Our piece in Science
has prompted many responses; my colleague Matt Nisbet has a pretty comprehensive rundown
of what we'd heard as of yesterday, with some inline replies. Of course, a lot more has cropped up since then, including from Bora
, and Mike the Mad Biologist
, among others. Bora
and Mike
are in general agreement with us, so I direct you there for great discussions that amplify what's already been said. As for those who are in disagreement, after the jump I'll elaborate on a few responses by Matt
, and add a few points of my own, by replying to Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers, and James Hrynyshyn. 1. What Role for Education? Zimmer brings up
a point that Matt and I have both heard in the past at talks:
....framing doesn't seem like quite the right response to the fact that over two-thirds of people in this country don't know enough about science to understand a newspaper story on a scientific subject. It seems more like surrender to me. Fixing high school science education seems a better plan.
Our response to Carl would be that it's not an either-or. Science education is critical, but it's also a long-term approach. It doesn't help us deal with the highly politicized hot-button issues that are playing out over the course of an election cycle--like embryonic stem cell research, or like global warming. On these issues, the frames game has already begun, and scientists are way behind. We simply can't wait for a better educated generation to come along and deal with these subjects in a wiser way. It will be too late. 2. What Role for Frame-Shattering? PZ has perhaps the most provocative response
to our piece. He says we're siding with conformity, saying that scientists should appease the other side. As PZ puts it,
...sometimes we want to change the public's ideas. We want to break the frames of the debate and shift whole worldviews, and accommodating ourselves to the status quo won't do.
This is really an appealing way of "framing" things. It invokes images of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. But I'm not sure it's quite right in this particular case. Matt and I, too, want to change norms and worldviews. We want to break some fricken frames. But we also recognize that changing worldviews is a long-term process, and you've got to begin somewhere. People need to be moved slowly, not abruptly, and you have to meet them at their individual starting points--not try to pull them down the road by force. That's really all we're saying: Move people by appealing to them in ways that are personally relevant--not abstruse, and not alienating. Aren't Scientists Over-Burdened Enough Already? James Hrynyshyn says we're saddling scientists with a job that ought to be performed by journalists, and that we're generally asking too much of them:
To be a great scientist requires enormous sacrifice and years of focusing on those very details that our framing enthusiasts would so readily discard. To tell them "Oh, and by the way, in addition to knowing your own field backwards and forwards, and being a good people manager, and writing killer grant applications, you also have to be a master of rhetoric, well-skilled in crafting public PowerPoint/Keynote presentations, and be completely up-to-speed on the latest political hot-button issues," is just plain cruel.
Matt and I never meant to suggest that every last scientist has to become a top notch framer. Rather, we want scientific societies, institutions, and universities to rearrange their priorities and step up to the plate on this. That means training a generation of better science communicators (although many scientists will assuredly opt out of the "framing" curriculum). It also means launching communication initiatives--such as advertising--targeted at specific publics, and using the right frames to reach them. The average bench scientist can happily duck all of this--there can be a division of labor--but for the scientific community as a whole, it's essential. Hrynyshyn also suggests that science journalism is where the productive framing ought to happen. The trouble is that traditional science journalism reaches far too narrow a slice of the public to have the kind of effect Matt and I are looking for. This is part of the problem with the whole "popular science" model of communication. But, Nisbet is the expert on this
. I'll defer to him.
