Donald A Fowler - Biologist

The science genius is a common trope in our society: a know-it-all who has all sorts of information and data ready to go off-hand. They are not only a fountain of facts but possess a real depth of understanding. That depth comes from progressing along a path of the structured knowledge that science involves, from basic to the advanced. The media that scientists use to communicate with each other reflects this structure of scientific knowledge. Facts and ideas are cited, giving specific credit to those who added to our knowledge and outlining the specific structure that the understanding takes. Obtaining a deep scientific understanding begins by engaging with the surface soil – loose, easy to dig, and not deep enough to pose any risk. Gaining further knowledge requires actually digging, and the student has to be careful that the walls do not cave in as they lose perspective and get lost in their own mine. As they dig deeper, the student needs to take care that the pressure that comes from becoming fully aware of their own ignorance does not become an insurmountable obstacle, leaving a filled in hole and no deeper knowledge. If well designed and well dug, a genius’s pit should be deeper and more impressive than anyone else’s. The depth of the mine attests to the personal intelligence and genius of the scientists who build it. This is a fairly straightforward way to understand knowledge. It has simpler rules and a clear, linear progression. It is reflected in, and an excuse for, the formalistic, jargon rich, and citation dense form of communication that science often takes. It finally offers an easy explanation of why some scientists are better than others: they know more and have a larger construction of information.

At first blush, this seems correct: It certainly follows the progression of my formal education and what many scientists I’ve met wish to portray. At least until I think of the scientists I’ve met, and this conception of science starts to look fairly inadequate. Most of my successful and highly praised colleagues possessed an excellent short-term memory, but in terms of their long-term retention of information, far from being any kind of intellectual exception, their knowledge is comparable to that of many others. Biology researchers and professors that I know could not immediately step into a third- or fourth-year university test outside of their current area of experience and ace it. Professional scientists regress to about a first- or second year understanding in any field that is not in their recurring experience. In this way, they resemble any other professionals, with their experience providing the knowledge. Most of them acquire the knowledge they need to profitably function more through experience. Like professors who need a refresher before teaching a basic biology course or lawyers remembering what was on the bar twenty years ago.

This anecdotal evidence points to something else at work when people, both professional and the general public, consume scientific media. It is more than a rote understanding and organization of the knowledge into an internalized whole. That something else radiates out from this simple conception of stereotyped scientific understanding, to a conception of science as a culture with emergent knowledge coming from its collective of human beings each with a complex set of rational and intuitive reasons why they do science, and how they do it. This is a broad topic, but to explore and introduce it here, I want to focus on the ‘knowledge from culture’ that populates so much of the popular and professional scientific world.

A Knowledge From Culture

Popular science communication is a good place to begin understanding knowledge from culture, even to understand how knowledge often works in professional science. Popular science communication does not rely on a strict citation, and it does not aspire to build on a lineage of previous work. For example, Ed Young, a science writer at The Atlantic, cannot direct nor expect the reader of a current article to one published two years ago. The reader cannot be expected to follow science journalism all that closely. Just the same, popular science writers could probably just open up a five-year-old edition of Science and write about some random article and still be able to engage the reader in something they didn’t know.

Still, readers know something about science and the concept of a public “scientific literacy” is not crazy. What people know is still knowledge, it just doesn’t follow the same rules which a formal understanding of scientific knowledge aspires to. This is what I mean by ‘knowledge from culture.’ Just like any other formal knowledge, it changes over time and even improves. Polling studies show that the general American public can answer many basic questions about science (1), and popular culture expects people to be familiar with and absorb some basic facts about science: The sharks in “Shark Week” need no introduction, but “Paurapoda week” would. This kind of knowledge changes, just as knowledge changes when people learn more about any topic in the news. Ideas such as global warming, genes, and computer languages would not have been widely known about fifty years ago, but they are part of a collective knowledge base today. The rules for what compose knowledge from culture are uneven and are found in that amorphous cultural space that we are all part of, but that we often feel powerless to influence, and certainly powerless to reference specific literature or authors. Though this knowledge includes facts and ideas that people can recall, its sources are indistinct: It’s just stuff people “should know.”

Knowledge from culture is like a muscle rather than a progressive construction over the long term. It needs repetitions and work in order to build and maintain itself. The use is whenever it is made salient, from recalling some piece of knowledge and understanding, to describing it to others through interpersonal interactions. Sufficient strength isn’t dependent on any one repetition – say, any single article or YouTube video – but rather on collective repetition over time. Repetition is a fairly basic learning technique known for generations; we cannot simply ‘write’ it to our brains like a hard drive. The repetitions are whenever the information becomes salient again. It can be anything from consuming popular science media or discussing the information with other people. These all reinforce its memory and emphasizes the social and cultural side of the knowledge. Its social and repetitive nature makes the knowledge a part of culture and gives it the collective exercise to be toned among a wide group of people. What gets retained from these repetitions is uneven, and often quickly loses its sources before any of the pertinent facts. In this way, the knowledge becomes part of what people “just know,” without reference or even active awareness of where it came from. Despite the information coming from media that is the product of the conscious and concerted effort of creators, similar to the conscious effort of a peer reviewed article by researchers.

A fuller understanding of science as a culture

Thinking about science communication as a knowledge from culture emphasizes how culture makes science much more than a collection of facts. Afterall, it shows why when anybody consumes some piece of science communication without explicit effort to learn it, much of the information won’t be retained from that single piece of media, if at all, for any amount of time. Thinking about scientific communication as a cultural product allows us an existing wealth of ideas and discussion about why people consume media and the form that it takes.

