Read this book now, and act on what you learn from it, for the sake of your own future and the future of our children and their children.

The rise of modern civilization, from the Enlightenment onward for hundreds of years, was the same thing as the rise of modern science. The rise of science was a cultural novelty with only vague foreshadowing. It was a revolution in the way humans think.

People come to believe what they believe in a way that rarely involves scientific thinking. The human mind is not inherently rational in the sense we usually use the term today. The process of learning things, of inference, and developing habits that guide our reactions to the world around us, evolved to function well enough given our usual cultural, social, and ecological context. But the modern world presents challenges that are better addressed, and problems that are only solvable, with a scientific approach. Science is something we willfully impose on our own process of thought and, at the level of society, formation of policy and law.

You have heard of the concept of “diseases of civilization.” For example, we evolved to seek and love sugars and fats, and then we developed methods of obtaining seemingly unlimited quantities of said nutrients. The success of our system of feeding ourselves solves the problem of uncertainty in the food supply and creates the problems of atherosclerosis, widespread obesity, and all too common diabetes.

Self damaging stupidity also seems to be a disease of civilization. One would think that with the rise of science, the opposite would happen, and it has to some extent.

People spend a great deal of time and energy, and other resources, acting on beliefs about food production and personal health that are contrary to their own best interests. Had a fraction of that energy been spent on trying to understand the relevant science of food production and health, those individuals would be much better off, as would the rest of society. The same pattern can be seen in all other aspects of life, from energy production and use to systems of transportation to diplomacy and warfare. Again and again, great ideas emerge that may become excellent new laws or common best practices, only to be watered down and compromised because of this self damaging stupidity. How, when, and why did we get here?

Today, increasingly and powerfully, anti-science forces are strong and shape the way people think and act to our collective detriment. This is the problem Otto addresses.

How is it that humans invented science, used science for all sorts of improvements (and, admittedly, a number of unintended negative consequences), and then came to new ways of developing policy and practice that hobble the use of this important cultural and social resource?

Shawn Otto’s book is a careful and detailed scholarly examination of this question. I struggled for a time with whether or not I should make the following statement about The War on Science, because I want this statement to be taken in a positive way, though it might be seen as a criticism. Otto’s book is similar to, and at the level of, an excellent PhD thesis. I very quickly add, however, that since this is the work of a very talented writer and communicator, it does not read like a PhD thesis. It reads like a page turner. But the substance of the book is truly scholarly, contributes new thinking, and is abundantly and clearly documented and backed up. I can’t think of too many books that do all of this.

The Enlightenment and the early rise of scientific thinking was a self conscious effort by a small number of individuals to rethink the way we think, and it was a very effective one. Almost every advance in technology, economy, and society – from vehicles and energy to the invention of money and markets, to new or modified forms of government – arose from the self conscious application of scientific thinking. The same great mind that contributed so much to the invention of modern physics and mathematics, that of Sir Isaac Newton, modernized the production of coinage and regulation of international exchange of money (as well as modern systems of engaging and neutralizing counterfeiting). The invention of the American system of government was the intentional and thoughtful product of individuals who called themselves and their actions scientific.

But, as Newton would say, for each and every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Science is not only a powerful tool for doing new things and improving old approaches, but it is also very inconvenient. For some, under certain conditions.

It isn’t that science itself is bad for powerful entities that make up the political and industrial status quo. Science is as essential today as it has ever been, or more so, to the owners of energy companies, the producers of military gear, the growers and purveyors of food, and so on. But there are times when the best available scientific evidence suggests that the best decisions that society or government should make are contrary to the vested self interest of those power brokers. So, really, the best method, from the point of view of stockholders in major corporations or the owners of vast energy or agricultural resources, or others, is to use science but also to control the interface between scientific action and public policy.

In other words, the scientifically derived answer to a question is different when the premise is different. What is the best way to increase profits from making and selling energy? What is the best way to protect the public health while making and selling energy? These are two valid questions that, at least in the short and medium term, can produce dramatically different answers.

In 2012, Shawn Otto posed the conundrum, “It is hard to know exactly when it became acceptable for U.S. politicians to be antiscience.” One could ask the same question about leaders of industry. The answer may be fairly obvious. This became acceptable the moment the interests being served by those politicians shifted from the populous to the smaller subset of owners and investors of business and industry. The money trail, which one is often advised to follow to find a truth, leads pretty directly to that answer.

