Science – Page 2 – Uncommon Ground

Follow up on dodging a bullet

Last week I mentioned that I had considered participating in Benefunder and that an article in Science made me glad I’d decided not to participate.

I was tempted because it sounded like a very promising idea. In the end, though, I just couldn’t see investing $500 in the project. It seemed too unlikely that a donor would be interested in supporting the esoteric research that I do.

Christian Braemer, CEO/co-founder of Benefunder, left a comment on that post. If you’re interested in Benefunder, I encourage to visit the original post and read the whole comment. Here’s the key part of what he has to say about the article in Science:

The worst part is the title, which implies we’ve folded and that couldn’t be further from the truth as you’ll see in a string of press releases that are about to come out regarding new partners, board members, and investors (although this story certainly isn’t going to help with the latter).

Not to be overly dramatic, but this story is a major threat to finding new ways to fund research in this country. Consider this, with our new approach, if we get just 4% of current DAF distributions, that equates to over $1B in new funding for research. Crowdfunding (which we are not) doesn’t have the right alignment of interests, expectations, or volume to be able to pull this off – at least not for the foreseeable future.

By the way, Christian posted his comment on 8 November, the day after my original post went live. His comment only went live this morning, because it’s the first time in a week I’ve had a chance to check in.

kent November 14, 2016 Science funding 0 Read more >

Oxford Handbook on the Science of Science Communication

I just ran across an old (13 October 2015) press release from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania announcing that Oxford University Press will publish the Oxford Handbook on the Science of Science Communication in 2017.¹ The very brief press release on the Annenberg Center’s website makes it sound very interesting. I look forward to learning more about it as its release date approaches. In the meantime, here’s a very brief description lifted from the press release.

The handbook, developed for scientists, academics and students of science communication, will grapple with the failure of widely accessible scientific evidence to effectively inform public controversies on issues including climate change, the human papilloma virus vaccine, and the safety of bio-engineered foods on the market in the United States.

¹OUP doesn’t seem to have an announcement of it on its website yet.

kent November 11, 2016 Science communication 0 Read more >

It appears that I dodged a bullet

A couple of years ago, I received an unsolicited invitation to participate in Benefunder, a sort of Kickstarter for scientists. I talked with the people running it a couple of times. They proposed a very intriguing idea: All I needed to do was come up with a snappy description of my research, some compelling images, and $500. They would promote my research as part of a portfolio that wealthy investors would contribute to both because they were interested in the research and because the contributions were structured in a way that provided substantial tax benefits, a donor-advised fund. I was tempted because it sounded like a very promising idea. In the end, though, I just couldn’t see investing $500 in the project. It seemed too unlikely that a donor would be interested in supporting the esoteric research that I do.

It appears that my skepticism was well founded.

[E]ven as Benefunder bulged with projects, donors remained scarce. “We were never able to get off the ground,” [Christian] Braemer [one of the Benefunder founders] says. Donor funds “were not willing to take the reputational risk [on] an unknown entity,” he says. And the firm received just a few “small transactions … a bit out of the blue.”

To stay afloat, Benefunder ramped up sales of the profiles and videos. In 2014 and 2015, it earned more than $660,000 this way but attracted just $62,000 in gifts, tax forms show. In late 2015, as the firm ran out of cash, it abruptly stopped recruiting researchers, left some videos unfinished, and laid off all but three of the 12 employees who worked for it and an allied firm. (Ambitious web fundraising startup fails to meet big goals, by Mark Harris, Science 354: 534; 2016 doi: 10.1126/science.354.6312.534 )

kent November 7, 2016 Science funding 2 Read more >

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway on the nature of science and science policy

I read Merchants of Doubt several years ago. If you haven’t read it yet, I urge you to buy a copy now (or check it out from your local library) and read it immediately. I was thumbing through some notes recently and ran across this passage that sums up the nature of science and its relationship to policy very nicely.

All scientific work is incomplete – whether it be observational or experimental. All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, to postpone action that it appears to demand at a given time. “Who knows,” asks Robert Browning, “but the world may end tonight?” True, but on available evidence most of us make ready to commute on 8:30 the next day.

This is only one of many gems in Merchants of Doubt. Read it and share it with your friends and family.

kent October 3, 2016 Science policy 0 Read more >

Thought for the day

“The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden…A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved although it does tell us a good deal about those who hold it.” C.S. Lewis

kent September 30, 2016 Science policy 0 Read more >

Communication requires listening and respect

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

As scientists, we tend to think that if we simply lay out the facts, the solutions to the world’s problems will be obvious. Show people the evidence that humans are contributing to global climate change and they will immediately realize that governments and individuals need to work together to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Show them the evidence that vaccines prevent disease with minimal risk and parents will immediately realize that they should make sure their children are immunized against rubella and whooping cough. But of course that doesn’t happen. Why? Because facts aren’t enough. Last month, Richard Grant wrote an article for The Guardian explaining why. He makes two very important points.

People don’t like being told what to do.
It’s more about who we are and our relationships than about what is right or true.

And he concludes with a very important observation:

Most science communication isn’t about persuading people; it’s self-affirmation for those already on the inside. Look at us, it says, aren’t we clever? We are exclusive, we are a gang, we are family.

That’s not communication. It’s not changing minds and it’s certainly not winning hearts and minds.

It’s tribalism.

