Standing on the shoulders of seagulls

I'm pleased to present the first guest post on this blog. Here, my friend and colleague (and Natural Sciences student) John Tweedie shares his thoughts on the challenges of communicating science: both within the scientific community and to wider audiences. John also blogs on science, Scottish football, birdwatching, and anything else that takes his fancy.

Knowledge is next to useless if it’s not shared. Knowledge is created by sharing and standing on the shoulders of the proverbial giants who came before. From town criers proclaiming a monarch’s decisions and clans and tribes sharing knowledge through song and poems to the advent of the printing press and the development of the world wide web, people have a thirst for knowledge and an urge to share it with others, be they friends or opponents, colleagues or competitors.

Emerging from the shadows of alchemy through the works of Aristotle and Archimedes and onwards through the Enlightenment to the modern day, science has developed an extensive body of knowledge and various means to communicate, both within science and to the general public.

The scientific method is the accepted way in which science is conducted — a question is posed or an observation is made and a scientist will then develop a hypothesis to find general patterns that underlie the question. Through experiment and further observation, they will refine their hypotheses and so become more confident in their outcomes.

A major part of this process — indeed the main way in which to further develop the hypotheses and build towards the more robust ‘theory’ — is communicating the findings.

There are several ways this can be done. One is to take part in conferences where peers can ask questions about methods used when conducting an investigation and their outcomes. Often these presentations can be used to test early parts of work — is the work well received, or are people picking lots of holes in it? The feedback can send a scientist off in different directions — perhaps their methods have been flawed or their statistics do not support their work. Further revisions and presentations can lead to the work being readied for publication for the wider scientific community to study.

The general process of getting a paper published is regulated by the major journals and through peer review. A paper will be sent out to reviewers who will scrutinise the paper and decide whether it’s fit for publication.

Whether another scientist can or cannot replicate the findings will lend weight to the hypothesis or result in refinements of the hypothesis. Later studies replicating the original investigation may include errors in replicating the experiments, in which case these findings must be published too. In science, negative results are every bit as important as positive results. A good example of this was the recent search for the Higgs boson — a negative result would have meant scientists having to revise their hypotheses and models, which in itself is a continuation of the process of building knowledge.

The most important part of a paper is not the conclusions, but the methods. This is where a scientist demonstrates how they went about answering their question. It’s this part of the paper that allows other scientists to attempt to replicate the experiments and observations conducted. It’s important to note that most scientists work in teams and collaborate within their institutions and with colleagues across the globe, and that published papers often represent the work of many people.

There’s a tension between new discoveries and building on previous knowledge. Scientists must be familiar with the current thinking and all that has gone before in their field.

John James Audubon is well-known for his work in the early 19th century as a field ornithologist and artist. To test whether the turkey vulture had a good sense of smell he put out hidden carcasses, and concluded when the birds didn’t find the meat that they did not have a well-developed sense of smell. Unfortunately for him, his experiment was flawed, because if he had known more about these birds he would know that they prefer fresh carcasses rather than putrefying flesh, and it turned out that the birds he was observing were in fact another species which have a poorer sense of smell than the turkey vulture.  He was also under the mistaken belief that animals can only have one well-developed sense; in other words, if a bird has a good sense of sight they cannot have a good sense of smell.

Much science is highly specialised and only of interest to other scientists, but enough is of potential interest to the general public or considered ground-breaking or to have real-world applications that could solve urgent problems facing humanity and the world today. These papers are picked up and summarised first by popular science magazines which will present as much of the science as possible but for a non-specialist but highly interested and educated audience.

Next up are newspapers and the media — they’ll often simplify the findings, bringing out the practical applications of the science or demonstrating in what way the findings may or may not have revolutionised our knowledge about a particular topic. They’ll often put the science in context with what came before and what the science could lead to in the future.

This is where science communication to the public becomes really important. Science thrives on using precise and specialised language, often underpinned by difficult mathematics or conceptual ideas. The News at Ten is not going to devote time to talking about the intricacies of quantum mechanics: to properly understand such a topic a person really does need an education covering the basics — in this case physics — what an atom is, what it is composed of and how they interact with each other and the transfers of energy.

