like. Is there really much reason to think that biologists listening to a biologist talking about some exciting new research will not be interested in the exciting novelty of the research? That looks more like a contrarian assumption than a really warranted opinion.
“OB,actually, I can base it on a very recent case…the scandal involving the Korean stem cell researcher. Far from being uncovered by experts, it was uncovered by…journalism…the division between experts and laymen is woefully out of date”
That is a very cheeky claim:
“Then a member of Dr. Hwang’s laboratory team secretly posted a denunciation of his work on a confidential Internet bulletin board maintained by “PD Notebook,” South Korea’s leading investigative news show.”
Roger, I’m not sure what your comment has to do with what I said. I didn’t say anything about experts and laypeople or any expert/layperson dichotomy. That’s not what the post was about.
Well, it has to do with lay people and things going over their head and the creationist rhetoric. Personally, I simply don’t think that this is what is happening, I don’t think that the creationists are particularly successful with “lay people” — I think it is more with the professional class composed of journalists like Easterbrook, engineers and the like. I think the people in Dover proved to have a very practical schizophrenic notion that, on the one hand, the world was created in whenever B.C. (I think Racquel Welch was hanging around then, with the dinosaurs) and on the other hand what their kids have to know to pass tests, get into college, get a job, etc., which is why they booted the biblethumpers out. I think that the idea of “lay people” has to be subjected to a little rigor.
If I am misreading your quotes and comments, apologies.
That’s okay. My point was sort of a tangent, really – I was talking about something a little different from what PZ was talking about.
But I don’t know – PZ has gone to some of these talks, he’s paid attention to who goes over well and who doesn’t. I think he has at least some idea what he’s talking about here. Do you have any reason other than hunch for thinking creationists are not particularly successful with non-scientists [can we drop the quote-hedged “lay”? – it’s not a term I use, myself]? I’m pretty sure I’ve read in more than one place that that is in fact true – when the two sides debate, the scientist gets nowhere, and the IDer wows the crowd. That’s one reason a lot of anti-IDers refuse to debate them – because it doesn’t work. Which is paradoxical, given the evidence on the respective sides. I think PZ was trying to account for that paradox.
A thought: Creationists may wow the crowds partly because they are NATURALLY SELECTED crowds. They will be 80% Christians because so few others take either creation or the fight against idiocy seriously.