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?

1. 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. [↩]

Ruth Cronje, a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and I agree that science education and communication must focus on the scientific process, not on scientific data, in order to be meaningful. She has published a letter in the journal Science which ought not to be ignored by the UC Davis PR apparatus and anyone else trying to communicate scientific issues.

Martin at Aardvarchaeology has a terrific post on scientism that we’ve blogged about before, that touches on these issues. Martin is rightly pointing out that physical scientists interpret their data, and that the interpretation of the data is where the scientific work gets done. Data is just data, and it is neither interesting nor useful until you’ve come up with a way to draw some conclusions about it. That realization, which came to me while doing research on minor solar system bodies, has guided my science education efforts ever since. If you go to one of my talks, you are going to see a slide about the scientific method, and you are going to hear how we learned what we know about the subject. Without that fundamental material, any attempt to communicate a scientific concept is worse than wasted: I believe that science communication divorced from method is harmful and that the culture of science communicators needs to change drastically.

Dr. Cronje is reacting to science framing. Framing is a rhetorical technique used for many hundreds of years in politics, which is well adapted to influencing opinions about subjects in which there is no clear-cut right answer. Its application to science communication has been puerile, ham-fisted, amateurish, and devastatingly damaging to the public perception of science.

Some highlights of the letter, with my emphasis:

[C]onfining science messages to just the facts interferes with public understanding of science as a systematic, logical process of human inquiry and effaces the distinction between data and scientists’ reasoning about data.

Scientists tend to shy away from revealing the intrinsic skepticism of science to the public, fearful that it will open the door to doubt about the validity of their conclusions. But communicating only the facts of science (framed or unframed) destabilizes public confidence in science. A fact doesn’t allow science communicators to reveal, justify, and ultimately promote the skeptical reasoning process that helps make scientists more confident that their reasoning is correct.

A “just the facts” strategy can and often does backfire, ultimately fueling public alienation from science. When scientists inform the public of “facts” (like the “fact” widely disseminated in the 1970s that all dietary fats are bad for us), and then that “fact” is refined or altered (now we’re told olive oil is good for us), the public is justifiably confused. Studies suggest that the public tends to regard normal scientific refinement and self-correction as equivocation or incompetence.

“Successful” science communication should not be regarded as any message that enlists public support for science. Rather, we should define “success” in scientific communication as achieving a public that celebrates scientific reasoning procedures.

I think that Dr. Cronje is absolutely correct when she asserts¹ that scientists frequently focus on facts because they are afraid. I will be forgiven, I hope, for expecting researchers to be as brave about explaining their own research as I am when I explain it.

And Dr. Cronje’s exposition explains admirably why I consider the UC Davis press release I blogged about to be a negative contribution to science communication - that is, something that actively harms the public reputation of science.

I hate to quote so much material and have so little to add. Many of my thoughts were recently written up in the post about the UC Davis press release - to which UC Davis responded by saying, essentially, “oh, we’re not so bad,” while failing to provide any methodological context for the facts asserted in their terrible press release. They don’t get it. I don’t expect them to give any real thought to what I say, but perhaps Dr. Cronje will have more influence.

Hat tip to Larry Moran, who reproduces the letter in its entirety.

1. She provides citations in her letter to sources that support her various views, including this one. [↩]