A harder question is, how did large portions of the academic world also decide to be anti-science? For this, one needs to take a more fine grained cultural approach, looking at self interest in the context of scholarship.

How does religion fit in here? The modern, mainly social network-bound, conversation about religion science, secularism, etc. is over-simplistic and mostly wrong. It is not the case that religion and science are opposite things. Rather, the rise of science was part of revolutionary changes in European religious institutions, culture, and politics. There are ironies in that story and the details are fascinating and important. Otto covers this.

Otto also identifies and discusses at length something I’ve been talking and writing about for some time. The nature of the conversation itself. If a conversation proceeds among those with distinctly different self interest, it quickly goes pedantic. If, on the other hand, a conversation proceeds among those with the common goal of understanding something better, or solving a particular problem, then it progresses and discovery and learning happen. On all of the different fronts of the “war on science” we see the honest conversation breaking down, or even, not happening to begin with, and from this nothing good happens.

Otto identifies a three-front war on science: The identity politics war on science, the ideological warn on science, and the industrial war on science. Conflate or ignore the differences at your peril. Postmodernism problemtizes the very concept of truth. Much of what you think of as the war on science is part of the ideological war on science, often with strong religious connections. The industrial war on science is in some ways the most important because it is the best funded, and the anti-science generals have a lot at stake. When cornered, they tend to be the most dangerous.

The last part of Otto’s book is on how to win this war. He is detailed and explicit in his suggestions, producing a virtual handbook of action and activism. Recognizing how the system works, how to marshal resources to reshape the conversation, what scientists need to do, what communicators need to do, are part of a coherent plan. He ends with a “Science Pledge” which is “a renewed commitment to civic leadership based on the principles of freedom, science, and evidence.” And there is nothing new in this pledge. It is, essentially, a fundamentalist approach to science, society, and policy, going back to the beginnings of the coeval rise of science and civilization. There is little in Otto’s pledge that would not have been said by Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, or Francis Bacon.

You will enjoy Otto’s “The War on Science” and it will enrich and advance your understanding of the key, existential, issue of the day. And, it won’t just inform you and rile you up, but it will also help you define goals and give you tools to meet them.

The War on Science is an essential work, a game changer, and probably the most important book you’ll read this year.

Here’s an interview with Shawn Otto on Ikonokast Podcast.

Here is the coverage.

More about ScienceDebate.org here.

Recently, NASA affiliated scientists shocked the esoteric world of biochemistry with the finding that a bacterium could successfully replace arsenic with phosphorus in key molecules, such as DNA, and make that work. Although arsenic is often incorporated into bio tissues, no one has been able to point to a prior study that clearly demonstrates that this is possible. This is very interesting science with all sorts of implications, if it works out. There are important as yet unknown details and open questions. The ultimate importance of this research remains to be seen, like any new scientific research, but if it is demonstrated to be as stated, this is very cool, new, and interesting science.

In this case, NASA produced one small press release, the substantive parts of which are reproduced here:

WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s website at http://www.nasa.gov.

Participants are:
– Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington
– Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif.
– Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
– Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla.
– James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe

That’s it. Prior to this press conference, the blogsophere went moderately wild (I’ve seen more wild) discussing and predicting what the find might be, talking about aliens, extraterrestrial life, etc. etc. Then, when the finding was reported in a paper released at the same time as the press conference (which is normal) and discussed in the press conference, most bloggers wrote about how NASA had totally screwed the pooch, putting out a press release (the one above) that caused widespread craszsiness in teh blogosphere.

I don’t agree. I think the widespread craziness was caused by the blogosphere itself, not by the press release above. I don’t think NASA needed to say less, or more, in this press release, but rather, those doing the wild speculation needed to read the actual press release and stick to what it says. Some did, by the way … several science bloggers pretty accurately predicted what the press conference was going to be about because they looked up who the participants were and did the math, as it were.

So, once again If find myself thinking one thing while the entire planet is thinking something different. I don’t think NASA screwed up this press release. (To reiterate: I don’t think NASA screwed up this press release. .. I did not mention the press conference or the research itself.) But many do.

So, I want to be edumucated. I want you to change my mind. Rather than stating that NASA did it wrong, prove it. In the comments below, reproduce a part of the press release, then cite a report in the blogosphere that came from this wording that was incorrect and over the top (about aliens or whatever) and show how a thoughtful rational expert or semi-expert in science or science writing can make the link that was made. Show us, in other words, how this press release caused some web site to say that NASA had found alien life, or whatever. Clearly distinguish between the press release being badly done in a way that caused the reaction vs. the blog or web site or press agency in question simply saying stupid crap because it was better press.

