As it's President's Day and I plan on seizing the opportunity to get some writing done, I won't be blogging much. But I will leave you with something very worth of contemplation on the subject of how scientists can sucessfully combat attacks on their expertise and various assorted misinformation campaigns. As it turns out, my friend and sometime co-author Matthew Nisbet just presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science about this. Read here for his full message, but let me list the take-home points in bullet form:
1. SCIENCE EDUCATION REMAINS CENTRALLY IMPORTANT. 2. BUT TO ACHIEVE POLICY OUTCOMES IN THE SHORT TERM, POLITICAL CAMPAIGN STYLE EFFORTS ARE NEEDED. 3. FRAMING IS THE KEY TOOL. 4. GOING ON THE OFFENSIVE IS GOOD. 5. CHANGE WILL OCCUR AT THE MARGINS. 6. BUT SCIENCE ADVOCATES NEED TO BALANCE PERSUASION WITH HONESTY. TRUST IS ON THE LINE. 7. A DIVISION OF LABOR IS NEEDED IN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY.
Many of of the suggestions that Matt makes are very consistent with the ones that I myself floated in my Seed article, "Learning to Speak Science." Now, if we could only get scientists (and a few pro-science sugar daddies) to start trying to implement them...
