Hello,
This is my first thread. Some of you may recognize me from the comments sections of certain news articles where I tend to post walls O' text in response to some commenter's repetition of pop culture's view of scientists as evil geniuses plotting to destroy the world with black holes and zombie viruses and whatever. I thought that maybe I should take the initiative and explain why I feel so strongly about the subject, and explain where the frustration comes from that drives me to spend an hour or two every other day writing essays to people who probably don't care how well I state my arguments.
Ok, yes, I'll admit that being fucking insane and delusional is part of it. But there's more:
See, most of the criticism leveled at science and scientists comes from complete misconceptions about what science is. At the simplest level, science is a way of finding the truth, and understanding reality. The scientific method works by observing the world's behavior, coming up with an explanation for that behavior, and then testing that explanation to see if it holds up under scrutiny. If that explanation does hold up, it goes from being a hypothesis to being a theory, which is no small feat.
Any idea that can genuinely be called a theory has been questioned and tested by dozens if not hundreds of people, many of whom want nothing more than to find a way to disprove it. The presentation of a hypothesis to a meeting of scientists can sometimes be similar to a trial at court, but with up to a couple hundred prosecutors and sometimes as many as a handful of defense attorneys. The more prosecutors there are, the more likely it is that the world's best experts on the subject are among them. The prospects for an idea that is not absolutely rock-solid are grim. Some of the most important theories we have now had to go through this process and be denied many times before finding acceptance, because merely being correct isn't enough.
To hear Hollywood, the news media, the general public, and worst of all, politicians describe it though, there's no such thing as a hypothesis, and any crazy idea automatically becomes a theory just as soon as it forms in a scientist's head, no matter how unsound the idea is. The phrase "it's just a theory" is thrown about as a way to suggest that it's almost certainly wrong.
People often write off the work of scientists as the product of a couple hours, afternoons if they're feeling generous, of idle speculation. The reality is somewhat different.
The actual work of observation and data collection, and the grueling process of assembling and interpreting that data, is also a daunting task. Research projects often start at least a year in advance of the actual work. You have to figure out what your goal is, figure out what data would be useful, what methods can be used to acquire the data, whether those methods will give you good data or biased data, then you have to figure out the logistics. Travel, food, lodging, tools, facilities, bribes for corrupt customs officials (yes, this is a real thing that has to be accounted for), permits, visas and passports, assistants and porters, the list goes on. Once you've got all this figured out, you then realize that you've got nowhere near enough money to pull it off, so you have to take all your plans and logistics and present them to a grant foundation and convince them that you know what you're doing so they will give you the money. If you get this far, congratulations, you can start packing at this point.
I will leave it to this video to shorten the wall of text and give you an idea of how seriously the minute details are taken for the tiniest little thing that could be influencing the system being studied: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlyorcJ28UA
You then have to collect your data and not lose it (this can happen, and more often than you would think. I've personally experienced this when our rock samples got lost by the lab that was supposed to date them. Trust me, losing your memory card is heavenly next to that experience). When you get back home, you spend your free time sorting through the data, building graphs and spreadsheets, looking up formulas, finding relationships, making sure they really are relationships and not something that you only see because you want to see it, and then putting all of it together in a way that shows you did your homework, you didn't cheat, you didn't miss the point, and that your explanation really does make more sense than the 20 or so others you didn't think of or hadn't heard of, or didn't design your project to address.
It would also, by the way, be a good idea at some point during all this to make sure you haven't unwittingly spent the year/decade on a problem someone else somewhere has already solved.
If your work amounts to not much more than a confirmation of what's already known, then you publish your findings in a journal and go on to the next thing.
If your work is important or conflicts with others, you might want to present it at a meeting for your field. There's at least one every year and there's bound to be at least a couple dozen people working in the same field who are keenly interested in the topic you've chosen. If your work conflicts with someone else's, they'll probably be there too. Some proficiency with politics is recommended in that case. Also, everyone loves to pick apart any new ideas, so be prepared to defend yours. This is where that courtroom situation that I mentioned above arises.
There are variations depending on your field, but that's roughly how it goes.
