Scientists, speak clearly

Too many scientists insist on being incomprehensible. This creates an alienation between the general public and science and clouds the potential contribution of science to the public discourse. Shouldn't you go down to the masses? The masses are not stupid; They want the worlds of knowledge to be opened to them. They just ask that they do it in a language they understand

First, a confession: the popular science columns I write, I don't always write about topics I understand. Some are a shot in the dark, but the challenge is not to write accurately; The challenge is to write interestingly. This is not just my personal challenge; Science communication will rise and fall on this.

I am reading a science book that is supposed to be popular. At one point I started making a competition between the longest sentences. The conductor reached eight lines with five side verses. I broke down. Scientific writing tends to be heavy-handed, solemn and unnecessarily long. I tried to read Derrida, Baudrillard, Žižek, Lacan, and I didn't understand. After a while I had an epiphany: the simulacra - isn't that the parable of Plato's cave, by any chance? Suddenly everything became clear. But by then I felt like a fool. And I felt angry at people in the humanities who write in a way that makes me feel stupid.

The over-professionalization of modern science involves a side effect that harms science: creating concepts just to create the appearance of a separate discipline; need to renew just for the sake of renewal; Creating new "semantic fields" just to define a new field, and that's when you can use old words. When scientists develop new terminologies to replace existing terms, sometimes the price is alienation from the public. When a scientist writes a book intended for the general public, why not write, for example, "thesaurus" instead of "semantic fields"? It's not exactly the same thing. It would not pass the editorial board of a scientific journal, but it is more than enough for the sake of science communication. He does not write for his colleagues; He writes for me and for you, the non-scientist reader.

Still, too many scientists insist on being incomprehensible. This creates an alienation between the general public and science and clouds the potential contribution of science to the public discourse. Isn't it worth going down to the masses so that the masses will eagerly agree? The masses are not stupid; They want the worlds of knowledge to be opened to them. They just ask that they do it in a language they understand. Not all scientists are heavy and dull. Boredom in scientific writing is not destiny. Richard Feynman, Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and many others have proven that it is possible to present complex scientific topics to the masses in a simple and understandable language.

For most of history, broad public education was dangerous for the ruling classes. For thousands of years, kings and nobles, plantation owners and religious priests tried to prevent education from their subjects, believers, workers and slaves. The Enlightenment could introduce into the minds of the common people ideas about human rights, class equality, women's equality, progress and other dangerous ideas that could work for the benefit of all humanity instead of only the upper classes. That is why for hundreds of years the Christian prayers were held in Latin - a language that none of the simple believers understood (even today, various streams of Christianity hold the prayers precisely in the Latin language, but it is already a battle of withdrawal); That is why slave owners in the British colonies and the United States forbade their slaves to know how to read and write, and forbade whites to teach them; Therefore, for a long time it was forbidden to teach women to read and write, in Judaism and other religions. Knowledge is power, and those in power preferred to allow it only to them. Even when science began to break through to the forefront of history, in early modern Europe, science was still not among the pioneers of equality in education; He still relied on kings, nobles, priests and counts for his funding. Only with the rise of democracy did science's need for extensive public education rise. The scientists realized that freedom of information and large-scale education would bring both public budgets for scientific projects - and the manpower needed to sustain scientific research.

Recently, there has been an ironic reversal: the patronizing view that the capacity for scientific discussion should be limited to a limited public of "chosen" - this view is preserved today precisely in the place that is supposed to be the bastion of enlightenment: the academy. But this process does not apply without reason: public education nowadays is more extensive than ever. The universities, colleges, academies, are flourishing more than ever. This means that almost everyone has a degree. A situation has arisen in which an academic degree no longer indicates uniqueness as in the past. If so, how do we differentiate between the masses of certificate holders and the only ones who have scientific boldness, the ability to break through research, who can be the cutting edge of scientific research? Those who can make the change in science?

In the world of "hard" science - chemistry, physics, electronics and computers - it is possible to show real achievements. In the humanities and social sciences it is more difficult: how will it be determined who are the best? After all, a philosopher is not able to improve computer systems and a historian does not understand nanotechnology. The prevailing method to determine who are the best in the humanities, is not necessarily the best: to sort them according to the amount of text they emit. The most prominent evidence of this is the "publish or perish" regime, which states that it is not the quality of the writing that determines promotion, but the quantity. This is how academic people are pushed to write gibberish and specialize in gibberish just to play the discipline's game, while ignoring the simple masses who generally want to understand what they are talking about there, in the academy.

New scientific definitions may mean not only the development of new fields of knowledge, but also the fencing off of the research or academic field, the exclusion of the general public from this field, the creation of an artificial semantic fence between the field of research and us, the readers. This entrenchment in the ivory tower not only gives the academy a bad name; It harms the academy itself. how?

Scientists used to need the support of kings, earls and admirals to gain the environment and budget to allow them to research. Today, more than ever, scientists depend on budgets given to them by democratic authorities. Since these authorities are elected by the general public, it is best for scientists to present their research as communicatively as possible. It is better for scientists to explain why genetic engineering should not be feared, why vaccines save lives and the risk of them is negligible relative to their benefit, why research in embryonic stem cells is so important and what benefit space research may bring to mass communication and transportation (hint: GPS).

But the non-fiction books, the books of popular science, are in retreat; They are struggling against traditional state and sector education systems. In their home turf, the printed text, they struggle against beautiful literature - prose, novels - which sells ten times more than non-fiction books. Science literature also struggles against hundreds of TV channels and countless websites, an endless sea of ​​pseudo-knowledge and pseudo-science. We see the dismal results in the deterioration of science education in Israel, the falling number of science graduates in high schools and the public's ignorance of basic concepts in science. When a Facebook group of vaccine opponents has almost 40,000 members - in Israel alone - it means that something is very flawed in science's ability to clarify fundamental truths to the general public.

This is the real challenge of science communication: not only to present the latest research in a communicative manner, but to get people whose heaviest thing they ever held was a newspaper to pick up a science book. It is important to make science accessible to the public, even if the description is not accurate and complete, and even if it is done in generalizations. It is better that many understand a little, than that no one reads anything. This is the challenge of science communication: to present science so that it is both interesting and relevant. to link an insight about a scientist, a chemical process or a history of discovery, with an insight about us; about our lives; About the way we think, act, feel, imagine.

Yuval Noah Harari makes it in history; Michael Sandel does it in philosophy. He fills stadiums (a philosopher who fills stadiums sounds like a parody of Monty Python, but it's a reality); Dan Arieli and Daniel Kahneman do it in psychology; Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley do it in biology. There are many more. The trick is to find them, and not to despair and not to be deterred if you fall into yet another misunderstood philosopher. It is important that you only had a bad dream; That it was just a simulacrum - sorry, the parable of the cave - and move on, for a scholar who manages to simplify, even if he generalizes or is not XNUMX% accurate. After all, the future of humanity depends not only on scientists but also on their political and social support: an educated and responsible society, with basic scientific knowledge that will allow it to examine the paths of scientific progress. Popular science writers and science communication channels such as popular science websites - the "Angle" agency, Davidson Institute website And locate Hayadan, for example - they are the ones whose activities enable the existence of such a company.