Understanding the creation and consumption of cultural products allows for the inclusion of personal influences into both processes. There has to be more to scientific media than the filing of something to our long-term memory. Afterall, we forget so much of what we consume and only recall partially what we manage to absorb. First and foremost, many people find fulfillment in consuming and creating interesting media, even if we cannot remember it a year from now or that what people find fulfilling changes from person to person. This is the product of a whole mish mash of feelings whose personal explanations start to look like rationalizations rather than foundational reasons. Things that, for now, have an explanation of: ‘they just are,’ are still remarkably important. It can just be an enjoyable and interesting genre of media to consume. Cultural and cognitive influences – whims, cognitive biases, and intuitions – not only influence casual media but are an important part of any form of communication, from its creation to consumption.

The nature of media itself is better understood when looking at it from a cultural context. A culture of communication helps both the creator and consumer efficiently get to the point of what is said. Any common genre or trope in culture tends to restrict the creator but also helps the consumer know what they are getting. These are inescapable forces that govern any media. It differs from the rigorous idea that science is a collection of facts, which implies that the collection and organization is obvious enough such that anybody exposed to the same facts will have a similar organization and recall of them. If this were true, then features like introductions in professional science and other conventions would be fairly irrelevant, everybody would have effectively the same conceptions of the field already. In popular science communication, both the tropes and overall organization are a given. It’s not popular if nobody consumes it. They have to both inform and conform to the knowledge from culture found in the general public. This means creating media that fits the expectations of those that the people consuming the media expect to get to the message. These expectations and practices come in a variety of forms. For example, the presence of a genres of communication: the common tropes, organization, and “rules” that help us and the creator effectively communicate and understand one another. These genres are numerous, from the organization of cinematic documentaries to articles in National Geographic or The Atlantic, and many more.

Just as popular communication of science is part of our popular culture, the knowledge used in professional science, like with many other professions, involves knowledge from culture. Experts in a field are not necessarily truly exceptional wellsprings of knowledge; instead, they are proficient in a culture of expertise, some of it based on a body of immediately recalled facts and ideas, but so much more based on a socialized process of getting the job done. The concept of knowledge from culture offers a different understanding of the types of skills that lead to advancement in the culture of science. This understanding of knowledge means that there are many scientists who progress far in their particular scientific culture by developing the skills that are the most useful in the culture; this, rather than mastery through a careful and conscious excavation of knowledge.

Media literacy

Media literacy offers the chance of exerting some conscious control over these cognitive and cultural influences. Media literacy also provides ways that one can better think and learn from the media they consume. At the center of practical media literacy are questions that one should ask of the media they are consuming, and of themselves while consuming it. These are fairly standard: Who is this for? What do they want me to understand or do? How do they build their argument? What organizations, institutions, and products did they mention? And, most importantly, what might they not have mentioned? These questions are very useful, but they ask questions only of the content, not the consumer. You, the reader, have quite a bit of agency with the media you consume, if you wish to exercise it. This can start with its own questions: Why am I reading this? What do I want to gain from it? What do I already know about it?

A common retort is that all media has to be taken with a grain of salt. Blanket skepticism often means simply discounting everything evenly, replacing an oblivious credulity with an equally simple and facile half-dismissal. It renders broadly impotent a person’s own ability and intelligence to make some use of the facts and ideas that interest them. It also denigrates the consumer’s sometimes genuine interest and curiosity. But the consumer has power in this relationship, and they come to it with knowledge, understanding, and a perspective, all of which all useful in helping them navigate the media they are consuming. These questions help make this knowledge explicit, useful, and able to fit in to what one already knows. This understanding doesn’t fix everything, but it is more useful than either credulity or uninformed dismissal.

The practical uses of media literacy are often the same uses that people associate with improved science literacy, from figuring out whether to trust a public opinion poll to understanding some new health science news. In my opinion, some of the best science journalism asks these questions with insightful and interesting results. When people ask me what they should know about science, I wish they would read more about the replication crisis, or the ways that the incentives in our society make much of nutrition and cancer health science suspicious. These are even more pertinent issues in democracies, as often one's vote can influence how the scientific community deals with these issues.

The questions that revolve around media literacy are good ones to ask, both in our general lives, but also for scientists of their own professional communication, even if they do not typically enjoy the idea that their work requires it. This is true especially in science, where a group of workers are in a world where their media content, commonly their writing, is their main path to professional advancement. However, scientific culture often asks little of the quality of the media itself. It is ripe for all the biases and diverging incentives in our society that can influence the product’s quality and how we imagine alternatives in important and insightful ways.

Hopefully, these essays will allow me to discuss science as a culture of complex people, with all the limitations, diverging incentives, and strengths that this entails, and not just as a narrow application of media criticism. Some of this will be about how my more narrow corner of biology works, while another part will involve discussing science communication and practice in general. My aim in all of them is to highlight some aspect of the influences of that world of knowledge from culture and practice, which should look familiar to anybody else who operates within a framework of knowledge from culture.

Still, science, especially fundamental science, is based on advancing an understanding that people have to actively possess; this cannot be done without people in that community communicating with each other, and it can be improved by thinking more deeply about what we are communicating and why.

If you want to discuss or contact me, Donald, regarding this essay, do so on my twitter: https://twitter.com/evodevodon

© Donald Alexander Fowler PhD, 2020: Text and Images

1: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-are-smart-about-science/