We need to listen more than we talk. We need to understand what people are concerned about and address those concerns. Aristotle understood this a couple of millenia ago (Rhetoric). Blaise Pascal made the same point nearly 400 years ago.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others. (link)

So let’s listen to people. Let’s try to understand their concerns. And then, let’s figure out what we can do to address their concerns.

kent September 28, 2016 Science communication 0 Read more >

Facts aren’t enough

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (attributed: Wikiquotes)

Those of us who are scientists have a tendency to think that if we simply lay out the facts – human activities are causing global climate change, for example – that everyone will listen to us and act accordingly. Tali Sharot and Cass Sunstein remind us in a recent New York Times op-ed that the world doesn’t work that way.

[F]or weak believers in man-made climate change, comforting news will have a big impact, and alarming news won’t. Strong believers will show the opposite pattern. And because Americans are frequently exposed to competing claims about the latest scientific evidence, these opposing tendencies will predictably create political polarization — and it will grow over time.

So if scientists (and other experts for that matter) want the public to make informed decisions about complex issues, it’s not enough for us to put out the facts and expect them to speak for themselves. We need to recognize that there is a science of science communication and work with experts in that field to help us find ways to help us communicate more effectively.

One of the first things we have to remember is that communication is not talking.

Climate change neoskepticism

Paul Stern and colleagues¹ use the term “neoskepticism” to describe the view that although climate change is real and although humans are responsible for much of it, the costs of attempting to reduce or mitigate it exceed the benefits.

[N]eoskepticism accepts the existence of [anthropogenic climate change] but advocates against urgent mitigation efforts on various grounds, such as that climate models run “too hot” or are too uncertain to justify anything other than “no-regrets” policies as having net benefits. Mainstream climate scientists are well aware of uncertainty in climate projections. But neoskeptics’ citing of it to justify policy inaction marks a shift of focus in climate debates from the existence of ACC to its import and to response options.

The problem, of course, is that uncertainty is a double-edged sword. It’s possible that the impacts of climate change won’t be as bad as current (mean) projections, but it’s also possible that they will be far worse. Worse yet, the longer we wait to mitigate impacts, the more difficult and expensive it will be to prevent them. In response, they argue both for more attention to decision sciences and to the science of science communication. Both are certainly needed. But they also focus only on part of the science communication that’s needed, the part having to do with facts about costs, benefits, and risks of action or inaction.

As scientists, we pay too little attention to the emotional aspects of persuasion involved in guiding public policy, and here I’m not talking about appeals to “your children and grandchildren” or “our fellow creatures.” I’m talking about the emotions people feel when they think about scientists in particular or experts more generally, for example. Science communication is important even when it isn’t imparting facts or knowledge. In fact, it may be even more important when it’s not imparting facts or knowledge. It may be most important when it’s sharing scientists as caring human beings who can be trusted. Only if we are trusted will anyone listen when we share our insights with them.

¹Stern, P.C., J.H. Perkins, R.E. Sparks, and R.A. Knox. 2016. The challenge of climate-change neoskepticism. Science 353:653-654. doi: 10.1126/science.aaf9697

kent August 15, 2016 Climate change, Science communication 0 Read more >

Kudos – Help promoting papers to new audiences

I was catching up on my reading last weekend when I ran across an article in Nature describing Kudos, a site that promises “broaden readership and increase the impact of your research” (https://www.growkudos.com/about/researchers). Here’s a bit more about what they say about themselves:

Kudos is more than a just a networking site, and more than just a publication listing. It is a toolkit for explaining your work in plain language and for enriching it with links to related materials (watch a video about explaining and enriching). Kudos also provides a unique one-stop shop for multiple metrics relating to your publications: page views, citations, full text downloads and altmetrics. When you explain, enrich and share your work through Kudos, we map your actions against these metrics in charts that show you which activities are most effective when it comes to increasing the reach and impact of your work (watch a video about sharing your work).

I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds promising. According to the article in Nature

The site is free for academics because scholarly institutions, societies, publishers and other commercial clients pay for its upkeep. Kudos helps these customers to track and evaluate their researchers (or, in the case of publishers, their authors) and foster a stronger relationship with them, explains Rapple. By encouraging researchers to do outreach, the site also indirectly builds the profile of their institution or their journal, she adds. And Rapple hopes that publishers and institutions can build up valuable intelligence from the Kudos database about the effects of different kinds of outreach. The site has established partnerships with some 65 publishers so far, including well-known firms such as Wiley and Taylor & Francis.

I’m going to try register soon. I’ll keep you posted on what I find.

kent August 12, 2016 Science communication 0 Read more >

Science communication and experts

Michael_Gove_at_Policy_Exchange_delivering_his_keynote_speech_'The_Importance_of_Teaching'_(cropped) In early June, Michael Gove was Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor of the United Kingdom. (Image at left By Policy Exchange [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons) He helped lead the effort that lead to the vote for the UK to leave the European Union. He appeared on a Sky News program where he “refused to name any economists who back Britain’s exit from the European Union, saying that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’.” (https://next.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c) While Gove was speaking about economists, his words have clear implications for scientists. Being expert isn’t enough. Commanding the facts isn’t enough. I’m no expert, but this strikes me as a pretty good example of why the “deficit model” of science communication (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model) is wrong.

Writing in EoS, Amy Luers and David Kroodsma have some good advice. Don’t report facts. Join conversations. Here are a few of the key points:

Science communicators need to focus on developing strategies to join and initiate conversations that start with people, not science.
Credibility is determined more by the communities scientists are associated with than by the papers they publish.
Scientists should embrace the fact that online communities enable people to come together and collaborate, and use this to identify new opportunities for coproduction of knowledge that can complement more conventional science communication efforts.

kent August 8, 2016 Science communication 0 Read more >