Mooney and Olson: Considered Harmful
Posted on April 21st, 2008 by blue collar scientist(The title of this post is best explained here.)
The box-office results for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed were pretty mixed. The opening weekend was far lower than producers’ expectations, but still pretty high. Yet the high earnings were mainly a result of the number of theaters the movie opened in - the per-theater earnings were pretty low. I’ve covered all this here, and concluded that Expelled is bad news, but not anywhere near as bad as it could be, and not nearly the success the creationists are making it out to be.
This balanced assessment is not what you would get if you were reading science framist Chris Mooney’s blog. He leads with:
Expelled a Box Office Success
I merely report the facts: Expelled, opening at over 1,000 theaters this weekend, has raked in $ 3.15 million, placing it ninth at the box office. In terms of political documentaries, it is already the eighth highest grossing of all time.
This does a lot to show that for Chris, “framing” means “misleading people with data and statistics.” First, it isn’t clear to me that this documentary should be categorized as a political one - it’s a religious documentary, if you ask me (though it could also be considered science fiction and fantasy). Second, he says nothing about the demographics of where the movie is screening. Third, he says nothing about the per-theater receipts, which are dismal. Despite having all that information available to him, he says “I merely report the facts.” Not so, Chris, you report a carefully selected and edited set of facts. And isn’t it funny - that’s just what the makers of Expelled did.
In any case, the figures Mooney apparently cites (but neglects to link to) can be compared to figures for documentaries in general (the only two categories available), where Expelled is currently number 26.
Another weird voice about the impact of the movie is that of Randy Olson, maker of A Flock of Dodos, a documentary about evolution and creationism that took a neutral point of view. Despite having previously said that Expelled was no problem…
I had heard about “the Ben Stein movie,” over a year ago when a friend in Toronto told me her best friend’s boyfriend was a cameraman on the movie. I had tried to warn everyone, “if this thing turns out to be entertaining, the evolution world is in trouble.”
It isn’t. Crisis averted. Thanks to Ben Stein. We can now throw this on the scrap heap alongside the growing mountain of boring global warming documentaries. And folks, warn your children, don’t use film to try and educate people. It’s an entertainment medium.
…he now says that Expelled is a massive problem and a huge success for the creationists:
This weekend Ben Stein’s anti-evolution movie, “Expelled,” had a HUGE opening, estimated to rake in over $3 million dollars.
Again, no mention of the number of screens the movie was on, or the low per-theater receipts. He goes on in condescending fashion:
To counter the blockbuster power of “Expelled,” the National Science Foundation, NAS and AAAS are organizing a panel discussion about putting together a committee to look into the possibility of creating a brochure that tells the public how to make a website for a petition that says evolution is fun.
That should probably take care of the problem.
You know what? I’m really fed up with the bureaucratic approach to communicating science. So much so that the International Year of Astronomy still strikes me as a potentially pointless exercise (but I have an open mind, and am heartened by Pamela Gay’s involvement - we’ll see how it goes). And I’m a frequent vocal critic of activism by institutional committee, which is what Olson describes here.
But really, this is a bit over the top, even for me. Olson is criticizing institutions that are sharply limited by their funding sources over what they are allowed to do. It’s an unfair slur. He should be agitating to change the rules, not condemning these institutions for following them.
Moving into the comments, Olson tells us who to blame:
You should focus your anger on the people who are paid to communicate evolution broadly. They should have created a voice for evolution so loud and powerful that disinformers like Ben Stein are drowned out. There should be five popular pro-evolution movies at the box office right now, instead of none.
Does anyone else find it funny that a filmmaker, who has never made a pro-evolution film, is criticizing those of us who aren’t filmmakers for not having made a bunch of pro-evolution films?
Having gotten the matter of blame out of the way, he then tells us what to do:
why doesn’t somebody run a film festival for pro-evolution films?
I suppose because doing that is expensive, and the people paid to do science communication work on shoestring budgets. I also suppose it is because people who know evolutionary biology don’t generally know how to run a film festival. But I’m only guessing. A commenter to the blog makes another cogent point, responding to Olson’s suggestion that a high-school kid who made an evolution movie would have nowhere to send it to:
A high-school kid? Youtube of course. And that has the potential to reach an audience larger than Flock of Dodos and Expelled combined.
I find the idea of a “film festival of pro-evolution films” as outreach hopelessly naive, if not just self-important. 99.9% of the public couldn’t name a single major international documentary film festival (let alone a specialized one), and a vast majority probably don’t even know documentary film festivals exist at all.
Olson then goes on to piss all over people like me:
It’s called supporting innovation. It DOES NOT HAPPEN in the world of science communication right now.
Right, Randy. I go into the schools 60-70 times a year and communicate science. Half the time I’m linking up to a school above the Arctic circle while I’m in southcentral Alaska using my broadband internet and a camera on my computer. I’m using 3-D models in my presentations. I teach in a roundtable format. I get funding for supplies and models for the classrooms I support by hook or by crook. Everything I do is based on how we know various scientific facts, and everything I do has students design an experiment so we can learn more about the subject. Everything I do can be part of at least two, sometimes three or four areas of study (astronomy, mathematics, physics, and biology).
This is not the science classroom you attended if you were raised in the United States at any time prior to about 2003. I’m so innovative that the teacher’s union isn’t sure they love me or hate me. Half the time I’m teaching a subject in a classroom that the teacher isn’t rated “highly qualified” to teach. Half the teachers interested in having me in their classrooms can’t figure out how to get the job done with the resources they have to hand. What I teach is way beyond the curricular requirements of the districts I teach in.