As a second exercise, and this would probably be more useful than the first (and the first exercise will not go well, I’m sure) try this: Simply rewrite the press release. This could be useful. I personally know people at NASA in public relations and elsewhere. I’ll make sure that anybody who is anybody sees the best of the rewrites.

And, if someone else has bothered to rewrite the press release in the comments, feel free to critique that press release too! We might as well get this right!

Read Bora’s post for a very interesting view of the issue. Here, I just want to add a couple of personal observations to cloud/clarify the waters a bit. But first, this: In Bora’s initial definitions, I wonder if it would be useful to add “teacher” as a category of both provider (as a teacher) and consumer (as someone learning the stuff to teach). Actually, I think it would be just plain important to add “teacher” to the mix. Maybe in Post 2.1.

Anyway, here are a couple of observations:

As have many science bloggers, I’ve dealt with provider institutions (the press-offices, or press-officers thereof) a number of times. I had a recent encounter that was somewhat interesting. I contacted the press office of a major institution because I was going to write something on a thing they were doing, and thought that would be a good source of info. (That turned out to be true.) During the interaction back and forth, it became clear to me that the press officer was thinking that I was a journalist, as in a science writer working for a press outlet. That was not correct, and in fact, there were reasons that I’d prefer to be thought of, in this case, as an academic. On the other hands, academics may be less likely to receive free “press access” to certain resources. It then became clear to me that if I tilted the press officer’s perception of me in either direction, I would be both telling a truth (because both are true) and telling a lie (because either way, I’d benefit by NOT being thought of as a member of the other category). So, in an effort to disclose, as well as to pass on the responsibility of the decision as to what privilages I should be granted to the granter in an open manner, I wrote the following:

I should clarify, as things can be confusing in this modern webby world. I am not a member of the press. I am a professional blogger, and a writer, but I am also a certified PhD holding … Anthropologist. Some people think of bloggers as journalists. I don’t mind getting journalistic privileges sometimes … but I never took a journalism course in my life.

I am a scholar, and a writer, and I approach this exhibit as a scholar/writer. Who has a blog. …

That may not clarify, but I hope it informs!

The press officer ignored this missive and provided me with the access and privileges that would be afforded to both a member of the press and an academic.

I don’t really want to analyze or comment on the above. I’m just providing this information to indicate how the contemporary situation can be a little bit twisty.

About a year ago, I was volunteering for a political candidate doing certain activities. At one point, I was asked to withdraw from those activities because I was a journalist, and they had just (very justifiably) made a rule: No journalists. I explained to my main contact person that I was a blogger, not a journalist. She explained “I know. But blogger = journalist right now, so you’re a journalist.” And by “right now” I understood her to mean in the heat of the moment, as things were moving quickly and great things were at stake, and lawyers and professional political organizers were making last second decisions and trying to avoid screwing up.

Subsequently, I’ve had similar discussions with politicos. I am explicitly not a political journalist, and would prefer to not think of my self as anything like a journalist when it comes to politics, using the current contemporary definition, or Bora’s better contextualized definition. I assume a “reporter” would have an obligation to “report” things that I, as an activist, may come across and realize, as an activist, that it would be better to not report. By this I mean strategic factors, not illegal or inappropriate activities. In politics, everyone pretty much knows what everyone else is doing in broad brush strokes, but the details can be important and are often better left unbroadcast.

So, although I’m willing to be a “science journalist” if Bora wants me to think of myself that way (but with some reservations that have mainly to do with the “teacher” missing from the equation, and the importance to me of political activism even in science) I don’t ever want to be a political “journalist” … I’d prefer to remain a partisan, and that is not so compatible with journalism.

Previously, I had been mainly interacting with people with a positive or neutral view of the Boob Quake, and in observing their relationship to the broader community of skeptics, feminists and atheists, noted that they were getting increasingly crapped upon for their involvement in it by subsets of those communities. The cleavage between pro and anti Boob Quake grew as quakes often do, along pre-existing fault lines, where the word “fault” is not so much about geology as it is about blame.

Subsequently, in part by listening to the podcast, and in part via private communications, I’ve learned more about the contralateral crap slinging that also occurred, including details of a couple of incidents that are almost alarming, in which social ostracization occurred because someone felt uncomfortable joining in.