This is all to illustrate how wrong the popular conception of scientists as people "just sitting around making crazy shit up" really is. It should also be obvious at this point that the "Mad scientist in a castle" trope really doesn't have anything to do with reality at all.
For some reason, there is a giant disconnect between this and the public. From the way people I've overheard on the bus or in restaurants or on the street or, of course, on forums speak about it, you'd think that there's no honest work being done in the making of a hypothesis or theory. Best of all, the news will often take the work of thousands of scientists from hundreds of countries working for decades on all aspects of the problem, as is the case with the International Panel on Climate Change, and present it as being on an equal footing with the major conflicting argument, made by a handful or even one person who has a science degree and works for Exxon Mobil. To the public, all that work disappears and the argument is reduced to one group's word against another group's word.
I want you to imagine Commander Shepard having about 50 years after the end of the first Mass Effect game to travel the galaxy, even visit Dark Space and take samples, photos, and videos of the hibernating reapers, find fossils of the last 20 or so species that the Reapers destroyed, find every news story that the Protheans made about the Reapers in the time that they had, download all the data they collected on Ilos, rebuild Vigil and get it to talk again, find the derelict reaper and put it in a museum, then launch it back into space again because the visitors kept getting indoctrinated, and lead people on monthly tours to the collector base so they could see first hand what goes on there. I want you to imagine that Shepard did all this, and additionally released all this information free of charge to the extranet. I want you to imagine that Shepard was not the only one doing this, but that Shepard's work was aided and complemented by thousands of brilliant and talented minds from nearly every planet in Council Space, and that the Reaper threat was acknowledged by every serious archeological, technological and historical institution in the galaxy. And I want you to imagine that after all this, Ms. Al-Jilani snidely and disingenuously brought the Turian councilor on her show to tell everyone, with finger quotes, that claims about the reapers have been dismissed. I want you to imagine that well more than half the galaxy believed the bastard.
Further, they believe that Shepard spent those 50 years doing not much more than feeding fish and listening to the tunes on the cabin radio, perhaps engaging in full sodomy simulations occasionally, and speculating idly on what happened to the Protheans when bored. Further, many suspect that Shepard is secretly experimenting with Artificial Intelligence, the Geth, and Rachni, and is going to someday either unleash them on the galaxy or lose control of them. After all, Shepard is known to have both a Geth and an AI on board the Normandy, and to have associated with the Rachni Queen before. No one remembers or thanks Shepard for anything good accomplished in the first game, kids who want to be like Shepard someday are beat up at school, though every once in a while there's an extranet video of one of the bullies getting pwned by a would-be victim who happens to be a biotic adept, and when not being portrayed in holovids as the future destroyer of the universe, Shepard is portrayed as a socially inept dork who lives below the stairs in engineering.
Now, you may have some idea of the frustration that comes with being a scientist these days.
Why worry about it? My sister points out that I'm wasting my time, that I'm never going to change anyone's mind, there are too many ignorant, intellectually lazy people out there in the world (and it really is laziness; with the internet, learning about what you're talking about has never been easier, cheaper, or faster, but few people seem to take advantage of that before making wild hysterical claims about GM foods or black holes at the LHC or other nonsense). She is of the opinion that people are too ignorant to save themselves, and we'll all be wiped out by each other or some disaster eventually and then it won't matter any more. She feels it's better that way because if we never leave the Solar System, no one else will have to put up with us, and no other planets will have to be, to use her terminology, destroyed or infected by us. She agrees with Agent Smith's reasoning on human beings as a kind of virus.
My opinion is a bit more optimistic. I don't believe that the best likely outcome has to be our destruction. We don't have to destroy ourselves, and we don't have to stay here till we die. If we leave Earth, we don't have to exhibit what Smith called virus-like behavior. The limitations that we have are real, but we don't have to be bound by them. We can learn to embrace the unknown rather than fearing it, to weigh our decisions carefully rather than choosing arbitrarily or choosing based on what we wish were true rather than what is true.
We can, if we master the impulses that are still with us from the days when we were much farther down the food chain, overcome this tendency towards ignorance by default, find a balance between the energy we consume and the energy available, and not only reach the stars, but be the kind of society that would not endanger anyone else by doing so.
