Talk Yo Ass Off
An essay on the importance of science communication
Welcome to my blog. Hopefully, I’ll publish more. But no pressure. In this essay, I explore the importance of storytelling and science communication, not only in my life but in science as a whole. This is probably just the start of an unending exploration I am having as part of academia and as part of the scientific community. I hope it is interesting.
Also, the title of this article comes from a song that I’ve been listening to constantly.
I also publish on substack at Mundane Wonders. Follow that here: https://open.substack.com/pub/mundanewonders/p/talk-yo-ass-off?r=flr51&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Find it here: https://open.spotify.com/track/4fravK1KeLjfZHVhphxIgm?si=9232f6f6ceec41b6
The place of academia
I’ve often thought about the point of being an academic. As I sit in my institution and look out into the world, I see a collection of smart people traversing campus often eager, but sometimes apathetic in their pursuit of knowledge. Because this leads to the pursuit of happiness. The good life. And I’ve always loved that. I loved that pursuit of knowledge. That yearning need for curiosity. That desire to know more, to share more. It’s an unending journey and one that is tiring yet provides immense energy. But, being an academic makes me think of what more I can do. We walk around here, listening to jazz, having futuristic conversations about the complications of AI and how this may impact our world, while only 1000 miles away, a war is raging on the European continent. It provokes a sense of helplessness. One cannot simply be overwhelmed by the feeling that one is not doing enough. Somehow this is on your head. More pronounced, however, is that this is not a new phenomenon. Not only are wars raging in Ukraine, in Palestine reports new deaths from Israeli raids on a daily basis. Isis is hard at work being Isis. In Italy, there are constant reports of migrants dying on boats in last-ditch efforts to make it to safety. To make it to Europe. And not being helped.
Viewing academia, I’ve often fluctuated between uselessness and usefulness. This is not to anger many of my colleagues in academia that I don’t see our value, but rather that I’ve often been unable to divide the pursuit of knowledge and purpose from the reality of the world we live in. However, then again, the job as a public intellectual often seemed ideal to me. Yes, one may have to get a Ph.D. which requires an unending pursuit of perfection. But upon receiving that distinction and receiving respect in your field, it seemed like the rest of the job revolved around going on various talk shows and giving various speeches about how important your research was and why it matters so much to the world. And then you write books in between. As I said, it seemed to me like the most ideal job. And more and more, as I’ve decided to continue this pursuit of knowledge, the life that I want to lead as an academic seems as far away from the life of my perceived “ideal” public intellectual.
Scientists’ bad hand
I fear scientists don’t realise the power that they hold. They often undertake exploits in the hope to uncover new wonderful discoveries. Only to bury themselves further inside the walls of academia. Walling themselves off from the rest of the world and not only the rest of the world but also the rest of academia. Something that I recognised that I found quite eery was the fact that in academia many academics from different fields never spoke to each other. This is something that C.P. Snow covers in his essay The Two Cultures. The vast difference between humanities and natural science is that often even when speaking the same language, they are unable to understand one another. If the academics can’t even talk to each other, what hope is there for them to talk to us? And then what happens to truth, if ever there was any truth? It erodes. And truth and trust which is extremely difficult to get disappears right in front of us.
I, like all of us, have been constantly rocked by the unending conquest and conflict in the world. Perhaps that is no one’s fault but my own as I find myself constantly inundated with news of conflict. However, it seems uneasy and often as if no one is doing anything about it. And often it seemed like academia was on top of that. If anyone was not doing enough, touting the importance of your obscure research in times of immense conflict and chaos seemed like the most narcissistic and incessantly annoying path to take. The life of a public intellectual began to change in my eyes, taking on more of a negative outlook.
The turn of the 21st century has brought with it continued economic inequality but also continuous conflicts. And unlike many other generations, we’ve grown up with conflicts always in our faces with a never-ending cycle of news. The allure of academia and of intellectuals begins to take a hit when you have many scholars that seem to be researching the most obscure problems as crises seem to be ever-multiplying along with an emerging loss of trust in our elites. We’ve begun to lose trust in the public intellectual. We’ve begun to lose trust in academia. We’ve begun to lose trust in science.