And naturally, that made me think of the penis thing. Or any other body part. It is probably hard to find a body part that someone isn’t sensitive about, and therefore, that an event based upon won’t potentially make someone feel badly. Perhaps this is simply the way of the world and body-part events, which are going to happen now and then, have this at a cost. Fine. But pro-Boob Quake activists probably, certainly in some cases, needed to know that sensitivity is important else that warm feeling they have in their bosom is someone else’s second degree burn.

Had this been about the male sex organ, this would likely have been noted early on in the process.

I have a couple of comments on the framing/marketing side of Boob Quake. I wonder how many of you have made the link between Boob Quake and the old Framing debate?

We’ve been through this issue with that famous debate, and the outcome of that debate is that independent agents out there on the blogosphere (both bloggers and commenters) are less, not more, interested in being scientific about communication (not everybody, but many). Why? Because they feel badly and took a certain side and as a result may have shot themselves in the foot. It does not matter if you find Matthew C. Nisbet’s hair annoying: Just as centrists should accept the reality of extremists, and understand their importance (which they do all to rarely) the more extreme activists (such as PZ Myers, myself, most of our readers, “New Atheists,” etc.) would benefit from noting that simply screaming at people and telling them to shut up, however justified, will not win all the battles.

If we think of Boob Quake as a protest, it must be acknowledged that it could have been a better protest. But, as I said in my earlier post, there weren’t any other protests; The skeptic, feminist, and atheist communities, who should have been rather offended by the initial contention that risqué female dress causes earthquakes, did not respond loud and clear with a well designed protest. Rather, Jen did Boob Quake, which took off on its own, and various subsets of the SFA community spent a lot more energy reacting to the event than to the initial idiotic and offensive statement made by the Iranian cleric.

Surely, it is an uphill battle to make protests work in an essentially irrational world. Perhaps one way to do it is to try to make sure that there simply IS a protest for each dumb-ass fundy cleric outburst. There should have been a response like Boob Quake to Robertson’s Haiti comment, for instance. The reason Boob Quake occurred, of course, is because the obvious response to that particular curse would be a highly sexualized response of any kind (as long as it was female-gendered), which of course gained immediate traction because sex sells, and sex motivates.

If the communities (skeptics, feminists and atheists and, depending, various scientists, social scientists, and political activists) responded to each outrageous claim made by fundamentalist preachers with a discussion of how to “test” the curse, and occasionally carried out the test, then people like Desiree Schell or Michael McRae, who know what they are doing, would have a stream of existing behavior and human energy to tweak and adjust and modify.

Obviously, there is not going to be a clear or even a sexy test one can run, tongue firmly in cheek, for every stupid and offensive remark made by people like Pat Robertson. But surely, a well publicized skeptical reaction of some kind each time major stupidness is uttered is bound to sink in, and cause media agencies to do something other than simply report the statement. It would ideally become true that every news report such as “… and, Pat Robertson made the claim that the people in Springfield who were killed by the largest tornado ever seen had invoked the wrath of god by earlier passing a zoning law prohibiting the building of more churches within the city limits” is followed by something like “… and in response, the best selling tee-shirt on the Internet is this one displaying a target in the foreground and a tornado in the background and the words ‘I think we should tax the churches and I’m still alive!’ … funds raised from the sale of which are being funneled to the Tax the Churches Foundation.”

Can we do that?

Albatross may or may not be affected by garbage, but it is not likely that the garbage shown in the guts of the baby birds in these particular media comes from the NPCGP. Yes, the plastic in the NPCGP and elsewhere may have a negative environmental effect, but the pictures of floating garbage, which are all from coastal estuarine regions down river from major “third world” population centers, are NOT of the NPCGP and thus constitute bald faced lies. Bald faced lies by organizations like Green Peace is the fuel that right wing anti-environmental pro-business neo conservative yahoos run on.

But the situation is even worse than that because of what appear to be the misguided efforts of a British Billionaire who has managed to frighten those best in a position to criticize him into remaining silent. In fact, I’m a little nervous writing this blog post.

One of the elements of the War on Ocanic Plastic is a recently launched boat, and the attending organization and marketing, called Plastiki. “Plastiki” is a play on words, and it turns out to be a meaning-drenched play on words.