This change is hampered by the spreading of ignorance and hysteria, especially about the research currently being done to both increase our understanding of the universe and to ensure that we live long enough to be able to use that knowledge. The continued demonization of science and scientists in pop culture doesn't help either. TV tropes lists "Science is Bad" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceIsBad) as an actual trope, and the hyperlinked text reading "Science is Good" goes instead to the Averted Tropes page.
I feel that it is important to try to dispel these myths and misconceptions. I'll admit I'm not very tactful when doing so, but I don't think it's appropriate to pretend that harmful opinions are worthy of respect. One positive thing I try to do in every post I make is to remind people that scientists have not, in fact, destroyed the world yet, despite having done so thousands of times in fiction. There have been no Frankensteins, zombie apocalypses, or man-made black holes in the real world. On the other hand, there is a long list of real horrors that, because of scientists, you will have an easier time with or not even face at all. The eradication of smallpox and the fact that today we can feed a number of people that would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago are substantial victories.
My own field of interest, volcanology, has saved tens of thousands of people in the last 20 years from being burned alive, buried, or poisoned to death, and it is such a minority science that there are only a handful of schools in the US that offer graduate programs in it (and the last time someone tried to not decrease funding for it, they got called out on national TV for cheap political points). Historically, one of the biggest obstacles to saving lives in volcanic disasters is the fact that people don't always believe the scientists, occasionally regard them with suspicion and hostility, and sometimes even accuse them of causing the eruptions in the first place. Of course, if a forecast turns out to be a false positive, they get death threats from angry business owners.
There's just no gratitude in this line of work. Frustration is a fairly common feeling whenever I observe the interaction between science and mainstream culture, but I am still hopeful that, barring a takeover of the education system by the creationists, we can continue onward and upward, and grow past this unfortunate backwards thinking like we have grown past so many other unfortunate cultural quirks.
For the moment, I'm not sure I can do much more than try to dispel misconceptions about this institution, one hysteric at a time.
This is my first thread. Some of you may recognize me from the comments sections of certain news articles where I tend to post walls O' text in response to some commenter's repetition of pop culture's view of scientists as evil geniuses plotting to destroy the world with black holes and zombie viruses and whatever. I thought that maybe I should take the initiative and explain why I feel so strongly about the subject, and explain where the frustration comes from that drives me to spend an hour or two every other day writing essays to people who probably don't care how well I state my arguments.
Ok, yes, I'll admit that being fucking insane and delusional is part of it. But there's more:
See, most of the criticism leveled at science and scientists comes from complete misconceptions about what science is. At the simplest level, science is a way of finding the truth, and understanding reality. The scientific method works by observing the world's behavior, coming up with an explanation for that behavior, and then testing that explanation to see if it holds up under scrutiny. If that explanation does hold up, it goes from being a hypothesis to being a theory, which is no small feat.
Any idea that can genuinely be called a theory has been questioned and tested by dozens if not hundreds of people, many of whom want nothing more than to find a way to disprove it. The presentation of a hypothesis to a meeting of scientists can sometimes be similar to a trial at court, but with up to a couple hundred prosecutors and sometimes as many as a handful of defense attorneys. The more prosecutors there are, the more likely it is that the world's best experts on the subject are among them. The prospects for an idea that is not absolutely rock-solid are grim. Some of the most important theories we have now had to go through this process and be denied many times before finding acceptance, because merely being correct isn't enough.
To hear Hollywood, the news media, the general public, and worst of all, politicians describe it though, there's no such thing as a hypothesis, and any crazy idea automatically becomes a theory just as soon as it forms in a scientist's head, no matter how unsound the idea is. The phrase "it's just a theory" is thrown about as a way to suggest that it's almost certainly wrong.
People often write off the work of scientists as the product of a couple hours, afternoons if they're feeling generous, of idle speculation. The reality is somewhat different.