I have such a lot of respect for many of the science correspondents who can convey complex ideas in the few minutes they get, usually at the tail-end of news programmes. What they do is explain what the science means through using analogies or how the findings are going to find practical uses in the future. Are the results of the findings going to result in faster computers and better communications technologies, are they going to enable effective medical treatments to be created? Most people’s lives have been enriched by the work of scientists: indeed many people are still living due to research, so this is often where the excitement of ‘big science’ is really conveyed.

As much as the general media help to shape public interest in science they also have a responsibility to present it accurately. It’s all too easy to oversimplify the science to make it seem as if a study is something that has a ‘common sense’ answer, something the social sciences are particularly vulnerable to. They could misrepresent the science, leading to confusion and misunderstanding, perhaps undermining public confidence in scientists.

The media can also suggest that ideas are contentious and that there are dissenting voices out there when really there is none within science itself. This is common with climate science where the media, in a mistaken sense of balance and fair play, will allow sceptics or deniers lots of airtime, potentially giving the impression that the scientific consensus is undecided. The BBC has come under particular criticism for this, highlighted in a report by Steve Jones. Many of the sceptics or deniers are not scientists, but are opposed to the idea of what the science represents, either through ideological, political or economic beliefs, and they are particularly concerned with how countries will respond politically or economically to putting in mechanisms to slow down human-caused global warming.

Andrew Wakefield’s now discredited work on the link between the MMR vaccine and autism is a prime example of how irresponsible communication can lead to health scares, and ultimately to deaths. Parents honestly think they're behaving in their children’s' best interests, and often talk about making informed choices for their children, but when the findings of science is misrepresented it can have dire consequences. Many people do not have the scientific education to make truly informed decisions on matters like these and so the media has a responsibility to present findings accurately. This is an example where the peer review process had failed: it should have never have been published in the first case.

As such, I’d like to see scientific communication be a part of all science undergraduate training. Many scientists like to distance themselves from the media and the general public, enclosing themselves in their labs and ivory towers and working in the pursuit of pure science. However, with much science being publicly funded and ultimately having practical applications, scientists should be able to communicate to the press and media. Not everyone can be a Richard Feynman or Carl Sagan, but the ability to communicate clearly to a wide audience is something that should be nurtured. Science has many ideas and words that are used in a specialised way — theory and uncertainty are two examples which the general public do not understand — but scientists should be able to clearly explain what they mean in the context of their work. Often critics say things like ‘it's only a theory’ to shed doubt on evolution, or the public take uncertainty to mean that scientists aren’t sure about their results. These ideas and indeed all science must be clearly communicated.

There are many other mechanisms of science communication. These include popular science books, sometimes written by journalists or historians of science who bring together whole fields and present the science in context, but often by working scientists themselves. Textbooks find their place in university libraries and are only really read by students and other scientists.

Radio is where the voice of scientists is often heard by the general public, rather than their work being interpreted by correspondents as on TV. It’s this medium where they get more time to explain their ideas to the general public, and it’s here that the really good communicators excel.

Some excellent communicators and working scientists, such as Brian Cox and Alice Roberts, are able to work across all media and they really engage the public, often enthusing about science and encouraging the next generation of scientists. They present big ideas that are exciting — normally little knowledge is expected of the audience, although sometimes, like Jim Al-Khalili, they’ll present more difficult concepts, expecting the audience to keep up.

All of these examples show just how wide and varied science communication is. Science is incredibly important to our societies — its developments enable our way of life to be possible — we live longer, we can access information on any topic at any time in just a few seconds, we can travel hundreds of kilometres in a few hours, we can talk to our friends and families instantly living on the opposite side of the planet, and in the developed world we have more leisure time due to developments in technology, often derived from pure science.

We’ve put men on the Moon and to the bottom of the oceans, we’ve sent probes to other planets, one has just left the Solar System, and a rover is sending back information from another planet. We know how old our Solar System is and how long it’s expected to last.

All of this science has had an amazing impact and it will continue for as long as we keep asking questions and enquiring about how the world and the Universe works, with communication being at the heart of the process.

