Who has heard of Jim Ottaviani? He’s a guy with an excellent line of science-related comics — I have “Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards”, but there are quite a few others I have to buy now — and now Scott Hatfield interviews Ottaviani at the San Diego ComicCon. Remember, we need multiple approaches to get science across to people, and comics/graphic novels have wide appeal!
I’d like to thank Megan for mentioning Colin Purrington’s excellent essay on what you can do to improve the presentation of evolution in museums. It’s positive, it’s simple, it’s stuff you can do on your very next museum visit.
I approve of this article criticizing the dumbing down of science in museums. I think a lot of science museums need a good sharp kick in the pants, because they are going too far down the road of pandering to mass media sensations — our local museum is running a big show on the science of Star Wars, and that article is complaining about the exhibits at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia about “Real Pirates” and “Chronicles of Narnia”. These are real concerns, and there has been a steady drift away from challenging attendees with interesting ideas towards merely entertaining them.
On the other hand, some flash and dazzle is a way to get the younger set involved. Museums, especially ones geared for younger family members, shouldn’t go too far the other way in pretending that popular culture doesn’t exist, or become too dry and serious. When we lived in Philly, we’d occasionally (not often, though — as the article points out, these places have become absurdly expensive) take the kids into center city, and walk down Benjamin Franklin Parkway to Logan Circle, and we’d catch of few of the museums there. The Franklin Institute was always the one with the caravans of school busses outside and the mobs of kids running through it, so we knew what we were getting into there. I always preferred the Academy of Natural Sciences museum myself — it was just across the street, and it had lots more substantive science on display.
We need a balance. It sounds like the Franklin Institute has gone too far in one direction, but it’s still filling an appropriate role…except, maybe, for that “Narnia” thing. I don’t see how to make a science story from a complete fantasy without even a technological angle to its story.
This should enliven your morning: Abigail Smith and I did a Bloggingheads diavlog the other day, and now you can watch us chatter away. I know you’ve all been wondering what Abbie looks like in person. (One odd thing about recording these, though: we are conversing over the phone, but we don’t actually see each other while we’re recording — it’s a bit of a surprise to see how it turns out.)
I should have combed my hair before I went on, I realize, and maybe I shouldn’t have been sipping at that glass containing the blood of innocents throughout.
Larry Moran has been highlighting the work of some great science writers — you really should start off your day with selections from two of my favorites, Richard Lewontin and Niles Eldredge. It’s almost as good as coffee for perking up your brain.
Blake Stacey, who is a good guy to have by your side in a firefight, has a wonderfully complicated post on this thing called science blogging. He’s mostly stating the obvious: it’s anarchic, it’s very hard to pull out, say, introductory material on a specific topic in science, there are problems of accountability, we don’t produce anything as coherently useful as a basic textbook, etc. Well, yeah. This is a general problem with solutions that bubble up from the ground rather than being defined from above — they do something very, very well, but it usually isn’t the something that a planner would design, and they often won’t easily do something else that you think they ought to do. Blake is entirely aware of this, obviously.
Nobody is acting as the central regulator of online science writing, though some would like to try. The interactions and evolutions we see are the result of the incentives at work, playing themselves out. If we want to change the way science blogging happens, or if we want our loose community to start generating something new, central decrees are no good: we have to make our desiderata the natural products of volunteer enthusiasm. Furthermore, science blogs are not a central authority for anybody else, so if we want to change their behavior, we have to find ways to put new “motivator units” in place.
He’s pointing to a real problem, and we’re aware that establishing a central authority is not going to solve anything, and I’d say it would even ruin everything. Incentives have to come from somewhere. My answer is…don’t worry, be happy, the solution will come from somewhere where you least expect it.
As an example, blogs themselves. I kept a web page for a long time, since the early 1990s, when all we did is write static html. When blogs started to emerge, I didn’t quite see the point. I could see exactly what they were: they were nothing but web-based front ends for personal databases. That’s all they are still. I couldn’t quite see the point — the data being stored was rather idiosyncratic, and personally, I couldn’t imagine myself writing enough stuff that it would warrant database tools to manage it. But then something odd happened: it turned out to be very useful to be able to compose something, and have it stored away in a manner that made it easy to access again. And then populating the database with useful stuff started to become an end in itself, the new motivator unit, and as the database grew, it became more useful, and that in turn made it more compelling to put more stuff in it, and so on.
Feed forward loops are powerful forces, people.
Then the other big force was Google. Google is the one significant tool we have for poking around in other people’s personal databases. That’s another powerful motivator, that we find ourselves able to plumb other people’s words and experiences fairly easily, and what do you know, other people are interesting, so we want to look more, and we want other people to find us interesting, so we stuff more and more goodies into our own databases. Feed forward, feed forward, feed forward.
However, and this is the limitation that Blake bemoans, the motivator is too general: all we’ve got is a criterion based on how many people find a particular database entry interesting, which is terribly vague. We want to know how many people find an entry informative, and even more, what kind of people (novices, experts, whatever) find the entry useful, and in what way. Google is terrible at this. I’ll be the first to admit that Pharyngula entries rank high in the Google indexes not because they are necessarily the best at explaining overall, but because they tap into subjects and attitudes that are popular. If popularity were synonymous with accurate or useful or expert, then America would have been created 6,000 years ago by a magical giant with a long white beard, and everyone in the world would be a porn star.
