Science is Cultures

Jul 17, 2009 Alun Politics, Science 1 Comment Blogging, Communication, Religion

I was walk­ing across a bridge one day, and I saw a man stand­ing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! don’t do it!“
“Why shouldn’t I?” he said.
I said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!“
He said, “Like what?“
I said, “Well…are you reli­gious or athe­ist?“
He said, “Reli­gious.“
I said, “Me too! Are you Chris­tian or Buddhist?“
He said, “Chris­tian.“
I said, “Me too! Are you Cath­olic or Prot­est­ant?“
He said, “Prot­est­ant.“
I said, “Me too! Are you Epis­co­palian or Baptist?“
He said, “Baptist!“
I said,“Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?“
He said, “Baptist Church of God!“
I said, “Me too! Are you Ori­ginal Baptist Church of God , or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?“
He said,“Reformed Baptist Church of God!“
I said, “Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reform­a­tion of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reform­a­tion of 1915?“
He said, “Reformed baptist church of god, reform­a­tion of 1915!“
I said, “DIE, HERETIC SCUM!” and pushed him off.

Emo Phil­lips demon­strates no-one is gen­er­ic­ally ‘religious’

I had 2000 words on Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s blog­ging typed up. I was going to leave it for my own files, then I was going to work it in a blog post. Since then there’s been a bit of a melt­down on the Inter­sec­tion. That means I’m not going to pick through most of their con­tra­dic­tions. There’s plenty of other people doing that and at worst, if I do it badly, it’s going to feed into the they’re vic­tims of the big blog­ger / bul­ly­ing PZ in the national media argu­ment (delete as appro­pri­ate). They’re the two pop­u­lar frames for the argu­ment, and being seen in one or the other pretty well rail­roads you into one sid­ing or another.

I’m aware Frames are deeply unpop­u­lar with some sci­ence blog­gers. If you’re not famil­iar with them, they come from an opin­ion piece in Sci­ence, Fram­ing Sci­ence, by Nis­bett and Mooney which argued that sci­ent­ists should com­mu­nic­ate their work in a social con­text, or frame, which res­on­ated with the pub­lic. To social sci­ent­ists the idea that texts have social con­texts is a mundane obser­va­tion. To sci­ent­ists who entered the sci­ences because they were inter­ested in sci­ence rather than cul­ture, this is per­haps less obvi­ous. At its most basic the mes­sage is “know your audi­ence”, which appears in more or else every book on present­a­tion I’ve read. Where Fram­ing Sci­ence went fur­ther is that it seemed to assume that sci­ence was polit­ical and com­mu­nic­a­tion was advocacy. My opin­ion was that sci­ence was polit­ical, with a small p, but that the cul­ture in sci­ence was built around try­ing to min­im­ise that effect to cre­ate a neut­ral product. As far as I know there’s no expli­citly social­ist Law of Grav­ity. Nis­bett and Mooney failed to either real­ise or con­vin­cingly acco­mod­ate how anti­thet­ical to some notions of sci­ence their pro­posal was. Either Frames are non­sense, or their meth­ods were an example of doing Frames badly.

Spin on to 2009 and Mooney and Kirshen­baum are advoc­at­ing a change in prac­tice in some sci­ent­ists. That’s per­fectly reas­on­able. No-one I know thinks sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion is per­fect. One of their stated tar­gets is to change the beha­viour of sci­ent­ists who are unsym­path­etic towards reli­gious belief. This isn’t irra­tional. They give reas­ons and come to a con­clu­sion. Whether or not you agree with them isn’t the prob­lem. If you do think the New Athe­ists should turn down the volume then how do you go about it? Telling the people you want to per­suade that they’re bad people and their narrow-mindedness is harm­ing Sci­ence isn’t the method I’d choose.

If I were to argue that the biggest bene­fit to sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion would be for PZ Myers to stop attack­ing reli­gion (to pick a totally ran­dom example), then I’d want to frame my mes­sage so that it res­on­ated with people like PZ Myers. I might argue that aggress­ive debate with a pub­lic which isn’t used to evidence-based debate as part of every­day life is polar­ising. This is a prob­lem if you occupy a small minor­ity pos­i­tion because the prob­lem is polit­ical rather than sci­entific and polit­ics is about quant­ity rather than qual­ity. I’d pre­face my argu­ment with data to show it wasn’t some­thing I pulled out of the air. This is because even if you think New Athe­ists are dog­matic it’s part of their self-image that they aren’t, so data would play well with them. If New Athe­ists genu­inely aren’t dog­matic then they can exam­ine the data any­way, so it’s win-win. Of course if the data doesn’t exist to sup­port the pro­pos­i­tion I might want to ques­tion if my pos­i­tion was sound.