I suppose I ought to try and offer some sort of partial defence of the media's coverage of climate change. It's very hard for those of us on the other side of CP Snow's two cultures to accept that contentious issues can be genuinely settled one way or another, and we're right not to accept it in other areas: we journalists have a healthy scepticism towards authority which helps keep politicians and bureaucrats in check the rest of the time (or, at least, it does until they decide it won't any more).

There clearly is still a genuine debate about what to do about climate change, even if there's no longer a debate about the science itself (or, at least, the science so far rather than its extrapolations in the decades to come). I hope this secondary debate — essentially, should we risk short-term economic growth by trying to stem carbon emissions, or should we accept a warming world and instead spend our wealth on better adapting to it? — will now become the focus of the mainstream media's coverage. This Economist leader, for instance, seems to get the balance right.

The strange English of dead liberals

Today's Telegraph has a nice quote from Peter Oborne — the paper's contrarian-in-chief — on the ongoing failure to agree a workable meaning of the word 'liberal'...

Now we come to the second wing of the modern Liberal Democrats, who have their roots in the collectivism of the first decades of the 20th century rather than the individualism of the 19th. These members greatly admire the state, while tending to be hostile to individual liberty. Bafflingly, they also call themselves liberals. But like so many other confusions of language, this is almost entirely the fault of the United States. Just as the Americans use the term “gas” for what we call petrol, so they have mangled the meaning of the term “liberal”, using it to describe those who embrace the state as a means of enforcing what they regard as desirable social goals – usually ones associated with the imposition of social or economic conformity.

As I've written before, tethering yourself to the 'liberal' mast lets you fudge the issue of whether you're really a centre-right Economist-reading type or a centre-left social democrat. In America the word now clearly means the latter, in Australia presumably still the former, while in Britain many left-wing voters assumed the Lib Dems were merely a less authoritarian version of the Labour Party (so ignoring their capture by Orange Book soft-libertarians). 

In Europe, proportional electoral systems mean parties aren't forced into uneasy SDP/Liberal-style alliances to win parliamentary representation. Anyone who isn't an ossified conservative (whether of left or right) should want the same for Britain: for the sake of our language as well as our politics. Electoral reform would allow classical and contemporary liberals to part ways: leaving each to campaign on a clearer and more honest platform, and ensuring that one of Western civilisation's greatest intellectual traditions doesn't just come to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean.

The political scientist

After Margaret Thatcher died, this leaflet from her third (but first successful) parliamentary campaign did the rounds on Twitter:

As an editor, I can't help noticing that there are four pages of the stuff, not to mention the usual assortment of random and pointless capitalisations (some things don't change).

I doubt, by the end of her political career, she would have stood on a platform of 'BENEFITS UP' — but I think, policy aside, it tells us a lot about how political communication changed in the second half of the 20th century.  Fast forward to her leadership of the Conservative Party and her time as prime minister, and compare her first endearingly amateur leaflet with these very influential, clear and direct adverts.  First, the Saatchi campaign that got her elected:

Then the advert I most associate with her time in office, 'AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance':

We don't tend to think of Thatcher as one of the great political communicators — admirers and detractors both point more to her unshakeable ideology and her force of personality as the secrets of her success — but we might remember how much of the professionalised media management Blair, Mandelson and Campbell perfected in the New Labour era began with her and her press secretary Bernard Ingham.  Perhaps, also, her dislike for nuance, subtlety and intellectual contortion allowed her to present simplified, easily understood messages in a way that has often eluded highbrow leftwing opponents.

The one epitaph being consistently applied by both friends and enemies is that 'you always knew what she stood for'.  In politics I'd prefer to live by Keynes' maxim, and my instincts would always favour consensus over a 51% strategy: but we can't deny the power that the Thatcher brand held for so many people for a remarkably long time.  The appeal of that uncomplicated approach, and the way her image personified her ideas, surely holds lessons for today's corporate and organisational communicators.  Like Supermac, and in a way her biggest rivals Tarzan and the Welsh Windbag never matched, the Iron Lady embraced an opponent's epithet and turned it greatly to her own advantage.

However, I think today marks the moment the brand overreached itself; achieved Thatcheration point.  A ceremonial funeral (a state funeral in all but name), complete with several hundred serving members of the armed forces, a cancellation of PMQs and a silencing of Big Ben, seems to me fitting only for a head of state, not a former head of government.  That conservatives fail to grasp the difference shows the hold she still has on their worldview.