So right now we are waiting for the next piece of the toolbox to fall into place, adding new metrics that will feed forward into new capabilities. We can’t design them — design is a terrible paradigm for adding unexpected newness and potential (which any evolutionary biologist would tell you). What will happen is a surprising and unpredictable side-effect of something else on the web. It could be something like social networking software adding a new criterion, like whuffie, that focuses people’s energies on productive contributions — only it won’t be the social networking software as it is now, and it won’t be whuffie, and it will have multiple effects, some of which may not be desirable. We will be surprised. It will take time for it to take over and become useful. In the early stages, almost all of us will be scratching our heads and wondering why anyone would find that interesting (cf. Twitter), and many of the solutions that are promising early on will fail. We are waiting for something new to evolve, and the best way to promote that is to encourage diversity and look at everything sideways, not by pushing for a specific solution. You don’t get emergent properties by forcing a result, or they wouldn’t be emergent properties.
The only answer is to keep playing. Don’t worry about it. Expect and embrace serendipity.
Somebody has floated the idea of building an Evolution Museum in the same neighborhood as Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum”. Superficially, it’s a fine idea, but no, I can’t support it, for a number of reasons.
Every natural history museum is an evolution museum.
There is already a natural history museum in Cincinnati—The Cincinnati Museum Center.
The web page for this proposed museum is thin and unprofessional. It looks like someone had the bright idea to build a competing museum, and his first and only strategy was to scribble up some html, in the hopes that millions will come pouring in through Pay Pal.
You want to build a real museum? Get the support of the scientific community first. Try to integrate with existing institutions. Line up real money from investors. Then ask private individuals to put a few dollars on their Visa card. This proposal is entirely backwards.
Charging forward as a private citizen and making naive plans to just “build a museum” might, if they’re very lucky, produce four walls and some space, but it will be just as superficial and empty as Ken Ham’s kitschy pile of crap.
Their financial page just makes me cringe. They’ve got 0 donations, but they’re dreaming of donations on the order of $10 million per month. Unbelievable.
So, like, ugh. There is a right way to go about putting together the complex resources needed to build a museum, and I’m pretty darned sure this isn’t it.
Now, if somebody were working with regional universities and museums and had a real plan that tapped into investments from the state government and/or local industry, then we’d have something I could get behind. This is, however, a much bigger project than the instigator has imagined.
It’s nice to know that at least one person liked my talks in Seattle — and I know at least one didn’t, the creationist who made the tired accusation that I was a “fundamentalist” in the Q&A — but you can make up your own mind, since a podcast of the NWSA talk is available.
Now, though, I just want to go home and take a nap for a while.
Randy Olson doesn’t like you. He says some very harsh things about the science blogs readership on the Skepticality podcast — you guys are all just so darn mean to him. This is all very unfortunate, because he does have some good things to say, but he’s also taking disagreement very personally, and is seeing things only through the lens of the filmmaker,which is skewing his perspective away from some significant points, at the same time that it’s giving him some useful and interesting views.
For instance, he criticizes my response to the event in which I got kicked out of a movie theater — the problem, he says, was that I was drawing attention to an event in which I had nothing to sell, while they did, and that’s a mistake. I certainly do have something to sell: myself (which I find personally important, even if no one else does), the blog Pharyngula, and the science of evolution. I don’t have a movie, but most people don’t; it’s a case of the Olson blinders to think that the only thing that matters is your movie. I managed to sell Pharyngula quite well, and got a lasting 30-50% increase in traffic, as well as more attention from the media.
The other thing he’s missing is what we accomplished with Expelled. Again, we don’t have a competing movie to promote, so we couldn’t very well peddle a positive message about our alternative cinema experience. Instead, we had to show that Expelled was a profoundly dishonest movie on all levels; we impeached its credibility successfully. The reviews tell the story, that they all point out how wretchedly false the story of the movie was. We can’t stop people from attending the movie, but we can weaken its utility as a tool for the creationist movement.
And that’s where we won. The podcast continues to falsely claim that the movie was a success, quoting box office figures. Wrong message. This movie was a flop: it lost money. Even more significantly, it failed with its intended audience. Remember, creationism is huge in this country, and a movie that taps into that base has got an automatic edge, which is how it managed to get millions in gross receipts. However, that’s also where it failed. It did not get any momentum at all with the evangelical audience, with a steady, rapid decline in attendance from day one. This is a movie that is coasting on Christian gullibility, but is getting no traction at all. Part of it is that the movie started with no credibility, but I suspect another part of its failure was in its marketing: ads on The Daily Show sound impressive to us, but weren’t going to draw in likely attendees, and using a rock-and-roll soundtrack and the image of rebelliousness is also not going to woo the evangelical crowd. Daily Show ads would have probably been very effective for Olson’s movie, Flock of Dodos, but they were wasted effort for this one.
One thing Olson is entirely correct on is that likability is important. I have no illusions that I’m a charming fellow, but in my public talks you may have noticed that everyone complains that I don’t breathe fire or eviscerate any creationists on the podium. That’s intentional — going all Lewis Black only works when you’ve got an audience that already agrees with you. However, the other essential component of a successful media strategy has got to be strength. Haven’t we learned that yet from years of watching Republican political tactics? They don’t win on just presenting perspectives agreeable to their electorate, but by being vicious bastards who won’t compromise. Olson is telling us to be like Jimmy Carter, and ignoring the fact that the environment right now is dominated by the likes of Dick Cheney, unlikable thug. Even worse is that he’s forgetting that it was Carter vs. Reagan, who was both likable and put up a good illusion of strength.
What we really need is someone who is fiercely likable, someone who can be admired while they’re fighting for science. I fear that what everyone else is calling for is the scientist as friendly, unchallenging wimp who will make the public feel safe and able to go on believing whatever nonsense they want … when what we really need is someone to shake up the bogosity of the general public’s delusions.
You people all need to get on over to Sciencewomen — she’s been blogging the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. This is the stuff of the next generation of scientists!
