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I'm somewhat confused why this is an issue. Who listens to anyone in a specific field? How many non-plumbers read up on issues that matter to plumbers? Most res
by eykanal 15y ago
I'm somewhat confused why this is an issue. Who listens to anyone in a specific field? How many non-plumbers read up on issues that matter to plumbers? Most research publications are describing incremental advances in highly technical fields. Why the hell would the public care about (to take an example from my J Neuroscience rss feed) seratonin reuptake transporter function in C Elegans? They won't. However, when that breakthrough comes that makes it relevant to curing cancer or whatever, they'll hear about it.
Reading some posts below, people seem to think that just because public money is being spent on "science", everyone should be able to understand it. My answers to that:
(1) Your money is being spent trying to find advances in technology/physics/medicine/whatever. We are hard at work doing so. We will let you know when something happens.
(2) It took Us (us = the researchers you're accusing of being insulting and callous towards the public) many, many years to understand what the hell we're doing. Your expectation that you will understand it without the necessary background is misinformed and frankly amusing. That being said, the popular press is there to do exactly that; contact your favorite media source and ask that they cover more advances in "science". They get paid to do this sort of work for you.
In re-reading this, it sounds pretty callous. I guess that's because I've become jaded by the constant "Why can't you explain this stuff easily! you must be a bad scientist! I'm going to write letters asking not to fund you!" The better question should be, why does the press not cover this stuff? Maybe they think (rightly so) that no one actually cares about it. Go ahead, ask to have our funding cut and spent on your medicaid bills; don't come whining to me when me and all my scientist friends have left to country to work in a more science-friendly environment.
- blahblahblah 15y ago"Your expectation that you will understand it without the necessary background is misinformed and frankly amusing. That being said, the popular press is there to do exactly that; contact your favorite media source and ask that they cover more advances in "science". They get paid to do this sort of work for you." The problem is that the people assigned to cover science for the mainstream press generally don't understand what they are writing about and, I strongly suspect, because they operate under constant deadline pressure they never even read the scientific literature. They just interview the scientist who did the research and interview another scientist in the field for another perspective and report the most interesting "sound bites" from those two interviews along with a bunch of horribly naive (and often flatly wrong) conjectures about what it all means. You can't really blame them. They're journalists. Most of them majored in journalism, English literature, political science, or history in college and probably never took a science course above the 100-level at any time in their entire undergraduate program. What we need is more Richard Dawkinses, Michio Kakus, and Carl Sagans - academics who take on the task of explaining science to non-scientists. The way you get that is by creating the funding apparatus to make it happen. Academics are quite sensitive to the priorities of funding agencies - they rapidly become very interested in research topics for which funding exists. :) If funding exists for a professorship focused on enhancing the public understanding of science, there will inevitably be plenty of academics competing to fill that position.
- eykanal 15y agoI agree with this, but given that there's barely funding for research itself now, this task has fallen to nonprofits. Hopefully they can do a good job of it.