I’ve been somewhat decoupled from blogdom in general recently, as I’ve been busy working on the book and getting ready for FutureBaby. It’s also been a useful mental health break, though, as I’m a little less worked up about stupid stuff than I was a few months ago.<\/p>\n
Every now and then, I catch the edges of some kerfuffle-of-the-moment, though, and it reminds me that continuing the decoupling is probably a Good Thing. The latest is the ongoing squabbling over Sizzle<\/cite><\/a>, which is the new “framing” fracas. This has been dragging on for a week, now, with the latest entries to catch my eye coming from RPM<\/a> and Chris<\/a>.<\/p>\n I have to say, I’m not finding much positive on either side of this argument.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This is really pretty much a continuation of the “framing” squabble, and a lot of the arguments are basically recycled from that. Take, for example, RPM’s complaint that:<\/p>\n In Randy [Olson]’s mind, he’s the expert on communicating science, and he loves telling scientists that they’re doing it wrong. However, he won’t tell us how to do it right!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I don’t want to just pick on RPM, because this is pretty widespread, but I continue to find this critique kind of baffling. I originally wrote it off as disingenuousness on the part of people like PZ Myers and Larry Moran who don’t actually share an agenda with Olson\/ Mooney\/ Nisbet. Now I’m just kind of confused, though, because I’ve heard the same thing from people who aren’t huge “new atheist” partisans.<\/p>\n I’m confused because it just doesn’t seem that complicated to me, and I wonder if I’m missing some nuance. The point that Olson is making is that the “all data all the time” format that scientists are prone to using doesn’t work very well for communicating with the general public, and public communication of science requires some additional factors– humor, appeals to emotion, some downplaying of caveats and qualifications. I’m not sure what’s missing here– ScienceBlogs is full of smart people, who shouldn’t need him to draw a map. It doesn’t seem that hard to figure out.<\/p>\n I’m also not sure he could<\/strong> draw a map, any more than you can write a foolproof algorithm to allow anyone to teach science to undergraduates. Teaching is a subset of communication, after all, and they’re both highly individual activities. What works for one person won’t necessarily work for another– there is no one-size-fits-all recipe for being a great science communicator. Carl Sagan is not Brian Greene is not Steven Jay Gould is not Oliver Sacks. Jennifer Ouellette is not Natalie Angier is not Dennis Overbye is not Carl Zimmer. And so on.<\/p>\n The point is to be aware of the process, and use your own personal strengths to suit that end. I couldn’t do a typical Cocktail Party Physics<\/a> post– I’m just not comfortable writing in that style, and it would show. I can do imaginary conversations with my dog, though, and that provides a moderately effective means of achieving the same end, that Jennifer probably couldn’t do (actually, she might be able to write great pet dialogue, but I’d rather not know that…).<\/p>\n General guidelines are the best you’re going to do, realistically, and I don’t personally think that Olson (or Nisbet and Mooney) has been unclear about what needs to be done as a general matter: keep it short, keep the storyline simple and compelling, don’t drown people in data. But maybe I’m missing something.<\/p>\n On the other side, Chris Mooney has been very vocal about promoting the movie, in a way that’s not winning him many converts:<\/p>\n Overall, at the screening I continued to feel struck by the incredible gap that exists between most ScienceBloggers, and most others, in terms of their responses to this film. Whereas many ScienceBloggers either didn’t like Sizzle or didn’t appear to get it, the audience in LA laughed at all the right moments, laughed repeatedly throughout, and generally seemed to be having a grand old time. Similarly, although I get the impression that many ScienceBloggers aren’t particularly entertained by Randy Olson’s mother, Muffy Moose, the audience loved her. Just as it loved Mitch, and Brian, and especially Marion, the film’s trouble-making cameraman.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There’s a significant difference between seeing a film in a theater with a crowd of other people, and seeing that same movie at home on DVD by yourself. Movies that seem pretty entertaining in a theater can fall flat in other contexts, and I’m not sure I’d be willing to draw too many conclusions from the fact that the crowd at the premiere enjoyed it more than a bunch of bloggers watching it by themselves.<\/p>\n More importantly, though, “You just didn’t get it” is a pretty lame counter to people saying that they didn’t like a movie. It might be true, but it’s rarely a useful response, and stating it bluntly isn’t likely to change anybody’s mind. <\/p>\n Elsewhere, he busted out a variant of the “but some of my best friends are black\/gay\/Martian!” defense against some of the complaints regarding the stereotypes in the movie, which is just astonishingly tone-deaf. It may be that the characters that played as bad stereotypes to me aren’t offensive to actual black and gay people for reasons that I don’t know, but “It can’t be offensive, it was written by a black guy!” just doesn’t fly. Reviews from people at the gay and lesbian film festival where it premiered might be convincing, but the nationality and\/ or orientation of the screenwriters and actors doesn’t change the fact that the gay producers gave me the creeps from start to finish.<\/p>\n So, in the end, I’m sort of leaning toward washing my hands of the whole business. Not entirely, obviously, or I wouldn’t’ve gone to the trouble of typing all this out, but all in all, I suspect I can find better things to expend mental energy on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been somewhat decoupled from blogdom in general recently, as I’ve been busy working on the book and getting ready for FutureBaby. It’s also been a useful mental health break, though, as I’m a little less worked up about stupid stuff than I was a few months ago. Every now and then, I catch the… Continue reading Sizzle: Framing :: Hit-With-A-Brick: Stabbed-With-A-Fork<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,35,11,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-movies","category-science","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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