Not saying that this is all the fault of scientists, it’s definitely not. However, science has tended to become rather dogmatic over the past couple of decades. Scientists publish often in obscure journals only for their peers making their work hard to understand for the masses. We have a mass communication problem. When we have a conversation with people about a topic that we deeply understand, we find it almost insulting and tiring that we have to sit there and explain it to them. Furthermore, science has also created its own communication problem in the pursuit of peer-reviewed journals. Peer-reviewed journals reinforce a certain type of writing and while often touted as the manner in which to progress science, often plays as a reinforcement of the same scientific pursuits. This can make it hard for science to progress and move forward. Furthermore, many papers are stuck behind paywalls making science fundamentally difficult for curious scholars, students, and laypeople to find. We as scientists also find it incessantly fun to write in academic language for our academic peers where we have the ability to tout our intellectual nous. This often leads to the most drab, dull, and boring papers and also can dissuade interested parties.
Science Communication
I got into science by chance. I wasn’t taught science in a way that was anything but remotely boring until my master’s education and maybe some high school biology and physics classes. But I got into science fundamentally because of science communicators. YouTubers like Veritasium, books written by the public by scientists, such as Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford, and podcasts like Radiolab. These exploits are often looked down upon by so-called “serious” scientists. Science is fundamentally knowledge-seeking. We are knowledge-seekers but are often fundamentally bad storytellers. Which is the second part of science. When a pandemic hits and a vaccine is made and there is deep distrust in the vaccine, we don’t think of this as a problem related to science. We think of it as a problem that is related to the public. That something must be wrong with them. Yet, seldom is it communicated what scientists do and exactly what science is. It almost felt like the last pandemic shocked us into action into realising the importance of science communication. Partly because vaccination was needed to create an immune population. But the distrust in science has not been helped by the previous pandemic. China has not helped in allowing a proper investigation to find the truth about the virus’s emergence. And we’ve seen accusations of lab leaks come from it. Vaccine mistrust and misinformation. And dismissal from the scientific community. We have a crisis of the elites in our world. From economic elites, political elites, media elites, as well as scientific elites, society is impacted as a whole.
As we look at the world, we see climate scientists beginning to take on a second role as activists. Fundamentally, an absolutely essential pursuit. Nevertheless, responses from the scientific community can often be reduced to “well, we’ve done the science; activism, that’s not for us”. As if, that should be where the job ends. And so the power ends there with science, and we leave practice to government or companies. Whatever they may do. We wash our hands of the problem often, and say, “well done, you”.
Storytelling
I recently listened to a podcast from Radiolab on Senator William Proxmire and his questioning of scientific pursuits. He created an award called the “Golden Fleece” which he awarded to projects that he deemed to be a waste of taxpayer money. For research such as giving alcohol to rats. While to us in science, we know that this research led to prominent results in the exploration of alcoholism, it can be difficult for those not involved in science to know that knowledge of alcoholism in humans came from this research. And it shouldn’t be on people outside of science to figure out what we are doing on our campuses. We should be better at engaging in this communication. In this storytelling.
Gaining the trust back of the public and making people interested in science like I was as a kid; as I became again during my graduate programme, comes from actively engaging the public in the importance of basic research. The importance of explaining the need for scientific research as wars ravage the earth. That’s why I still want to be a scientist. The pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of creating a better world for those who come after us is a beautiful endeavour, but it is an endeavour that can lose its allure in a world that is overrun by crises. Overrun by loss of truth. And trust. There becomes a difficulty in realising the purpose of what you’re doing in the first place as you sit in a room writing and reading and experimenting as everything seems to be falling apart around you. And when you’ve lost the trust of the public. It’s easy to bury your head deeper in the sand and wall yourself off from people and say, “they just don’t understand”, but fundamentally we’re the ones simply telling a bad story. In fact, do we even want to be storytellers anymore?
Some cool further listening and readings:
- Radiolab’s Golden Goose where they tell the story of the Golden Fleece award by William Proxmire and the all-important Golden Goose Award that it birthed: https://radiolab.org/episodes/golden-goose
- C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures: https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5110/snow_1959.pdf
- William James The Ph.D. Octopus: https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEJamesOctopusTable.pdf
