At the end of last week, I made a quick trip to UCLA to visit with some researchers who, despite having been targets of violence and intimidation, are looking for ways to engage with the public about research with animals. I was really struck by their seriousness about engaging folks on “the other side”, rather than just hunkering down to their research and hoping to be left alone.
The big thing we talked about was the need to shift the terms of engagement.
Category Archives: Scientist/layperson relations
Psychohazard.
The other day, while surfing the web, my better half came upon this semi-official looking symbol for psychohazards:
The verbiage underneath the symbol seem to indicate conditions that might have serious consequences for one’s picture of the world and its contents, or for one’s ability to come to knowledge about the world. A philosopher who was so inclined could go to town on this.
However, while this particular icon was new to me, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen the term “psychohazard” in use.
Who’s a scientist?
At Philosophers’ Playground, Steve Gimbel ponders the pedagogically appropriate way to label William Dembski:
I’m wrapping up work on my textbook Methods and Models: A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and have run into a question. …
The evolutionary biology track’s final piece deals with William Dembski’s work on intelligent design theory. Therein lies the question. The way the exercises are laid out is in three parts labeled The Case, The Scientist, and Your Job. The second part is a brief biographical sketch (a paragraph, just a couple sentences about the person’s life). Not every case study has a bio — for the discovery of the top quark, for example, there is no “The” scientist — so the question is whether I should have one for Dembski.
On the one hand, having it seems to beg the question I am asking the student — is it science. By labeling him “the scientist” in the text is to send a signal to the student. At the same time not doing so seems to send the same sort of message in the opposite direction. It also seems to be a political statement whether I do or don’t. If he had a Ph.D. in biology or had done some other work, that would make it easy, but he has a Ph.D. in mathematics and another in philosophy and teaches philosophy at Southwest Baptist Seminary. He did have an NSF research fellowship at one point, but then so have many philosophers whom I would not call scientists. His arguments are aimed at the discourse within evolutionary biology, that is, he sees himself as doing science and it is his clear intent to do science. Is that enough to be a scientist? Would being a mathematician with a professional interest in complexity theory, applied statistics be sufficient? Does the applied nature, the world-pointing orientation of those field make one a scientist? What is a scientist and is William Dembski one?
That question of who is properly counted as a scientist resurfaces yet again.
Discuss “Unscientific America” Saturday at Firedoglake Book Salon.
For those of you who have been following the various online reviews of and reactions to Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, you may be interested in the Firedoglake Book Salon discussion of the book. The discussion takes place Saturday (tomorrow), 5-7 pm Eastern (2-4 pm Pacific; those of you in other time zones can probably calculate your local time equivalent better than I), will include author Chris Mooney, and will be hosted by yours truly.
Given that I’m pretty convinced I have the best commentariat in the blogosphere, I’m hopeful that a bunch of you will be able to join us!
Unscientific America: Are scientists all on the same team?
As promised, in this post I consider the treatment of the science-religion culture wars in Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. If you’re just tuning in, you may want to pause to read my review of the book, or to peruse my thoughts on issues the book raised about what the American public wants and about whether old or new media give the American public what it needs.
In the interests of truth in advertising, let me state at the outset that this post will not involve anything like a detailed rehash of “Crackergate”, nor a line-by-line reading of the contentious Chapter 8 of the book. You can find that kind of thing around the blogosphere without looking too hard. Rather, I want to deal with the more substantial question raised by this chapter: Are scientists all on the same team?
Unscientific America: Is the (new) media to blame?
In this post, I continue working through my thoughts in response to Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s new book, Unscientific America. In this post, I focus on their discussion of the mainstream media and of the blogosphere. You might guess, given that I’m a member of the science blogosphere, that I have some pretty strong views about what blogs might accomplish in terms of helping the public engage with science. You would be correct.
A fair portion of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (reviewed here) explores conditions of American life that make it harder for the public meaningfully to engage in science — or easier for them to disengage. Prominently featured here are the changes that newspapers and television have experienced in recent decades. Mooney and Kirshenbaum write:
Americans for Medical Progress names three Hayre Fellows in Public Outreach.
Today Americans for Medical Progress has announced three recipients for academic year 2009-2010 of the Michael D. Hayre Fellowship in Public Outreach, designed to inspire and motivate the next generation of research advocates. From the AMP press release:
The importance of animal research to medical progress will be highlighted in projects by three graduate students selected as Michael D. Hayre Fellows in Public Outreach, Americans for Medical Progress announced today.
Gillian Branden-Weiss and Breanna Caltagarone, students the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, and Megan Wyeth of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, will inform and engage the public as advocates for biomedical research.
Braden-Weiss and Caltagarone will create a “Thank a Mouse” interactive campaign for private practice veterinarians and their clients. Through the development of a website and other interactive materials, they will focus on the many contributions of animal research to veterinary treatments that help pets, livestock and wildlife.
Wyeth, a graduate student who conducts epilepsy research at UCLA, will expand the advocacy group Pro-Test for Science on the UCLA campus and create a model for similar student organizations throughout America. This April, Wyeth was a leader of an historic rally by Pro-Test that drew over 800 to stand in support of scientists targeted by animal rights extremists.
Unscientific America: Give the people what they want, or what they need?
In the post where I reviewed it, I promised I’d have more to say about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As it turns out, I have a lot more to say — so much that I’m breaking it up into three posts so I can keep my trains of thought from colliding. I’m going to start here with a post about the public’s end of the scientist-public communication project. Next, I’ll respond to some of the claims the book seems to be making about the new media landscape (including the blogosphere). Finally, I’ll take up the much discussed issue of the book’s treatment of the science-religion culture wars.
Never fear, I’ll intersperse these posts with some that have nothing to do with the book, or the framing wars. Also, there will be new sprog art.
One of the tensions I noticed within Unscientific America has to do with who bears responsibility for the American public’s disengagement with science. Do we blame scientists who have been so immersed in doing science that they haven’t made much conscious effort to communicate with members of society at large? Wretched science teachers? The American people themselves for being too dumb or lazy or easily distracted to “get” science and why they should care?
Book review: Unscientific America.
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.
by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books
2009
In this book, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum set out to alert us to a problem, and they gesture in the direction of a solution to that problem. Despite the subtitle of the book, their target is not really scientific illiteracy — they are not arguing that producing generations of Americans who can do better on tests of general scientific knowledge will fully address the problem that worries them. Rather, the issue they want to tackle is the American public’s broad disengagement with scientific knowledge and with the people and processes that build it.
Trust and accountability in the vaccine-autism wars.
There’s a new feature article by Liza Gross [1] up at PLoS Biology. Titled “A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars,” the article does a nice job illuminating how the themes of trust and accountability play out in interactions between researchers, physicians, patients, parents, journalists, and others in the public discourse about autism and vaccines. Ultimately, the events Gross examines — and the ways the various participants react to those events — underline the questions: Who can we trust for good information? and To whom are we accountable for our actions and our decisions? In many ways, it strikes me that the latter question needs more consideration than people typically give it.
The question of trust, on the other hand, is one with which people seem more ready to grapple. The challenge, however, is that such grappling seems more often than not to result in mistrust.