Academic tone-trolling: How does interactivity impact online science communication?






There’s lots to talk about here.

Does this research finding mean that, when you’re trying to communicate scientific information online, enabling comments is a bad idea?

Lots of us are betting that it’s not. Rather, we’re optimistic that people will be more engaged with the information when they have a chance to engage in a conversation about it (e.g., by asking questions and getting answers).



It should be noted — and has been — that some kinds of incivility wear the trappings of polite language, which means that it’s not enough to set up automatic screens that weed out comments containing particular specified naughty words. Effective promotion of civility rather than incivility might well involve having the author of the online piece and/or designated moderators as active participants in the ongoing conversation, calling out bad commenter behavior as well as misinformation, answering questions to make sure the audience really understands the information being presented, and being attentive to how the unfolding discussion is likely to be welcoming — or forbidding — to the audience one is hoping to reach.


I’m also guessing that the experimental subjects reading the science article and the manipulated comments that followed could not themselves participate in the discussion by posting a comment. I wonder how much being stuck on the sidelines rather than involved in the dialogue affected their views. We should remember, though, that most indicators suggest that readers of online articles — even on blogs — who actually post comments are much smaller in number than the readers who “lurk” without commenting. This means that commenters are generally a very small percentage of the readers one is trying to reach, and perhaps not very representative of those readers overall.

At this point, the take-home seems to be that social scientists haven’t discovered all the factors that matter in how an audience for online science is going to receive and respond to what’s being offered — which means that those of us delivering science-y content online should assume we haven’t discovered all those factors, either. It might be useful, though, if we are reflective about our interactions with our audiences and if we keep track of the circumstances around communicative efforts that seem to work and those that seem to fail. Cataloguing these anecdote could surely provide fodder for some systematic empirical study, and I’m guessing it could help us think through strategies for really listening to the audiences we hope are listening to us.

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DOI: 10.1126/science.1160364

Can we combat chemophobia … with home-baked bread?

This post was inspired by the session at the upcoming ScienceOnline 2013 entitled Chemophobia & Chemistry in The Modern World, to be moderated by Dr. Rubidium and Carmen Drahl

For some reason, a lot of people seem to have an unreasonable fear of chemistry. I’m not just talking about fear of chemistry instruction, but full-on fear of chemicals in their world. Because what people think they know about chemicals is that they go boom, or they’re artificial, or they’re drugs which are maybe useful but maybe just making big pharma CEOs rich, and maybe they’re addictive and subject to abuse. Or, they are seeping into our water, our air, our food, our bodies and maybe poisoning us.

At the extreme, it strikes me that chemophobia is really just a fear of recognizing that our world is made of chemicals. I can assure you, it is!

Your computer is made of chemicals, but so are paper and ink. Snails are made of chemicals, as are plants (which carry out chemical reactions right under our noses. Also carrying out chemical reactions right under our noses are yeasts, without which many of our potables would be less potent. Indeed, our kitchens and pantries, from which we draw our ingredients and prepare our meals, are full of many impressively reactive chemicals.

And here, it actually strikes me that we might be able to ratchet down the levels of chemophobia if people find ways to return to de novo syntheses of more of what they eat — which is to say, to making their food from scratch.

For the last several months, our kitchen has been a hotbed of homemade bread. Partly this is because we had a stretch of a couple years where our only functional oven was a toaster over, which means when we got a working full-sized oven again, we became very enthusiastic about using it.

As it turns out, when you’re baking two or three loaves of bread every week, you start looking at things like different kinds of flour on the market and figuring out how things like gluten content affect your dough — how dense of a bread it will make, how much “spring” it has in the oven, and so forth.

(Gluten is a chemical.)

Maybe you dabble with the occasional batch of biscuits of muffins or quick-bread that uses a leavening agent other than yeast — otherwise known as a chemical leavener.

(Chemical leaveners are chemicals.)

And, you might even start to pick up a feel for which chemical leaveners depend on there being an acidic ingredient (like vinegar or buttermilk) in your batter and which will do the job without an acidic ingredient in the batter.

(Those ingredients, whether acidic or not, are made of chemicals. Even the water.)

Indeed, many who find their inner baker will start playing around with recipes that call for more exotic ingredients like lecithin or ascorbic acid or caramel color (each one: a chemical).

It’s to the point that I have joked, while perusing the pages of “baking enhancers” in the fancy baking supply catalogs, “People start baking their own bread so they can avoid all the chemicals in the commercially baked bread, but then they get really good at baking and start improving their homemade bread with all these chemicals!”

And yes, there’s a bit of a disconnect in baking to avoid chemicals in your food and then discovering that there are certain chemicals that will make that food better. But, I’m hopeful that the process leads to a connection, wherein people who are getting back in touch with making one of the oldest kinds of foods we have can also make peace with the recognition that wholesome foods (and the people who eat them) are made of chemicals.

It’s something to chew on, anyway.

Reasonably honest impressions of #overlyhonestmethods.




So, I’m going to say a bit more.













What researchers use #overlyhonestmethods to disclose ethically problematic methods?



That outcome would strike me as a very good one.

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Fear of scientific knowledge about firearm-related injuries.


Among other things, this suggests a willingness to put the scientific knowledge to use once it’s built.** If we learn some relevant details about the workings of the world, taking those into account as we figure out how best to achieve our goals or solve our problems seems like a reasonable thing to do — especially if we’ve made a financial investment in discovering those relevant details.

And yet, some of the “strings” attached to federally funded research suggest that the legislators involved in approving funding for research are less than enthusiastic to see our best scientific knowledge put to use in crafting policy — or, that they would prefer that the relevant scientific knowledge not be built or communicated at all.




As the letter from the Crime Lab rightly notes,





What this suggests to me is that these legislators either don’t understand that knowing more about how the world works can help you achieve desired outcomes in that world, or that they don’t want to achieve the outcome of reducing firearm injury or death.


Perhaps they fear that careful scientific research will turn up facts which themselves seem to “to advocate or promote gun control” — at least to the extent that they show that the most effective way to reduce firearm injury and death would be to implement controls that the legislators view as politically unpalatable.

If nothing else, I find that a legislator’s aversion to scientific evidence is a useful piece of information about him or her to me, as a voter.
*If federal funding for research did function like a subsidy, meant to keep the researchers employed and out of trouble, you’d expect to see a much higher level of support for philosophical research. History suggests that philosophers in the public square with nothing else to keep them busy end up asking people lots of annoying questions, undermining the authority of institutions, corrupting the youth, and so forth.

**One of the challenges in getting the public on board to fund scientific research is that they can be quite skeptical that “basic research” will have any useful application beyond satisfying researchers’ curiosity.