What Does It Profit Science to Gain the World?

Blog, Science, Skepticism: September 9th, 2009

Not too long ago, I wrote a sarcastic post in which I detailed how skeptics and scientists could better communicate with the lay public.  I noted that skeptics need only utilize the same shoddy, lame arguments that are so effectively used by proponents of pseudoscience.  People are more convinced by rhetorical skill than reasoned argument, so it stands to reason that people would accept skepticism more readily if it were supported by the same fallacious reasoning of pseudoscientific nonsense.  Naturally, when I made this suggestion I was being facetious, but it seems that some skeptics and scientists are unwittingly advocating such a stance, apparently not realizing that advocating the popularization of skepticism and science would inevitably lead to such nonsense.

Take, for instance, this recent post from the Science-Based Medicine blog, in which Val Jones writes about his attempt to convince a committee to not publish misleading information concerning the treatment of autism.  He ended up making a presentation alongside an opposing doctor who advocated alternative treatments for autism.  Val writes:

The committee ended up siding with my opponent. I was flabbergasted and asked one of the committee members what on earth they were thinking. She simply shrugged and said that my opponent was more likable than I was.

He concludes from this experience, as well as from his review of Randy Olson’s latest book about science communication, that scientists need to be more likeable, to learn how to tell better stories, and so on.  If scientists do not do so, they will eventually lose the culture wars to the forces of pseudoscience.

The prospects of training scientists in such rhetoric, though, worries me.   For whatever reason, people enjoy mindless speculation about the paranormal.  These are the kinds of stories people want to hear.  It isn’t that these stories are told particularly well or with any sort of special flair.  Indeed, watching any number of the incredulous ghost hunter, psychic children, or mysteries of the Bible shows on television has revealed to me that, if anything, the purveyors of such woo tend to be horribly daft when it comes to good story-telling.  Are we supposed to believe that a show about ghost hunters traipsing about in a dark basement with an unsteady camera and bad lighting, blandly commenting about electromagnetism and cold spots, with nary a trace of plot development or narrative, is somehow compelling story-telling?  And yet these types of shows regularly outperform any program with even a hint of real science in it.

The fact is, we live in a culture that has seen the production of classic movies wittled away into the production of cliched and recycled romantic comedies, banal action movies steeped with inane one-liners, and farcical comedies in which the only “joke” is the fact that you’ve just paid $12 to watch a movie whose plot is essentially an extended case of flatulence.  We’ve seen literature go from Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, and Crime and Punishment to Twilight (essentially vampire pornography) and Goosebumps.  We’ve seen science documentaries go from the Cosmos series to What the Bleep Do We Know.  We’ve seen political discourse devolve into isolated, partisan polemics from both sides, both steeped in ridiculous conspiracy and paranoia, whether it be baseless tirades about government-led death panels and Obama being the antichrist or Republican-orchestrated attacks on the World Trade Center staged as terrorist attacks.  And what passes for TV nowadays is often little more than so-called reality television, in which cameras follow around the stupidest men and women in America to watch them get drunk, bicker, and sometimes have sex with each other.  People would sooner watch Flavor of Love (and who wouldn’t want to watch an aging rap icon who resembles a malnourished ET make out with beautiful women who engage in silly athletic competitions to win his heart?) than a compelling drama with an actual plot and real character development.  Are these the types of stories scientists should be telling?  If we wish to popularize science, these are the models of popularity, after all.

Because the masses are so easily swayed by nonsensical, mindless horseshit—as well as by logical fallacies of all stripes—it worries me when scientists are exhorted to appeal to the masses.  The masses are fucking idiots.  They don’t like good story-telling.  They like simplistic cliches that appeal to their prejudices and superstitions.  The fact is, these people simply don’t like science.  Science has had and continues to have masterful story-tellers, from Carl Sagan to George Gamow to Neil Degrasse Tyson to Stephen Pinker to Richard Dawkins, and not even these masters have made much of a difference.  It is overly simplistic and foolish to think we can repackage scientific content and somehow make it marketable to the same people who derive pleasure from American Idol and True Blood and who think Glenn Beck makes compelling arguments.  Most people are blustering retards who only appreciate the most outrageous sophistry as argument and the most appalling, bland pablum as art.  We should not sully science in a way that truly popularizes it.  For to truly popularize science, we would have to totally bastardize it and transform it into a mere shadow or husk of its former self.

