aspiringdoctors:ceruleancynic:labbugs:thegreenwolf:imaginarycircus:patchfire:cardozzza:purplecloudce
aspiringdoctors:ceruleancynic:labbugs:thegreenwolf:imaginarycircus:patchfire:cardozzza:purplecloudcenter:I laughed a little too hard at this one.“No, I want science that is accessible to me, I do not have a doctorate in this field and therefore articles written by people with doctorates to communicate theories to other people with doctorates is not something I can readily comprehend. I also prefer to read about basic first aid instead of in-depth medical books three inches thick on IV treatment, but still have the audacity to say I think medicine is interesting.”Seriously, why does this elitist bullshit keep popping up on my dash? ‘What, you like science? Name three albums by science! Fake sciencer.’Additionally, science has become so specialized that academics in the same departments at universities often can’t understand their own colleagues’ work in terms of peer-reviewed journals. Scientific articles and books written for laypeople are generally edited for accuracy as well as being written FOR communicating with the general public. I can confirm this is 100% true. Scientists don’t read someone’s article like it’s an article from Time magazine. It doesn’t make perfect sense immediately. If someone wanted to truly understand the science they’d have to spend time reviewing the data carefully and unpacking the equations. Math is a short hand. They usually provide a few equations and leave out a lot of steps that you can’t just intuit from the ether. Take the famous e=mc^2 - it takes so much math and theory to explain how you get there. The paper is long and you need to have a solid understanding of things like Newton’s Principia, Maxwell’s equations on electrodynamics, Minkowski, and especially Lobachevsky’s non-Euclidean geometry–in order to work through the paper. It takes time to unpack the equations in detail and follow how the proof works. (You also have to know how mathematical proofs work.) It might take many blackboards packed with equations to fill in the steps in between equations in order to rigorously understand the paper. I spent weeks doing that with both Maxwell and Einstein after I’d studied the math needed. I worked for cosmologists working on very specific problems in optical astronomy. They could not pick up someone’s work in X-Ray or Radio astronomy and read it once and totally understand it. They had an idea of what was going on, but not a true, solid understanding of what the work meant. It wasn’t their field and they didn’t need to know most of the time. If you make car tires–there are things you need to know about how cars are built and work, but you don’t need to know everything about engine design or maintenance. Being able to explain science clearly to a lay person is a talent. I’ve known brilliant scientists who were completely unable to explain their work to graduate students in astronomy, never mind a lay person. Not to mention a lot of the problems we face, at least in the US, can be directly attributed to science illiteracy. A third of Americans deny evolution. The growing anti-vax movement is because people don’t understand how either vaccinations or autism work, nor do they realize how utterly flawed the “research” linking the two is. We have politicians who are supposed to be doing things about climate change instead denying it even exists, even though the science points right to it. People latch onto all sorts of incorrect B.S. simply because they don’t know the basics of the scientific method or how a proper experiment is run. My academic background is primarily in the humanities (though my counseling psychology MA straddles the line between humanities and science). I ended up taking what was essentially research methods and statistics for people who suck at math. Even though I don’t have more of a scientific background than that, I make it my business to try and be basically literate in as many of the sciences as I can–I’ve got natural sciences down pretty well, though I struggle more with things like quantum physics. It’s not just because i want to sound smart. it’s because it’s necessary to know these things to have an understanding of what’s going on in the world. Yes, history is important. Yes, economics is important. But so is science, and making all of these accessible to more people is empowering. They’re tools, and if we know how to make use of them, or at least understand some of what the experts are doing with them, then we have more of a chance to participate in these massive efforts in the world that we currently feel we can’t do anything about. If we feel science is important AND we can explain why, then we’re more likely to demand the same of our elected leaders. If some politician is trying to sneak some environmentally unfriendly bill past us, it’ll be more alarming to us if we actually understand what makes it so unfriendly. If we know some basics of human anatomy and health, we can be more active advocates for ourselves in the health care system, and so on.Knowledge IS power, and if it starts with little sound bites that pique curiosity, so much the better. Much better, in fact, than spending that thirty seconds watching yet another commercial trying to sell you cars or lawn care, anyway.I saw the first post this morning and immediately thought “If someone gave me a paper way outside my field I would have a hard time reading it and probably wouldn’t want to read anything else in the field because I would have to look up every other word and then have to re-read paragraphs over and over to get any meaning out of it”.Which isn’t a bad thing to do if you have the time, but for most of us, reading one article that is out of our field so in depth enough to actually understand it, just doesn’t fit into our schedules.So I was very happy when I cam home to find these comments under the original post. The intellectual snobbery of the tweet in the OP is amazingly counterproductive. I have zero background in any of the sciences beside basic marine biology and a childhood spent with a couple of scientists who never fucking stopped looking shit up and talking about it, but because I find it fascinating I’ve tried to learn as much as I can on my own. I can’t read peer-reviewed journal articles in a lot of the fields I’m interested in because I simply do not have the math skills to even begin to comprehend what the equations mean, but I can read books about those fields and get a lot out of it. I’m not the intended audience for those journal articles. Neither is the random person on the street who might find Neil deGrasse Tyson’s quotations interesting enough to go and read more about what Tyson’s discussing. Making science accessible and not this terrifying incomprehensible, unknowable, and therefore untrustworthy ivory-tower bloc is desperately needed, now more than ever. Saying that people aren’t really interested in science if they haven’t got a sodding PhD in quantum electrodynamics is NOT HELPING. REBLOG FOR COMMENTARYTHANK YOU EACH ONE OF YOUThe doorway to all science should not require one to climb a mountain to reach. That is the realm of affecting science. -- source link