Plastiki comes from the name of the boat “Kon Tiki” which was an effort by rich-guy Thor Heyerdahl, many years back, to prove that people could have survived long distance travel across the pacific in a boat made of local materials using traditional methods. He wanted to prove that Polynesians did not end up populating the various Polynesian island in the form of barely surviving pregnant females clinging to logs washed by major storms from island to island, but rather, on purpose, because they could, and they could becauase they were oceanic travelers of some significant prowess.

This effort by Heyerdahl was done in the context of a racist Western world that preferred to see all brown people as less than capable (it’s easier to define some as lesser if all are lesser) so his stunt … building a Polynesian style boat and replicating a trans-Pacific voyage … was under the microscope. And, because he framed it wrong, he screwed it up.

Kon Tiki was a huge failure (at the time) for several reasons. In my mind, the fact that Heyerdahl was eventually able to make the trip is part of the proof that long distance sailing using traditional boats is possible. But he was unable to launch (or, really, land) the boat in surf. The boat was not able to handle the chop, which also means that if he had run into serious storms along the way, he would have sunk. He had modern maps and modern geographical knowledge, and modern (for the time) navigation equipment, and perhaps most importantly, a certain amount of modern food stored on the boat. So, people who did not want little brown Polynesian people to succeed in the bright light of history cold look at Kon Tiki and say “Heyerdahl cheated! Those “living archaeologist” hippies are liars!!!!11!!”

And they were. Thor Heyerdahl pretended to have been doing what the ancient Polynesians did, but he wasn’t. He cheated. But there is a lost lesson here: If Heyerdahl could have brought forward in time ancient Polynesian mariners, they would have pointed out dozens of things he was doing wrong. Only heteronomrative postmodern cauaseo-European hubris (which was a feature of the pre-processual European archaeolgical community) wold allow Thor to think that a decade or two of working on this problem would give him the knowledge and skills that the ancient Polynesians would have had. So, a partial success is a success.

Unless you claim that a total success is the litmus test, fail at that level, then lie about it.

So, it is uber-ironic that this new boat …. Plastiki … is named in part after Kon Tiki. Plastiki seems to be making the claim to be self-sustaining.. .they have a garden to grow their food, and a solar collector to run their motor, and a sail to drive them across the ocean. The boat is made out of discarded plastic bottles. They will sail into the Gyre and do battle witih the plastic.

Except it is all lies!

A sail boat can’t sail into the plastic gyre because it is a gyre!!!! It is a part of the ocean that sail boats have to sail AROUND because the wind is calm. That’s why the plastic accumulates there! By definition, by physics, by Neptune, Plastiki can not sail into the gyre!

But it can use it’s motor. Powered by the sun. I do not know this for a fact, but I’d bet money that there is also a fossil fuel motor on board, and that this solar panel will not be sufficient to motor the boat into the gyre. Or, they simply are not going to the gyre.

I doubt the boat is “made out of plastic bottles.” Yes, I’m sure there are lots of bottles used to make the boat (I’ve seen pictures) but it is ALSO made out of other stuff. The main ingredient of a boat is … air! Right? It is the ingredient that gives a boat buoyancy. The main ingredient in Plastic Bottles is … air! Do the math. This plastic bottle thing is probably not a complete hoax but it probably is a bit of creative framing, and when we learn that the boat is actually made out of baby bunny rabbits (or whatever) the shine on this project may dull a bit. OK, it won’t be baby bunnies, but it will be something. And I’ve got a feeling it won’t be pretty.

Are they actually going to live off the food in their garden? I’m not sure they’ve said they will, but they’ve said they’ve got a garden and they’ve not said how much of their food will come from it. My money is on the garden failing and the parts getting tossed overboard in a storm. A storm of irony, it will turn out.

None of the Plastiki rhetoric I’ve seen mentions a chase vessel … a large deisel powered boat that would follow close behind the Plastiki in case anything goes wrong. Or perhaps some other way of getting a boat or a chopper to the Plastiki quickly. I’m not saying there is such a boat, but we don’t know there is not such a boat. If we find out later, when the boat is actually used to rescue the crew, or deliver supplies (like a bunch of bottled water?!?!?) or to tow the boat into or out of the gyre, we will be witnissing a public relations failure which will cause MORE suffering among the baby albatross, not less. I could be wrong about the follow boat. I simply don’t know. But I wait patiently to find out.