And I do this all for free, not necessarily because I’m a good guy and generous with my time - but because there is no money to get subject matter experts to bring this kind of innovative science communication into the classroom. What could I do if I could spend even the meager salary of a classroom teacher on my efforts each year? Probably quite a lot - the problem being, of course, that if you have that much money to spend, you are going to spend it on a teacher, not on me. And I perfectly understand why that is the case - so I go on doing what I do pro bono.
But all this isn’t good enough for Randy Olsen. I’m guessing he’s never heard of me1, and doesn’t have the first idea about what I do.
Perhaps we science communicators could get some constructive criticism from supposedly expert pro-science communicators for a change? Eh? Please?
- Yes, I’m calling him ignorant. Anyone who doesn’t understand what grassroots activists do, and how many of us there are, and still says the kinds of things Olson says, is profoundly ignorant. [↩]
Tags: Chris Mooney, expelled, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Flock of Dodos, public outreach, Randy Olson, science communication
April 21st, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Olsen is irritating and happily ignorant, yes, but I think he makes one solid point. As Scott and I have discussed, science is POORLY taught in this country. The basic tenants of science, the scientific method, and evolution are simply not passed along until college and, to a certain degree, grad school. I, for one, blame textbook publishers, who are so wrapped up in not wanting to piss anybody off that they remove any sort of data or text that could be considered controversial.
The entire science education industry needs to grow a pair and decry ID for what it is: Creationism in a cheap suit. What’s more, teachers need to tell their students WHY creationism and ID are improper scientific theories. You know how many times I hear “It’s just a theory?” about evolution? It drives me insane! Yes, it’s “just a theory,” but it’s supported by countless studies in multiple fields. It’s never been DISproven, and that’s what science is. Science is all about falsification. In a way, we’re all looking for ways to disprove the theory, but it stands the rigors of science and comes out the winner.
That’s what people don’t understand, and that’s what is not being communicated effectively. Also, Olsen is a tool.
April 21st, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Zach, I don’t disagree with you at all that science is poorly taught in this country. That’s exactly why I’m doing what I do - even my publicity kit explains that I do these things “in response to what he [i.e., me] perceives as a crisis in science education in this country.” Thing is, we don’t need Randy Olson to tell us that things are messed up. He’s not doing anything constructive here, is my point - the things he’s right about are self-evident; the things he’s wrong, or ignorant, about are things people like me could use real, constructive leadership on.
I should have added a lot to what I do with students. Lots of lessons are actual scientific research. “My” students have discovered asteroids. They’ve measured asteroid positions. They’ve contributed real, peer-reviewed science at a high-school age. They learn about things like centroiding and error in measurement, statistical significance, and other important concepts from working with astronomical images. (We characterize the signal of a star in an image in terms of its standard deviation.) Randy Olson simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The innovation is out there; he (and others) simply refuse to recognize it.
As for evolution being “just a theory,” indeed. It is “just a theory.” The hypothesis that taking a gunshot wound to the head can kill you is also “just a theory.” And both are about equally well-supported as being true. I am, shall we say, a proponent of educating people about what “theory” means in a scientific context.
April 22nd, 2008 at 8:21 am
Honestly I’m fairly unconcerned with how much money they “make” off of the movie. Truth is lots of people are going to see it in the end, mostly the converted, but tons of un-initiated in-betweeners. It’s going to struggle in the box office as long as it can, then be relegated to open piracy to try to further the issue. The best we can do is exactly what we are doing: talk about it, answer the questions, and fire back with answers, links, and good science whenever someone throws some dribble from this hit-piece across our bow.
What this movie will ultimately do is polarize the issue. This has been done before, and taken to court for teaching standards and more, and again and again we’ll see science prevail. Why? Because truth ultimately prevails. The things we need to keep watching out for are things like secret voting sessions in school boards (I live in Florida. They know the best way to win the debate is to not have one). Thus far we’ve survived it, but we always seem to be on the cusp of retardation.
We at nasa do outreach, but we kinda do it badly. Personally I think our outreach is modeled toward politicians (which is necessary), and then adapted for kids occasionally. It always comes off as some 1950’s “atomic cafe” style PSA about moon landings or some other thing they’ve already had beaten into them by their parents, who all work at the space center anyway. Even our own state has lousy support for the space program, never mind the rest of the country.
I would love to do more. I’m a multi-disciplinary kind of guy who loves everything from electron valence shell physics to little plastic army men. I connect with kids well when it’s on subject, but I’m in no position to speak for nasa in any way. And while I’ve done a few school talks on my own time, they were invites from teacher friends, and I have no idea how to seek out opportunities to do such things more frequently.
Which brings me to my big giant complaint about education right now. When I went through school (which really wasn’t that long ago at all) I was given sciences in the form of gospel- as in “we know the big stuff, it’s all solved before 1925 or so, and everything now is just putting it together or little bickering” When I got out I discovered great debate over almost every aspect of science. There were more than 9 big things in the solar system, the universe is bigger, no smaller, no bigger than we think it is, with more energy than we assumed, and that matter/energy are not so clearly defined. These sorts of things, the places where our research and attempts at understanding the very basics of the universe, macro and micro, are pushing back and forth in endless “aa hah!” moments. These are the things that would have sparked me to the sciences much, much earlier. That and I didn’t learn to write a research paper till after I was out of college. I mean I was given assignments to write them, but I’d never really seen a proper one. It’s terrible. Really terrible. I had no idea what peer reviewed was really about. The “research” papers I did during my education were busy work. Educational babysitting.
That said, how can we expect these kids to understand the total lack of science in ID if they don’t have a clue what peer reviewed research is?
PS: There was a short while in my early college days then I played assistant at an asteroid hunting telescope. Florida kinda sucks for such things, but we found a few. Now I hear FIT is opening up a new scope to do the same, but of course better suited to florida’s murky skies. Know your science, love it.