The actual work of observation and data collection, and the grueling process of assembling and interpreting that data, is also a daunting task. Research projects often start at least a year in advance of the actual work. You have to figure out what your goal is, figure out what data would be useful, what methods can be used to acquire the data, whether those methods will give you good data or biased data, then you have to figure out the logistics. Travel, food, lodging, tools, facilities, bribes for corrupt customs officials (yes, this is a real thing that has to be accounted for), permits, visas and passports, assistants and porters, the list goes on. Once you've got all this figured out, you then realize that you've got nowhere near enough money to pull it off, so you have to take all your plans and logistics and present them to a grant foundation and convince them that you know what you're doing so they will give you the money. If you get this far, congratulations, you can start packing at this point.
I will leave it to this video to shorten the wall of text and give you an idea of how seriously the minute details are taken for the tiniest little thing that could be influencing the system being studied: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlyorcJ28UA
You then have to collect your data and not lose it (this can happen, and more often than you would think. I've personally experienced this when our rock samples got lost by the lab that was supposed to date them. Trust me, losing your memory card is heavenly next to that experience). When you get back home, you spend your free time sorting through the data, building graphs and spreadsheets, looking up formulas, finding relationships, making sure they really are relationships and not something that you only see because you want to see it, and then putting all of it together in a way that shows you did your homework, you didn't cheat, you didn't miss the point, and that your explanation really does make more sense than the 20 or so others you didn't think of or hadn't heard of, or didn't design your project to address.
It would also, by the way, be a good idea at some point during all this to make sure you haven't unwittingly spent the year/decade on a problem someone else somewhere has already solved.
If your work amounts to not much more than a confirmation of what's already known, then you publish your findings in a journal and go on to the next thing.
If your work is important or conflicts with others, you might want to present it at a meeting for your field. There's at least one every year and there's bound to be at least a couple dozen people working in the same field who are keenly interested in the topic you've chosen. If your work conflicts with someone else's, they'll probably be there too. Some proficiency with politics is recommended in that case. Also, everyone loves to pick apart any new ideas, so be prepared to defend yours. This is where that courtroom situation that I mentioned above arises.
There are variations depending on your field, but that's roughly how it goes.
This is all to illustrate how wrong the popular conception of scientists as people "just sitting around making crazy shit up" really is. It should also be obvious at this point that the "Mad scientist in a castle" trope really doesn't have anything to do with reality at all.
For some reason, there is a giant disconnect between this and the public. From the way people I've overheard on the bus or in restaurants or on the street or, of course, on forums speak about it, you'd think that there's no honest work being done in the making of a hypothesis or theory. Best of all, the news will often take the work of thousands of scientists from hundreds of countries working for decades on all aspects of the problem, as is the case with the International Panel on Climate Change, and present it as being on an equal footing with the major conflicting argument, made by a handful or even one person who has a science degree and works for Exxon Mobil. To the public, all that work disappears and the argument is reduced to one group's word against another group's word.
I want you to imagine Commander Shepard having about 50 years after the end of the first Mass Effect game to travel the galaxy, even visit Dark Space and take samples, photos, and videos of the hibernating reapers, find fossils of the last 20 or so species that the Reapers destroyed, find every news story that the Protheans made about the Reapers in the time that they had, download all the data they collected on Ilos, rebuild Vigil and get it to talk again, find the derelict reaper and put it in a museum, then launch it back into space again because the visitors kept getting indoctrinated, and lead people on monthly tours to the collector base so they could see first hand what goes on there. I want you to imagine that Shepard did all this, and additionally released all this information free of charge to the extranet. I want you to imagine that Shepard was not the only one doing this, but that Shepard's work was aided and complemented by thousands of brilliant and talented minds from nearly every planet in Council Space, and that the Reaper threat was acknowledged by every serious archeological, technological and historical institution in the galaxy. And I want you to imagine that after all this, Ms. Al-Jilani snidely and disingenuously brought the Turian councilor on her show to tell everyone, with finger quotes, that claims about the reapers have been dismissed. I want you to imagine that well more than half the galaxy believed the bastard.
