Science’s Biggest Fail

Well, we've seen lately an uptake in science evangelists like Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson. Both have been around for a long while, building reputation, but as-of-late both have been on a full assault against fallacies perpetuated by the media and the like.

We need more publicly-accepted household-named science evangelists to promote science, how it works, it's principles, etc.

This has even affected some of my family members for whom English is a second language, but who learned both meanings of the word simultaneously in the 80s in the US. Some of them can't separate the concepts, no matter how hard I try to explain to them that they are mostly unrelated.

EDIT: wording

Mainstream news is broken. Sure its possible to dig up a good/factually accurate/balanced perspective story in some of the less visited corners of the internet. But news mainly serves to validate someones politics more than real reporting. This needs to change so that the media can earn back some credibility as well.

"Imagine an engineer who normally comes to work in jeans and a t-shirt. One day the boss says "I want you to present your product tomorrow. Here's the address." So the engineer cobbles together a demo, dresses up in his khakis and a polo shirt, and shows up to present... at a nationally-televised, black-tie event. That's analogous to the situation in which climate scientists now find themselves.

For the most part, climate scientists are doing normal science, and thinking in terms of presenting their work to other scientists. But their work has become the centerpiece for huge global initiatives with large economic, environmental, and political impacts. This means their results, methods, and even personalities are being subject to an unusual degree of criticism (some valid, some not.)"

This creates a credibility gap. The science they're doing is perfectly acceptable in the "getting less wrong all the time" sense, but not really acceptable in the "we have a completely proven solution" sense.

We've all heard "science ... it works, bitches". Yeah, science works and planes fly -- but individual scientists will tell you it's more like http://www.twisteddoodles.com/image/86414780702 or https://electroncafe.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/scientific-pro... . Loads and loads of uncertainty, repeating experiments, interpreting results, criticism from other scientists, and then eventually you get something that improves on pre-existing ideas by a small amount. So the emphasis on the "planes fly" kind of science ends up increasing the credibility gap for the sort of ordinary science done by most scientists, because most science doesn't have flashy "now we have airplanes" type results.

Then there's the problem of science being presented by polarizing figures rather than scientists, and often being tied to specific policy recommendations that aren't actually all that closely tied to the science. Politicians are both overconfident in the science, and overconfident in their favored solutions.

So people end up buying anti-vaxx BS, even though that's an area where the science works in the "airplanes fly" sense. The data is overwhelmingly in favor of vaccinating for things like measles. But if people can't tell the difference between that kind of science and Al Gore saying "we need cap and trade" or some guy on TV selling nutritional supplements who uses the word "science" 12 times per minute in his infomercial, they'll have a hard time trusting even the best science.