Mooney and Kirshen­baum have adop­ted a some­what dif­fer­ent tac­tic. They’ve aggress­ively gone after PZ Myers, omit­ting some details Myers thinks are import­ant in their dis­cus­sion. Even if Mooney and Kirshen­baum are entirely cor­rect in what they say this still a cata­strophic fail­ure of frame if they intend to alter Myers’ beha­viour. This fail­ure is being com­poun­ded on their web­log. I’m left won­der­ing who the tar­get of the frame is. In the­ory it looks fine. Mooney and Kirshen­baum are the prag­matic sci­ent­ists who are fed up with the God Wars. That’s a frame which should appeal to a lot of athe­ists who can’t be bothered with reli­gion because they have no interest. How­ever the dis­cus­sion of how the New Athe­ists are Bad People, pulls it right back into that argu­ment. The only way that could make sense is if Sci­ence is a monoculture.

That’s where SEED magazine is wrong. Sci­ence isn’t Cul­ture. Sci­ence is Cul­tures, plural, with dif­fer­ing motiv­a­tions, meth­ods even social beha­viour. Phys­i­cists will often pub­lish to pre-print serv­ers and work from those rather than wait for formal pub­lic­a­tion in a journal. Other sci­ent­ists wouldn’t. I’ve lost track of how many dif­fer­ent defin­i­tions dif­fer­ent dis­cip­lines have for the word ‘agent’. I’ve vis­ited one com­bined depart­ment where people iden­ti­fied which sub-field you were work­ing in by see­ing what you were drink­ing. One group drank beer, one group drank wine and the third drank to for­get. Throw in com­plic­at­ing factors like per­sonal polit­ical views and sci­ent­ists are not a homo­gen­ous bunch. You can’t reach every­one, and you don’t even need to try. You can pick your fights.

The same assump­tion of a homeo­gen­ous (and pass­ive) audi­ence is seen else­where. Many com­ments have argued that Dawkins prob­lem is that he isn’t Sagan. Sagan was respec­ted. Sagan bridge sci­ence and reli­gion. Sagan reached 500 mil­lion people with his shows. Basic­ally Sagan is the Chuck Nor­ris of sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion. No-one seems to have added that the world has moved on. When Sagan at his peak there were three tele­vi­sion sta­tions in the UK. It’s com­mon for a Brit­ish house­hold to have hun­dreds now. I don’t know how dra­matic the change has been in Amer­ica. Also there’s addi­tional factors like the rise of the web. Broad­cast­ing is now sat along­side many-to-many com­mu­nic­a­tion. These days niche pro­gram­ming is the norm and people will search out the niches they want. I’d like to say the 60s and 70s were a golden age of com­mu­nic­a­tion with people like Jacob Bro­nowski or James Burke being appre­ci­ated for their mas­ter­ful per­form­ances of sci­entific poetry. Yet I can’t help won­der­ing if one of the reas­ons many people watched was because the only altern­at­ive was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with their partner.

There’s no longer one audi­ence, there’s many. Any­one arguing that there is just the one true way to reach those audi­ences is only going to sat­isfy one audi­ence. For instance some other people have held up Gould as a com­par­ison to Dawkins. Gould really doesn’t move me, but then I have no interest in base­ball. I’d hope there’s room for a more inter­na­tion­al­ist approach to sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion than Amer­ic­ans com­mu­nic­at­ing exclus­ively with Amer­ic­ans, Bri­tons with Bri­tons and so on. It’s yet another layer of com­plex­ity. That’s why I’m wary of Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s cri­ti­cisms of strongly athe­ist sci­ence com­m­un­ci­ation. But equally it also means that reject­ing some com­mu­nic­at­ors because they’re ‘appeas­ers’ is going to miss some of the pub­lic. If we want sci­entific soci­et­ies and aca­demia to sup­port com­mu­nic­a­tion then acknow­ledging the import­ant of diversity would be helpful.

Sorry for the lack of links. I’ve cobbled this together at the last minute because what I had was far worse and even longer to make a simple point. I’ll try and add more links in tomorrow’s entry where I’ll try and make a pos­it­ive case for ignor­ing reli­gious sens­it­iv­it­ies (or even chal­len­ging them) in sci­ence communication.