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There's one complaint here that seems valid: > gives us a false sense of confidence in how much we know about the biological world A false sense of confidence

by dkarl 4y ago

There's one complaint here that seems valid: > gives us a false sense of confidence in how much we know about the biological world A false sense of confidence could make people vulnerable to bold false claims, which might lead to poor consumer choices and poor policy choices. Beyond that, the approach seems really wrong-headed. Popular science education has a successful approach when you want people to understand the limitations of a model: you hook people with a fun headline of "COOL NEWS, THINGS ARE MUCH WEIRDER THAN YOU THINK!" You teach forward from the oversimplified model. You aren't going to reach many people with a negative, moralizing message that people need to go backwards and give up a model that has given them insight. "Oh, we should never have given you this, you're not smart enough for it, you're going to make a mess." The sad thing is that the information conveyed here is really cool, and it could easily be framed in a fun way! Instead, it's presented in a way that sends the message, "Look, you need to understand how dumb and dangerous it was for you to think you had any insight into this." > It's finally dawning on us that the cell is not a machine I really, really, really don't understand the sense of moralistic fear infusing this whole presentation. Reading the piece and watching the video, I feel like I'm reading and watching a religious sermon on the spiritual dangers of materialism instead of a piece of popular education to help the public have a better-informed understanding of science.

ouid 4y ago
you are thinking about individual understanding, but science writers must be concerned with population understanding. People die and get born, and this is a force in the population making it know less over time. This force and education must reach some sort of equilibrium, and the author is concerned about the shape of the resulting steady state of knowledge. It is far more important, typically, to not lie to people than it is to tell them the truth, for if you are lying to them in service of later telling them the truth, and people don't seek out further education, then most people will just believe lies, and then eventually die, never having contributed their knowing the truth to the population knowledge distribution.
- 1auralynn 4y ago
  On the other hand, if everything is always presented in its full complexity with a million caveats and you lose people because they don't have the prerequisite knowledge to be able to digest it, I guarantee this will result in many, many more potential contributions being lost than from those who were just "satisfied that it was all worked out already".
  - ouid 4y ago
    Your "guarantee" is insufficient evidence that lying to the population is worthwhile. The burden of evidence is on you, I think. You're also making unreasonable assumtpions about the burden associated with not lying. You don't have to completely solve the miscommunication problem in order to do something about it, and even if you were to try to completely solve the miscommunication problem, it would not require you to include a million caveats. Basically you could solve the whole problem by not making analogies.
    - 1auralynn 4y ago
      Yeah I mean, we could just never use real structural data and just communicate purely in symbols that way users would know it's "not real", or inherit a billion dollars and come up with a perfect simulator and high-end computers for all of humanity to view it. This stuff is HARD to make, and nearly impossible to satisfy everyone. Drew Barry's animations are "lying" because they're not a perfect representation of reality? In my opinion, it's better for his animations to exist and be "lying" than have nothing.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      You're falling into your own trap of what is and isn't a lie. Lets go with the common aphorism 'all models are wrong, but some are useful'. As it puts forth there are a large number of useful models, but wouldn't that fall under your term of a lie since it's not the truth of a situation. The problem with reality is it feels no need to be explainable. I think I meant to post this to the user above you....
1auralynn 4y ago
People like this are one of the reasons biology visualization is so difficult: Nothing less than a perfect simulation is good enough, and any editorial/design choices to make certain processes perceptible to humans are problematic in some way. It's all true really, but there are many valid reasons to create visualizations that are less-than-perfect. But yeah it's a fine balance between accuracy and the appearance of accuracy (e.g presenting a process as linear when it's really stochastic)

by dkarl 4y ago

ouid 4y ago

you are thinking about individual understanding, but science writers must be concerned with population understanding. People die and get born, and this is a force in the population making it know less over time. This force and education must reach some sort of equilibrium, and the author is concerned about the shape of the resulting steady state of knowledge. It is far more important, typically, to not lie to people than it is to tell them the truth, for if you are lying to them in service of later telling them the truth, and people don't seek out further education, then most people will just believe lies, and then eventually die, never having contributed their knowing the truth to the population knowledge distribution.

1auralynn 4y ago
On the other hand, if everything is always presented in its full complexity with a million caveats and you lose people because they don't have the prerequisite knowledge to be able to digest it, I guarantee this will result in many, many more potential contributions being lost than from those who were just "satisfied that it was all worked out already".
- ouid 4y ago
  Your "guarantee" is insufficient evidence that lying to the population is worthwhile. The burden of evidence is on you, I think. You're also making unreasonable assumtpions about the burden associated with not lying. You don't have to completely solve the miscommunication problem in order to do something about it, and even if you were to try to completely solve the miscommunication problem, it would not require you to include a million caveats. Basically you could solve the whole problem by not making analogies.
  - 1auralynn 4y ago
    Yeah I mean, we could just never use real structural data and just communicate purely in symbols that way users would know it's "not real", or inherit a billion dollars and come up with a perfect simulator and high-end computers for all of humanity to view it. This stuff is HARD to make, and nearly impossible to satisfy everyone. Drew Barry's animations are "lying" because they're not a perfect representation of reality? In my opinion, it's better for his animations to exist and be "lying" than have nothing.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    You're falling into your own trap of what is and isn't a lie. Lets go with the common aphorism 'all models are wrong, but some are useful'. As it puts forth there are a large number of useful models, but wouldn't that fall under your term of a lie since it's not the truth of a situation. The problem with reality is it feels no need to be explainable. I think I meant to post this to the user above you....

1auralynn 4y ago

People like this are one of the reasons biology visualization is so difficult: Nothing less than a perfect simulation is good enough, and any editorial/design choices to make certain processes perceptible to humans are problematic in some way. It's all true really, but there are many valid reasons to create visualizations that are less-than-perfect. But yeah it's a fine balance between accuracy and the appearance of accuracy (e.g presenting a process as linear when it's really stochastic)