In fact, the bottle part of the story is already starting to fall apart:

…anonymous sources involved with the project revealed to Earth Island Journal recently that the project team was not able to get as many used bottles as were needed to build Plastiki; some of the bottles used are actually new. Of the used bottles, many were found in dumpsters and washed by underpaid and poorly treated workers from Mexico and Guatemala, according to one source. EIJ

In the end, Plastiki may do as much damage, or more, to efforts to address the problem of the NPCGP as Kon Tiki did (for a while) to experimental archaeology and the concept that Polynesians although brown and tribal and all, could do smart stuff. Earth Island Journal’s article (quoted above) references a number of other problems with Plastiki, and the overall strategy of the boat’s owner, British billionaire David de Rothschild.

Go read that article, but when you do, I want you to take note of something more important than any of the details I’ve given here or given in the EIJ article.

In that article, you will see two references to apparently important facts that are attributed to anonymous sources … to sources that are afraid to speak out loud because they are afraid of Rothchild. I’ve blogged about this topic before, and I also have sources on which I’m relying, who have asked me to keep their names out of this for similar reasons.

Is it really true that David de Rothschild is some sort off media-hound-of-the-Baskervilles, ready to pounce on anyone who stands in his way? Sounds like it. I can only hope that our collective contacts in the Pacific are overly sensitive. If Rothschild, or Greenpeace, or other entities that seem willing to make stuff up to frame their argument really are dangerous, then the Ocean Conservation Movement is a ship with a leaky hull.

It has been said that marketing is more important than facts, that framing is more powerful than truth. I disagree. And by saying so, I appear to be putting myself at some risk.

That makes me laugh. But not in a funny, ha ha way.

Well, we can’t do much about that now, but I thought you’d like a summary of the sessions I managed to attend. This is a totally biased and random set of thoughts not a uniform overview of the sessions I attended. I should mention that NOT attending several of the sessions was very painful because I wanted to go to them but it is hard to be in more than one place at the same time. Most of the sessions will be on line as videos and I’ll let you know what I know about that when I know it.

From Blog to Book: Using Blogs and Social Networks to Develop Your Professional Writing – Tom Levenson, Brian Switek and Rebecca Skloot (program link)

This session was crowded and hot and I was sleepy and hungover. So the fact that it was also an excellent session (for me) says much about the participants. The most interesting and useful information that came out of this session related to strategies for using a blog to develop and eventually promote a book. So, dear readers, keep this in mind. In case I write a book or something.

Science on Radio, TV and video – Darlene Cavalier and Kirsten ‘Dr.Kiki’ Sanford (program link)

This session began an ongoing two-day thought process on how science communication should work. Well, actually, the thought process started the night before when I found myself almost totally alone (because others were distracted or just looking away) with Chris Mooney, and we had a long talk about this issue prompted by my recent review of Unscientific America.

I guess the conversation appeared to be very animated because there were reports the next day that Chis and I had a big fight. But we didn’t. We had a respectful and productive conversation. We may, however go ahead and have a big fight here. We’ll see!

(Here’s my comment on that post which seems to be temporarily stuck in moderation:

Good to see you at the conference.

I have very mixed feelings about the idea of “certifying” blogs. However, there are two reasons to do so: 1) it will help in our efforts to develop the right message and to control the results of people’s internet “reserch” and 2) it is a form of self-policing that one could argue we are not doing enough of.

This does not obviate the potential problems it creates, and it may well be that those problems outweigh the benefits. I simply don’t know much.

While I agree that bloggers should be promoting the excellent institutional structures you mention, it simply is true that a certain number, and it is a growing number, of people do pay attention to blogs. Some of this number may be people who are somewhat distrustful of the mainstream institutions.

)

In any event, the session served as a touchstone to the current state and potential effectiveness of multimedia and other promotion of good science.

Citizen Science – Darlene Cavalier, Scott Baker and Ben MacNeill (program link)

I hope you get to see a web site or video related to this session. The point was quite simple: To bring us up to speed on citizen science projects, and a web site organized by Darlene to serve as a clearing house for this. One of the key issues that was brought up (by me, in this case) is the problem that will eventually emerge when non-real science projects show up and want to play with the real science projects. What do you do when the Anti Vaxers want to do a citizen science project? Or the creationists?

An Open History of Science – John McKay and Eric Michael Johnson (program link)

John McKay gave a great overview of the history of science publication to recent times, and Eric Michael Johnson gave an overview of more recent times and of OpenAccess publication.

We then discussed the evils of publishers and proprietary publication, the current status of some important legislation to stop OpenAccess publication, and the role of alternative models.

