Adult Supervision

I've been looking around for some different blogs to read, because if I'm going to waste my time I at least want to be entertained, and I have developed a very low tolerance for earnest progressive chest-beating. Barack Obama inviting homophobic pastor Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration isn't something to get the vapors over, as the time for that is if the policies aren't getting us out the very deep hole Republicans everywhere have dug for us.

Who is IOZ ruminated on another blogger's ruminations about Star Trek, and it's overall spirit of optimism and human endeavor, so reminiscent of JFK at least while Gene Roddenberry was running things. Later on, though, TNG and DS9 would get pretty grim and militaristic. Recalling how Kirk said to Trelaine, the immortal, godlike six-year-old how he was missing out on "the terror of murder, the suspense - the fun",** I guess the producers just couldn't hold out, giving in to the notion that watching shit get blown up was more fun than optimism and human endeavor.

IOZ skewers the fatuousness that would infect particularly the later Star Trek programs, saying,

You'll often hear the claim that Star Trek posits an ideal of a cooperative, post-scarcity, universally tolerant and largely utopic future, when in fact its fictive universe presents a deracinated, militaristic hierarchy as humanity's destiny. Which, when you think about it, is Kennedy-esque, isn't it? Star Trek was mostly zippity-doo space opera, and I feel a little guilty for picking on its tissue-paper politics, but you do have to wonder why enlightened humanity chooses to whisk among the stars in a bad facsimile of a 19th-century navy? In that regard, the missing detail is a realistic portrayal of sodomy.

In that same vein, other missing details in a realistic portrayal of a 19th-century navy were rum and the lash.

While it's nice to speculate about the hope of a post-scarcity utopia, we're going to have to get through the scarcity phase, which we're beginning to make the transition into. This brings me back to President-elect Obama selecting a homophobic bigot as the pastor to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. I find it deplorable, but in a tiresome sort of way because it distracts progressives whose energies should be devoted to other areas such as, say our unsustainable way of life, a topic that is relentlessly ignored by the media. Unfortunately, we as progressives are going to have to be the adults here (since the Rick Warrens of the world apparently aren't enlightened enough for that yet), which means sometimes sucking it in for certain aspects of life such as, say a finger stuck in the eye of homosexuals everywhere, to focus on bigger picture stuff. . . such as, say our unsustainable way of life. Being dead from starvation, disease or conflict makes it harder in the long run to combat hate and bigotry.

Therefore, I'm much more impressed with President-elect Obama appointing Jane Lubchenco as administrator of NOAA, than I am discomfited by selecting the Purpose-Driven-Life guy to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. Very adult-like.

** And if that just went past you, you need to question how much of a Trekkie you really are.

How to Read

It almost seems to be a redundant topic, but I found value in this post from the Copyblogger. The audience for it consists of the people who have managed to get past the gossip, innuendo, unsubstantiated opinions, disconnected facts and plainly incorrect stuff which makes up the preponderance of written material today. It expands from the topic of “information” (described by Wilson as “. . . a full, accurate, and properly nuanced body of knowledge about important matters. . .”) and goes to how to read for discovery and to achieve understanding.

The focus of the article is on reading to make yourself a better writer, however the concept can be expanded to reading to make yourself a better citizen and more enlightened voter. As David Brin points out, human nature always conspires against Enlightenment. And there is a substantial fraction of American citizens today who in on that conspiracy.

Wrong Answer

A few days back I was driving around running an errand and happened to catch on the radio “MarketPlace”, that annoyingly smug business program carried on NPR stations. I try not to listen to NPR any more, but it’s one of those things that’s hard to stop once you’ve started, like cigarettes or heroin. Anyway, they carried a story about energy independence blah blah blah, and how someone was trying to commercialize plasma gasification as a waste to energy technology. Plasma gasification uses high temperatures to convert organic materials into “syngas”, or a gas stream composed mostly of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. These two substances then can be catalytically rearranged to form methane, hydrogen, and hydrocarbon fuels. It's been tried as a means of biomass conversion in a few places.

There was a hint of conspiracy theory about why this technology just isn’t all over the place, making truckloads of money for its proponents.

You know, we would be taking away a large business for the landfill people and the incinerators, so waste company do not want to see this technology come out. On the other hand, if we produce power, we will be infringing on the coal business and fossil fuel burning business.

I guess the energy consumption and expense involved have little to do with it. The other point that was brought up in the article as a reason we “need” this technology is that we’re running out of landfill space. . . .

The “running out of landfill space” argument is always a sign that you’re talking to someone who doesn’t really know much about environmental issues. We’re not running out of landfill space these days, so much as we’re running out of political will to site landfills where they are needed. Landfills also are a sign of mismanaged resources. For example, a significant chunk of the copper from the entire lithosphere is in landfills, a fact coupled with rising demand in China, which helps explain why thieves are starting to strip copper fittings out of abandoned forclosed homes. This article points to more examples of metals whose stocks may be approaching exhaustion. I found it from a Daily Kos diary “Peak Metal”, which has a nice analysis of the problem, but then mars it by indulging in liberal handwringing about how hard metals reclamation will be, and engaging in NIMBY-ism about how you don’t want a landfill mine as a neighbor (knee-jerk NIMBY thinking being another sign you’re talking to someone who doesn’t really know much about environmental issues).

So, we don’t need to be melting garbage to make fuel or electricity – we have other ways of getting those things. However, we are probably past the point where we need to start reclaiming and reusing the crap we’ve been tossing away so blithely. Noone yet is talking seriously yet about landfill mining, but if we’re arresting people for stealing copper, digging up landfills for it can be only a matter of time.

