More Anti-Narrativism
I'm listening to this podcast: "How to talk about science" on a Radio National podcast. It's a bunch of journalists and philosophers talking about how to communicate science to the masses. It's full of the same tropes about how you need to ground science communication in stories about real people (often the authors and their families). The examples that they use involve reaching out to stupid fucking Americans who don't believe in Evolution, or Climate Change, and that old chestnut Quantum Physics.
Firstly: leave the fucking Quantum Physics alone... when Bohr and Heisenberg couldn't even agree on the meaning of their theory (great Wikipedia article about the so-called Copenhagen Intepretation), then how can you hope to get the general public to understand it. Just let the physicists make us some magic computers and shut up! Everyone who talks about it now uses the Many-Worlds interpretation as a lens for discussing it, as if this is the main usefulness of Quantum. In fact, it was only proposed in 1957, when Quantum Mechanics dates from 1900 and was fully elucidated in the 1920s. And don't get me started on all the New Age interpretations of the many worlds like you get in that Stupid Movie - What the [#%^$%^&](fuck) do we (k)now.
Secondly: to introduce a personal narrative connection to get my audience to buy my anti-narrative point of view - I'm sick and tired of hearing news stories about the "Cure for Cancer" or whatever that are based on a small study of mouse models of humans that were fed some kind of protein or whatever, and in every case the interviewee is simultaneously pleased to be on the TV or radio or TED talk, but also saying - if this is really an indicator of cancer cure, then we'll take 10-20 years to get to a real human therapy. My personal pain comes from seeing all these FRMIs applied to people's brains to show the wonders of neuroplasticity, when the best I can get for my neurological problems that don't allow me to look at a screen for more than 90 min, or drive (or even be driven) more than 20 km without getting a migraine-like headache and severe joint pain, is a ECG that is interpreted to mean "No Gross Brain Damage", and "Some aspects of Migraine, but we've never seen this before". I'd much rather not know that there's promise in neuroplasticity unless or until I can get someone to put my brain in the scanner and tell me what's going on and how to plastic it away!
Summary - there's way too much popular science communication - much of it misleading. And the cliché of the scientist that doesn't think it relevant to let the general public know what they're doing. Au contraire! Every fucking scientist is trying to get visibility for their work because the funders of science aren't interested in basic research which is generally unknowable to the GP, and irrelevant to them until it results in an application. And please don't tell me any stories about you and your son going for a walk in a forest that inspires me to believe that anthropogenic global climate change is real!
Firstly: leave the fucking Quantum Physics alone... when Bohr and Heisenberg couldn't even agree on the meaning of their theory (great Wikipedia article about the so-called Copenhagen Intepretation), then how can you hope to get the general public to understand it. Just let the physicists make us some magic computers and shut up! Everyone who talks about it now uses the Many-Worlds interpretation as a lens for discussing it, as if this is the main usefulness of Quantum. In fact, it was only proposed in 1957, when Quantum Mechanics dates from 1900 and was fully elucidated in the 1920s. And don't get me started on all the New Age interpretations of the many worlds like you get in that Stupid Movie - What the [#%^$%^&](fuck) do we (k)now.
Secondly: to introduce a personal narrative connection to get my audience to buy my anti-narrative point of view - I'm sick and tired of hearing news stories about the "Cure for Cancer" or whatever that are based on a small study of mouse models of humans that were fed some kind of protein or whatever, and in every case the interviewee is simultaneously pleased to be on the TV or radio or TED talk, but also saying - if this is really an indicator of cancer cure, then we'll take 10-20 years to get to a real human therapy. My personal pain comes from seeing all these FRMIs applied to people's brains to show the wonders of neuroplasticity, when the best I can get for my neurological problems that don't allow me to look at a screen for more than 90 min, or drive (or even be driven) more than 20 km without getting a migraine-like headache and severe joint pain, is a ECG that is interpreted to mean "No Gross Brain Damage", and "Some aspects of Migraine, but we've never seen this before". I'd much rather not know that there's promise in neuroplasticity unless or until I can get someone to put my brain in the scanner and tell me what's going on and how to plastic it away!
Summary - there's way too much popular science communication - much of it misleading. And the cliché of the scientist that doesn't think it relevant to let the general public know what they're doing. Au contraire! Every fucking scientist is trying to get visibility for their work because the funders of science aren't interested in basic research which is generally unknowable to the GP, and irrelevant to them until it results in an application. And please don't tell me any stories about you and your son going for a walk in a forest that inspires me to believe that anthropogenic global climate change is real!
posted by Keith Duddy at 12:26 pm
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