Trust and Critical Thinking – Stephanie Zvan, PZ Myers, Desiree Schell, Greg Laden, Kirsten Sanford (program link)

This was the session I was in. The session went rather well, with lots of discussion and numerous excellent ideas. I’m going to wait to point to the filmed version of it before going into details, but I’ll just mention now that one debate that is already arising from this is the following: How do we change the fact that when someone googles a few key terms to conduct their own scientific research … regarding something important in their own lives … they often end up with several pages of woo and garbage? How do we deal with the fact the fact that when something like a web blog award is organized, pseudo science sites have an equal or better chance of winning a “science blog award” as real sites? Can there be something like a “UL approved” feature for science blogs? Can this be done fairly and inclusively? As we speak, the blogosphere is diving itself up into the “No, we can’t do that it would ruin it for everyone” camp and the “We might not like this idea but it is going to have to happen” camp.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Session: Engaging underrepresented groups in online science media – David Kroll and Damond Nollan (program link)

This session started out with David Kroll and Damond Nollan giving an overview of social networking and other online media mainly at one traditionally black university, followed by an interesting discussion.

In a former life, I was asked to look into developing social media for a college advising program, so I have a special interest in this topic. One of the questions I have always felt to be very important is how do college or university representatives (faculty, advisors, admins) deal with the fact that if we encourage, develop, and facilitate social media we are going to encounter things like college students having conversations about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll right before our very eyes. So, I was interested to find both here and in later conversations with Nollan that the admins at at least one college were willing to live with what they created. This is rare.

I was also interested to hear an example from David wherein he observed something (on twitter) that should not really have been there (not in the student’s interest) and how he intervened. (I was disappointed that when I asked David about it, a member of the audience felt moved to answer on David’s behalf and shut down the conversation …. I really wanted to know why David followed the tact he chose, what his thought process was and what he considered, because it matters a lot to relationship building with students and has interesting legal implications, but alas, we must discuss that some other time.)

Getting the Science Right: The importance of fact checking mainstream science publications — an underappreciated and essential art — and the role scientists can and should (but often don’t) play in it. – Rebecca Skloot, Sheril Kirshenbaum, and David Dobbs (program link)

I expected this to be a good session, but it turned out to be a great session. I did not learn anything new about fact checking and how to do it and what it is, but the discussion covered much more than that and provided a set of real life examples that make the process more tangible. (As an aside, I’m afraid there is at least one attendant to the meeting that might think that I blog things that may or may not be “facts” then wait to see what happens in the comment section, but sometimes people don’t really listen at these discussions …)

All three authors had great examples and great advice. I wish we had another hour to talk. It would have been interesting to compare academic writing with writing-writing in relation to fact checking. (I had an interesting conversation later on with Henry Gee about that.)

That’s all for the session. There were also many wonderful hallway conversations. Finally, a statistic for you: Number of times a sentence started with “Don’t blog this but….” = 14.

Unscientific America also documents the negative effects of the diminution of the role of, and respect for, science in America, and the book documents that this change in attitude is in part due to the systematic dumbing down of our culture by right wing partisan forces.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum address the problem of communicating science to the public, and it is in this area that most negative criticisms of the book have arisen. For example, they spend one entire chapter taking PZ Myers and the “New Atheists” to task for riding rough shod over people’s sensibilities. To me, it is very interesting, and I want to see this in a positive light, that an entire chapter of a major book on science communication is devoted to new atheists and the blogosphere. This serves, in a way, to underscore the fact that faithless radicals are truly at the negotiating table. I happen to disagree with Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s take on Myers, his blog, and his handling of Crackergate. (Which should not surprise you. I am, after all, the one who found the image of Jesus on the famous trash can banana.) Also, the Cracker Chapter does disrupt the flow of the book and distracts from the main argument, in my view.

Many readers have had a hard time understanding what the main point of Unscientific America is in relation to science communication, suggesting that Mooney and Kirshenbaum don’t really know what the point is themselves. I think this is not a lacking on the part of the authors, but rather, it is because the situation is itself undefined and vague, like a battlefield with very few troops spread across a great deal of terrain. Science and society touch in many places but they tend to be discontinuous places. Cable TV shows, but only a couple, are science-oriented (and they all suck). Prime Time TV currently sports forensic science (in a totally unrealistic way) but the presence or absence of science in this venue is capricious and unpredictable. Science is required in high school and college. But so are a lot of other things. Science may or may not be part of a person’s weekly media intake. Many Americans probably don’t even know when they are looking at science, or when science is in fact making a difference in their lives. Most people probably read, see or hear most of what they consciously encounter from the scientific world in the from of snarky remarks by TV pundits or anchors or sensationalized but uncontextualized “wow” reports about whales or killer bacteria or NASA scientists doing something esoteric but loud and expensive.