We’re Right, Who Cares if We’re Boring?

PZ Myers issues a bit of a screed about scientists framing messages, and why scientists are perceived at being bad at “communicating”. His conclusion is that scientists shouldn’t need to speak so slowly and use such small words in order to frame their topics properly, and that the media and public need to claw their way to the deeper understanding of nature that scientists have.

He implores, “[j]ust don't ask us to do all of a huge subject like evolution in a couple of snazzy sentences. . . .” I would ask, why not? You could start the elevator message with the importance of understanding evolution is, as citizens, to be able to participate in the public debate about a range of issues, including endangered species, global climate impacts, genetically modified foods, pesticides in agriculture. You can’t be a good citizen if you don’t understand evolution. (Here’s some supplemental reading on “elevator messages”, for those who are interested).

How about that for starters? After you get that across, then you can start telling stories about natural history, with themes related to evolution. I’ve always liked how Stephen J. Gould makes natural history and by extension, evolutionary biology, come alive. More scientists could stand to learn to interact with the public in the same way he did.

PZ even has the start of an elevator message:

In the battleground I play in, the evolution/creation wars, I know that the majority of the public are victims. We share common values: they are promoting their particular beliefs not because they are stupid or evil, but because they care about living in a good society, because they want their children to grow up economically successful and personally happy, and they are convinced that evolution threatens their personal bliss. (They're wrong, of course, because they've been lied to, but they don't know that.) One effective tactic for our side is to hammer on those shared values, and point out that good science is essential for economic competitiveness, for medical progress, and to improve everything from agriculture to reproductive biology.

A practical suggestion I would have in crafting this message is that people may not be inclined to listen if they feel that their intelligence is being insulted. This observation is based on my experience with risk communication and public involvement associated with hazardous waste site cleanups – the fact that we experts knew more than the community members about the technical topics actually matters very little in the process of engaging them as stakeholders and trying to get their acceptance of a particular cleanup option.

In the original Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney paper that Myers is commenting on, it says:

On these highly politicized topics, scientists need to stop thinking that technical knowledge, alone, suffices to drive decision-making or change minds. That's simply not how the media works, or how the public perceives and processes information. The article (which I'll post as soon as available) ends with this coda:

Some readers may consider our proposals too Orwellian, preferring the traditional model of safely sticking to the facts. Yet scientists must realize that these facts will be repeatedly misapplied and twisted in direct proportion to their relevance to the political debate and decision-making. In short, as unnatural as it might feel, in many cases, scientists should strategically avoid emphasizing the technical details of science when trying to defend it.

This is an astonishing admission to make nearly 50 years after “The Two Cultures”. Flawed as it might have been, Snow’s essay still should have been a wakeup call for those scientists interested in the social relevance of their work to find tools for communicating to tough audiences.

PZ also takes the media to task for why scientists are perceived as poor communicators:

Now we may suck at giving the attention-grabbing 15-second sound bite, but that's not what we do. We are experts at explaining complex subjects which do not fit into the format expected of television news, but hasn't everyone noticed that television news is utterly useless at transmitting substantive information? Instead of complaining that our culture's class of experts at technical subjects aren't sufficiently pithy for a dumbed-down, low-bandwidth, superficial medium, why aren't we fastening the blame on the media for inappropriately using our experts' talents?

Ok, at this point, it’s useful to recall the phrase, “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel” (supposedly from Mark Twain), or its 21st century equivalent, “never pick a fight with someone who buys bandwidth by the gigabit”. If getting your message out is important, you have to know more about what you’re up against.

The news media are in the business to make money, and must deliver a product that their customers desire. The customers of the media are advertisers, and the product being delivere are readers or viewers. If narrative, violence and conflict are what bring the eyeballs to the advertisers, that's what the media outlets are going to provide. The news media are biased towards what's "new" and "fresh", something not oriented to extended analysis of a topic. Visual depictions get more attention than text. Bad news is more compelling than good news. So, for example, melting ice floes don't do much to highlight the story of global climate change. However, add a couple of drowning polar bears to the picture, and people start to take more notice.

For me, the most important thing to understand about the news media is the need for narrative:

The news media cover the news in terms of "stories" that must have a beginning, middle, and end--in other words, a plot with antagonists and protagonists. Much of what happens in our world, however, is ambiguous. The news media apply a narrative structure to ambiguous events suggesting that these events are easily understood and have clear cause-and-effect relationships. Good storytelling requires drama, and so this bias often leads journalists to add, or seek out, drama for the sake of drama. Controversy creates drama. Journalists often seek out the opinions of competing experts or officials in order to present conflict between two sides of an issue (sometimes referred to as the authority-disorder bias). Lastly, narrative bias leads many journalists to create, and then hang on to, master narratives--set story lines with set characters who act in set ways. Once a master narrative has been set, it is very difficult to get journalists to see that their narrative is simply one way, and not necessarily the correct or best way, of viewing people and events.

It is this hardening of news into master narratives, combined with the media's tendency to reinforce the status quo and to appeal to fairness (i.e. presenting both "sides" of an issue, regardless of how wrong one side might be) that thwart the introduction of scientific thought into public discourse. If the master narrative is that there is disagreement among experts about the fact of global climate change, that's going to resonate more than the fact that those who disagree are marginal scientists or being paid to disagree. If the master narrative is that there is a plausible model in addition to evolution and natural selection to explain biodiversity, that combined with the appeal to "fairness" will compel people to give intelligent design a chance, regardless of how scientifically wrong-headed it is.

Overcoming these master narratives, not complaining about them, is the task faced by scientists who want their ideas heard in by the public. So, I'm lining up with Nisbet and Mooney on this one.