As an example, consider Mary Roach’s best-selling science/skepticism books.  These are what science books would trend toward in order to become more popular.  For instance, in Roach’s book Bonk, a book exploring sex and sexuality research, she focuses heavily not on the actual science, but on the personalities behind the science and on trivial but funny anecdotes throughout the book, and she even includes herself as a participant in studies for anecdotal purposes and narrative effect.  The problem is that the science becomes very watered down.  Most of the text is devoted to describing locales and people, and not the actual sexual research.  What research is provided is often glossed over very quickly and superficially.  As an example, Roach only briefly mentions the controversy surrounding the existence of the G-spot in women, yet spends pages talking about various scientists’ eccentricities or describing how to masturbate pigs.  What is worse is that in her other book, Spook, Roach exemplifies the problem with trying to popularize skepticism: it simply can’t be done.  Spook is a book about pseudoscientific and scientific research concerning the afterlife and other such paranormal phenomenon.  Throughout its pages, Roach admits to being skeptical but only in a hand-waving, “but maybe there’s something really out there” kind of way.  Skepticism simply doesn’t sell, and Roach knows this.  People want to believe in mystical claptrap.  They like to hear about people and places, but not so much about science or research.  And, unfortunately, anyone who tries to popularize science for the masses would have to end up sacrificing the real scientific and skeptical content, as Mary Roach does in her own books.  And while Roach’s books have actual scientific content, imagine the depths to which they’d have to further sink to become truly popular.

What would truly popularized scientific content—as popular as The Left Behind series or The Da Vinci Code—look like?  I believe it would contain the most bland and trivial of scientific content, nearly stripped bare of anything meaningful and souped up with irrelevant anecdotes and incidental biography, perhaps even rendered in the style of reality television so as to be so completely inane as to induce projectile vomiting in those of us with sensitive aesthetic palates.  Truly popularized science would resemble the type of “science” we see advertised in newspaper headlines: exagerrated, distorted, chopped short, and frequently wrong.  It would tout miracle cures, unexplainable mysteries that “baffle” scientists, and so on.  The media already knows how to sell science; they’ve been doing it for longer than the skeptical movement.  And they know that incredulous mystery-mongering and fear-inducing sound bytes sell.  They know that fancy rhetoric, even if it is indeed logically fallacious, is more convincing than reasoned argument and actual fact.  Thus I find it laughable when skeptics try to argue that scientists need to learn how to sell science.  The newspapers and the popularizers have been selling science for ages, long before us, and they’ve already worked out the formula—and it doesn’t include skepticism or the legitimate, careful use of the scientific method.  I can’t reiterate this enough: most people are idiots and have poor taste, and they enjoy mysterious paranormal mumbo jumbo and accept logical fallacies as gospel truth.

We don’t need to popularize science and skepticism to such a degree.  Such popularization is impossible without bastardizing science of any legitimate content.  Scientists should refuse to dumb down the science to reach a wider audience.  They should refuse to pander to the ignorant and the silly, even if they do exist in droves of large market shares.  Why should we demand that scientists become poets and reality television stars?  Instead, we should demand of the public that they become educated.  Science doesn’t need to change; the idiots of the world convinced by non sequiturs, who decide arguments based on likeability and stage presence, are those that need to change.  Science simply can’t be marketed to such a population without making serious intellectual sacrifices—sacrifices that simply aren’t worth the effort.  In order to reach the heights of popularity, science would have to forsake reasonable conclusions for exagerrations, it would have to report biography and anecdote over actual data, and it would have to refrain from any skepticism and appear to remain open to, and endorse, the most inane of pseudoscientific possibilities.  In short, we can’t really hope to popularize science and skepticism to a public that is willfully uneducated and stone-dumb; nor should we want to popularize science in a manner that would appeal to such imbeciles.  For what does it profit science to gain the whole world if it loses its scientific soul in the process?  All we can do is continue reporting the actual science, and do so with passion and enjoyment, constantly ridiculing those who don’t understand it, and hope that our passion and ridicule will win over the future generations.