Further, they believe that Shepard spent those 50 years doing not much more than feeding fish and listening to the tunes on the cabin radio, perhaps engaging in full sodomy simulations occasionally, and speculating idly on what happened to the Protheans when bored. Further, many suspect that Shepard is secretly experimenting with Artificial Intelligence, the Geth, and Rachni, and is going to someday either unleash them on the galaxy or lose control of them. After all, Shepard is known to have both a Geth and an AI on board the Normandy, and to have associated with the Rachni Queen before. No one remembers or thanks Shepard for anything good accomplished in the first game, kids who want to be like Shepard someday are beat up at school, though every once in a while there's an extranet video of one of the bullies getting pwned by a would-be victim who happens to be a biotic adept, and when not being portrayed in holovids as the future destroyer of the universe, Shepard is portrayed as a socially inept dork who lives below the stairs in engineering.
Now, you may have some idea of the frustration that comes with being a scientist these days.
Why worry about it? My sister points out that I'm wasting my time, that I'm never going to change anyone's mind, there are too many ignorant, intellectually lazy people out there in the world (and it really is laziness; with the internet, learning about what you're talking about has never been easier, cheaper, or faster, but few people seem to take advantage of that before making wild hysterical claims about GM foods or black holes at the LHC or other nonsense). She is of the opinion that people are too ignorant to save themselves, and we'll all be wiped out by each other or some disaster eventually and then it won't matter any more. She feels it's better that way because if we never leave the Solar System, no one else will have to put up with us, and no other planets will have to be, to use her terminology, destroyed or infected by us. She agrees with Agent Smith's reasoning on human beings as a kind of virus.
My opinion is a bit more optimistic. I don't believe that the best likely outcome has to be our destruction. We don't have to destroy ourselves, and we don't have to stay here till we die. If we leave Earth, we don't have to exhibit what Smith called virus-like behavior. The limitations that we have are real, but we don't have to be bound by them. We can learn to embrace the unknown rather than fearing it, to weigh our decisions carefully rather than choosing arbitrarily or choosing based on what we wish were true rather than what is true.
We can, if we master the impulses that are still with us from the days when we were much farther down the food chain, overcome this tendency towards ignorance by default, find a balance between the energy we consume and the energy available, and not only reach the stars, but be the kind of society that would not endanger anyone else by doing so.
This change is hampered by the spreading of ignorance and hysteria, especially about the research currently being done to both increase our understanding of the universe and to ensure that we live long enough to be able to use that knowledge. The continued demonization of science and scientists in pop culture doesn't help either. TV tropes lists "Science is Bad" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceIsBad) as an actual trope, and the hyperlinked text reading "Science is Good" goes instead to the Averted Tropes page.
I feel that it is important to try to dispel these myths and misconceptions. I'll admit I'm not very tactful when doing so, but I don't think it's appropriate to pretend that harmful opinions are worthy of respect. One positive thing I try to do in every post I make is to remind people that scientists have not, in fact, destroyed the world yet, despite having done so thousands of times in fiction. There have been no Frankensteins, zombie apocalypses, or man-made black holes in the real world. On the other hand, there is a long list of real horrors that, because of scientists, you will have an easier time with or not even face at all. The eradication of smallpox and the fact that today we can feed a number of people that would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago are substantial victories.
My own field of interest, volcanology, has saved tens of thousands of people in the last 20 years from being burned alive, buried, or poisoned to death, and it is such a minority science that there are only a handful of schools in the US that offer graduate programs in it (and the last time someone tried to not decrease funding for it, they got called out on national TV for cheap political points). Historically, one of the biggest obstacles to saving lives in volcanic disasters is the fact that people don't always believe the scientists, occasionally regard them with suspicion and hostility, and sometimes even accuse them of causing the eruptions in the first place. Of course, if a forecast turns out to be a false positive, they get death threats from angry business owners.
There's just no gratitude in this line of work. Frustration is a fairly common feeling whenever I observe the interaction between science and mainstream culture, but I am still hopeful that, barring a takeover of the education system by the creationists, we can continue onward and upward, and grow past this unfortunate backwards thinking like we have grown past so many other unfortunate cultural quirks.
For the moment, I'm not sure I can do much more than try to dispel misconceptions about this institution, one hysteric at a time.