I hope, then, I won't upset anyone by suggesting that now is the time to lay the brand to rest, not to immortalise it.

How's that squirty inky stuff workin' out for ya?

I've written a lot in favour of the principles of plain English and Orwellian language generally, so I enjoyed Ed Smith's piece in the New Statesman challenging the ideas the great man laid out in Politics and the English Language. The penultimate paragraph was especially well put:

Orwell argues that the sins of obfuscation and euphemism followed inevitably from the brutalities of his political era. In the age of the atom bomb and the Gulag, politicians reached for words that hid unpalatable truths. By contrast, our era of vague political muddle and unclear dividing lines has inspired a snappy, gritty style of political language: the no-nonsense, evidence-backed, bullet-pointed road to nowhere.

 

It's very hard to disagree with that, particularly with the point about evidence-based policymaking, a phrase often used as a figleaf for policy-based evidencemaking. But I think the wider argument rests on something of a misreading of plain English; of when it needn't be used and when it must.

Any clear and honest communication of a political message is obviously a challenge both to bureaucratic or academic jargon that overcomplicates issues, but less obviously a challenge to the dumbing down that oversimplifies them (which seems often to be confused for plain English). Owen Jones is quite perceptive in noting that the left are particularly guilty on the former score, and the right on the latter: though we could hardly accuse Obama, say, of subxaggerating his backstory.

It's perfectly possible to be insincere with simple, straightforward language. Speaking honestly ought to be just as important as speaking plainly. Finally, it seems to be stating the obvious that plain English is necessary when the writer's primary purpose is to communicate clearly, but might not be when it isn't. A commentor on Stephen Poole's Guardian piece puts it perfectly:

I think you misunderstand the point of plain English a bit (but then in fairness, perhaps some of its adherents do as well). Most people wouldn't expect poetry to be written in plain English. But most people wouldn't expect poetry in a letter from the council, or a bank. Those are the kinds of communication plain English needs to be used in, so that everybody is able to easily understand information that directly affects their lives.

 

Frustrated narcissists in damp garrets are welcome to shovel as much allusion, amphibology and aureation into their fevered, ne'er-to-be-read ramblings and rants as they can manage: but please keep them away from writing letters for HMRC.

Deconstructing dog whistles

Today I noticed a piece of political communication that raised my eyebrows: this one-day poster campaign by the Tories to highlight Labour's support for the government's 1% cap on public sector wage rises (a cut, in real terms) but opposition to the government's 1% cap on rises in benefits.

You might think I'm being pedantic (it is my job, after all) but I think what they've come up with doesn't quite come off.  When you have as few words as this to play with, as will always be the case in a billboard poster, the message needs to be totally unambiguous, and I don't think this is.

The 'by' makes it fall down: it suggests Labour support putting up benefits by an amount greater than workers' salaries, which obviously isn't the case.  On realising it's not the case, the floating voter on the Clapham omnibus might then find himself wondering why the Tories had put up such a misleading poster, and ask himself what else he can't trust them to be straight about.  It also raises the question: which workers?

My suggested wording (assuming that mentioning a 'cap' would be too Westminster villagey) would be as follows: 'Labour want to cut public sector wages. They don't want to cut benefits', perhaps followed by 'Only the Conservatives stand up for hardworking people.'  This leaves out that the government also want to cut public sector wages, so is perhaps a bit more ruthless, but also I think a bit clearer.  Or they could just have gone with 'Today Labour are voting to increase benefits more than public sector wages', or better still "more than nurses' and teachers' wages", if it has to be a one-day-only ad.

Commentators on left and right seem to agree that this is an effective message (as long as the Tories don't overdo it).  It might be a smart political strategy — and if they really can divide the country into 'strivers' and 'skivers' in self-identifying strivers' minds they'll have pulled off quite a propaganda coup — but tactically I'd say they've missed a bit of trick with this effort.

Am I missing the point entirely by trying to deconstruct the dog whistle?  Possibly: my straw man in Clapham might well not get as far as realising that, taken literally, the poster is nonsense.  The strategy, then, relies on confusing voters more than convincing them.  That might work: but why take the risk when a clearer but no less convincing alternative exists?