Most people do not develop positions on science policy. Most people receive their positions from wherever they receive all of their political views. From Rush Limbauch or Keith Olbermann, or someone. To combine my own personal view (which I have drifted into here, sorry…) with that of Unscientific America: Regular citizens and scientists are separated by a very narrow but very deep canyon, resting comfortably on either side of this canyon and vaguely aware of the others across the way. When science policy issues arise among the citizenry, the scientists don’t really play a role. When scientists lobby for their funding from the big agencies and other sources, they don’t really account for the people over on the other side of the canyon. This has been the case for years, and over this time, the social and cultural relevance of actual science has pretty much vanished among the populous, and the ability to understand what motivates or interests the general public… or just even how to talk to them … has disappeared from the culture of science. Not that it was ever there. Looking back, it is clear that the bridges that did exist across this canyon were built by regular people inspired by the occasional super-communicator, such as Carl Sagan. Those bridges were not, in any systematic way, built by the scientists.

Clearly, a central point of the book is that science needs to regain a position of respect and perceived importance, and to get out from under the thumb of right wing anti-science denialists and industry apologists. But to do this, it may be useful to know why science has lost its political grip, and what the best way to get back some traction may be. The authors have criticized the old school “popular science” approach as something that has not worked in the past, and they see education reform as too slow. Yet, I’m fairly sure they are not against education reform, and they probably see the existence of a healthy science geekhood as not a bad thing, even if it is not the best way to solve the current dilemma.

With respect to the history of the problem, Unscientific America is totally there. It’s a well done accessible account not meant to be a scholarly work. With respect to the definition of the problem, for the most part, Unscientific America is there as well, although I do not agree that the so called “New Atheist” voices are ruining it for everyone, and I wish Sheril and Chris would just appreciate Cracker Gate for what it was. But much of what Mooney and Kirshenbaum say about the problem of science communication is in my view, dead on even though most of my colleges in the scientific world do not agree. The fact that the people who clearly have failed to communicate the important features of science to usefully enhance and affect public understanding of policy does not make them expert on what should be done to better develop public understanding of science policy. It makes them failures in that area. It makes their opinion about how to do what they’ve done so poorly rather irrelevant.

The assertion by scientists that they know what they are doing when it comes to communication with non scientists smacks of things like the “mommy instinct” and other wooish beliefs that science tends to eschew.

When it comes to what to do next, how to approach this problem, Mooney and Kirshenbaum make the same mistake I see so many of my fellow bloggers make, and so many of my fellow political activists as well. They take sides not just against the obvious enemy (Republicans, Morons and Megalomaniacs) but also against their allies. So I’ll declare the “howto” part of this book a first (or second) draft.

Read the book. Respond to it. Help do something to make Unscientific America obsolete. In other words, try to be a good citizen.

Here’s why. The first paragraph of this essay contained five sentences, some run-on. The second paragraph of this essay was made up of only one sentence. It is my understanding that in many American High schools, this concise, accurate, and very clear one sentence paragraph would not be allowed in any student wiring (in English class or Science class) because it breaks a rule. The rules is that a paragraph has five or more sentences. WTF?.

If find this rule to be profoundly disturbing. While this rule is not only about science education, it does symbolize much of what is wrong about our system of education in general. This rule solves a problem (students not thinking enough about what they are writing) and in the process ruins the teaching of good communication. Similar arbitrary and capricious rule making plagues each area of our educational system. Bleh.

Recently, my daughter wrote an excellent short essay for her English Literature class. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a very logical progression and making excellent points about two novels being compared as part of the assignment. But the first and third paragraph were three sentences long. In order to comply with the rules, she had to move the last sentence of the third paragraph with the first paragraph, split one of the sentences in the first paragraph in two, and tack what was left of the third paragraph on to the middle paragraph. Ouch.

Every iota of effort expended by our students on appeasing teachers and school authorities by following arbitrary rules made up to fix minor problems but in turn causing serious deficits in how we teach thinking, writing, and reasoning, is a wasted iota of effort and should be discouraged, not required, of those students. I. Really. Mean. This.

Well, I’ve said enough and it is time to break for lunch. Having soup today. Mmm. Mmmm. Good.