Blue Collar Scientist

As is well known, prominent science framing advocates Nisbet, and less explicitly Mooney, have recently told PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins that they should stop talking about science because they do more harm than good. I promised before that I would be making some remarks on this topic, so here they are. I’m going to split up what would be a long post into smaller parts, so this is part 1.

In this discussion, the word “framing” has two meanings.

The first is the general concern that every communicator has with the manner in which their message will be received. We all figure out how to say what we are saying in what we hope will be the most effective way. This has been well-described by Mark over at Good Math, Bad Math, in the event you want to read more.

The second meaning is framing as advocated by Nisbet and Mooney, and this is mostly what these posts are addressing. They propose what I find to be a disjointed, unsystematic set of techniques for communicating science which avoids offending or alienating those who believe in antiscience. Their ideas seem to be driven by several ideas:

• controversies about science are analogous to political campaigns;
• these campaigns need to be won;
• they are best won by appealing broadly to religious science deniers;
• through various specific techniques.

Nisbet and Mooney are wrong in many different ways, and for many different reasons. I’m going to discuss some of them.

Science Controversies aren’t Political Campaigns

I have a fair amount of experience working on political campaigns, starting with a hometown mayoral race, and ending up working on several campaigns for statewide and national offices. I stopped working in politics after college, preferring to concentrate first on earning a living, and later not so much on earning a living as doing something I liked (working in astronomy).

Science controversies have some parallels to a political campaign, but not very many. In a campaign, the task is to convince voters to vote for your candidate. By and large, this is done by crafting appealing opinions. The opinions are arguable - they may or may not be factual, and proposed actions can often never be proven to be better than some other proposed action. And you don’t have to look good to voters in order to win - you just have to look better than the other candidate.

While facts may inform peoples’ opinions, a campaign is not asking voters to accept facts. “Vote for me and I will kick start the economy by building a bridge across the river” is not a fact-based message. Building the bridge might be a good thing to do economically, but how would you really know? Such a proposal is phenomenologically too complex to model¹; it is subject to a great many variables, and voters aren’t in a position to understand whether the claim is factual or not. Most voters will vote on the basis of whether they want a bridge, not on the basis of whether the bridge will actually result in the things the candidate promises. Consequently, the goal of a political campaign is to make voters want the bridge, and to make your candidate look good for wanting to do something everyone else wants to do.

Science controversies, such as the evolution vs. creationism debate, are fundamentally different. For one thing, a creationist will never want evolution. Making that appeal will go nowhere. But more fundamentally, unlike the question of the consequences of building a bridge over the river, there are facts at issue in any science controversy. In the case of the evolution-creationism controversy, the facts are incontrovertible, but denied by one side. Unlike bridge building, the phenomenology of evolution is subject to good modeling and has a sound evidentiary basis, in a way that bridge economics and other public policy and electoral issues do not.

Nisbet and Mooney seem to think that science is a superior opinion to hold than, say, creationism. Unfortunately, that’s wrong; science is not a matter of opinion, but of facts and the best available explanations of those facts as determined by a sound methodology. Science is not a matter of opinion.

As far as I’m concerned, Nisbet and Mooney’s seeming presupposition is false: Science controversies are not like political campaigns, and as a result the rhetorical tools we need to employ within such a controversy need to be different from those used in political campaigns.

But it goes a bit deeper than that.

Some scientific facts are inherently incompatible with some religious beliefs. I know from personal experience that promoting these facts irritates a small minority of religious people. So far, I have not found a way to say that the universe is billions of years old, or explain how we know that, without sending at least some young-earth creationists into spitting fits of defensive, hysterical hostility. Discussing these facts clearly antagonizes them, but Nisbet and Mooney say that I’m not supposed to do that to creationists, and that we’ll never get our message across if that happens.

As an aside: Maybe I won’t get my message across to the creationist that gets unhinged when I mention the facts, but what about the other people in the room? I can be pretty sure I’ve reached most of them.

Nisbet and Mooney don’t say so explicitly, but it sure looks to me as though they are telling me to not talk about any scientific results or methods that have a chance of offending religious people. And here’s where I have the problem.

I consider the task of science communication to be to communicate science - to tell the truth about what is known about our universe - so I can’t accept Nisbet and Mooney’s version of framing. As far as I can see, Nisbet and Mooney would have us teaching a caricature of science, one that has its most remarkable - and difficult to accept - discoveries played down, or suppressed, so as not to be offensive to the superstitious.

Unfortunately that’s the kind of science communication we’ve had in the United States for my entire lifetime. That kind of science teaching is what has landed us in this boat. We do not need more of the same.

Next edition: How to really win a policy debate, and the trouble with appealing to science deniers.

1. At the present time. [↩]

Tags: communication, education and public outreach, epo, framing, framing science, mooney, nisbet, political campaign, science

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 5:09 am and is filed under activism, education and public outreach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.