"Science Literacy" is ultimately a form of critical thinking

We need a more informed public when it comes to science, no question.
We need journalists to properly present scientific facts in context, without lending undeserved "equal weight" to unscientific or even anti-scientific sentiment. Again, no question.

But we will never have a public that thinks critically if we try to protect them from ideas we don't think they're ready to parse.

I like how Bob Garfield (of "On the Media") covered the uproar over the provocative profile of Freeman Dyson in The New York Times Magazine.

The following quotations are from the episode. Link:  On The Media: Transcript of "Getting Heated" (April 10, 2009)

• The New York Times Magazine published a cover story on Freeman Dyson, an eminent physicist who has been in residency at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies since the 1950s. The piece, titled The Global Warming Heretic, chronicles, among other things, Dyson’s unorthodox opinions on climate change, namely his belief that scientists rely too much on computer generated models and that carbon dioxide, which is contained in coal smoke, is not that bad for the environment. Of course, his thinking flies in the face of an overwhelming preponderance of scientific research. Dyson himself says that his views might be wrong and they're, quote, “more a matter of judgment than knowledge.”

  tags: science, nytimes, on the media, climate change, science literacy

  • The New York Times Magazine published a cover story on Freeman Dyson, an eminent physicist who has been in residency at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies since the 1950s. The piece, titled The Global Warming Heretic, chronicles, among other things, Dyson’s unorthodox opinions on climate change, namely his belief that scientists rely too much on computer generated models and that carbon dioxide, which is contained in coal smoke, is not that bad for the environment.

    Of course, his thinking flies in the face of an overwhelming preponderance of scientific research. Dyson himself says that his views might be wrong and they're, quote, “more a matter of judgment than knowledge.”

  • Some of the reaction to the article was severe, as bloggers and online commenters questioned the magazine’s judgment, author Nicholas Dawidoff’s credentials and Freeman Dyson’s grip on reality. Among the most vitriolic was Joe Romm, a writer for The Climate Progress blog at the Center for American Progress, who ridiculed all involved and alleged that the attention devoted to Freeman Dyson was shameful.

  • BOB GARFIELD: You know, I've got to say, back in the '70s a guy named William Shockley, who had won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on developing the transistor, started coming out with some generally crackpot theories on race and was ridiculed and attacked, but the outrageousness of his theories did not make me less want to know what led to his using his Nobel Laureate status as a bully pulpit for racist, pseudoscientific views. I wanted to know more about him, not less.

    When people say controversial things, shouldn't we want to know more about them, not less?

  • JOE ROMM: Because of the way it covers global warming and similar issues as he-said/she-said, the media guarantee that a certain fraction of the [LAUGHS] community is going to go out there and say outrageous things to be covered. I think that if there’s a fire in a theater and you are screaming, there’s no fire, don't move, then you don't deserve a cover profile in The New York Times Magazine.

    BOB GARFIELD: Don't you give the audience any credit for a story that clearly characterizes Dyson’s views as way beyond the scientific consensus? Do you credit them not at all for being able to parse the relative weight of these arguments?

  • JOE ROMM: The public is not scientifically expert, and the public’s ability to distinguish science and pseudoscience, which sound pretty much the same, is very small. So it is up to the filters, the media, to use its own judgment based on talking to many different sources and itself weighing the credibility of sources.

    What The New York Times Magazine has done is elevate Dyson to a very high degree of credibility as a highly credible source on global warming, which he isn't.

    BOB GARFIELD: Wow, I so can't believe we've read the same story. The story I read didn't promote his opinions in any fashion, such as you’re describing.

  • BOB GARFIELD: I think you’re also ignoring the preponderance of The New York Times’ reporting over the years, the extensive coverage that, for example, Andrew Revkin has given to this subject, you know, that I would say in no way sugarcoats the issue of climate change.
  • JOE ROMM: The New York Times does do some fine reporting on global warming, but the reader of this piece may or may not have read that. The media doesn't have unlimited space and certainly not in high profile places like a cover profile in The New York Times Magazine. And when they choose to write at length about a man like this, they are saying his ideas merit serious discussion.
  • BOB GARFIELD: I've got to tell you, Joe, you know, this show has been right out in front of criticizing the way the media have covered global warming on precisely the false equivalency issues that we've discussed, but I just didn't see this story as having done that. It seems to me that you’re not even angry about this story so much as you are about the press’ whole history of covering this issue.
• Next, Garfield interviewed Dawidoff, author of the profile.

  • BOB GARFIELD: Does it matter, from a journalistic point of view, whether he’s right or whether he’s wrong?

    NICHOLAS DAWIDOFF: Oh, absolutely not. ...I have no investment in what he thinks. I'm just interested in how he thinks and the depth and the singularity of his point of view. He’s a completely original person, and a brilliant and an unusual and an accomplished person, and an unpredictable person, and that’s what attracts me to him. I just think that he is so worth listening to, whether you agree with him or not. And I certainly don't agree with everything that he says, but I'm interested in everything that he says. And there are not that many people in this world about who you can say, “I'm interested in everything that he says.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Standardizing our language for climate change

These are quotations from the following link:

• Bowman Global Change spearheads efforts to establish unified climate change language

  • Bowman agrees with the National Research Council that scientific understanding of climate change has outstripped society's capacity to use the knowledge. Bowman says the solution is to adapt scientific communication to make the science behind climate change comprehensible to non-experts. "Simplifying the complex science and translating the scientific language allows all members of society – both policy makers and consumers – to confront the climate crisis and make informed decisions. We need to put the science in the hands of the people," says Bowman.
  • ...urge scientists to establish a single frame of reference for atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and rising global temperatures. Standardized measurement will provide the public with consistent reporting on these critical parameters, reduce confusion, and help decision-makers to base their sustainability choices on accurate science.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Annals of Public Policy: Getting There from Here: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Though this was in the January '09 issue of The New Yorker, I keep referring to it in conversations about health care. More people need to see this.
Our revised health care system will necessarily be built on existing platforms. We won't be starting from scratch. But Gawande describes how health care was revised in other countries, making it easy to see what's possible here in our own.

• Annals of Public Policy: Getting There from Here: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

  tags: Atul Gawande, health care

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Steven Chu gets rock star status

Steven Chu gets rock star status

by Tona Kunz

"Ok, so Steven Chu didn't get his picture on the cover of Rolling Stone... but he did get picked as one of the magazine's "100 people who are changing America" in the March 18 online issue."

from symmetry breaking, the symmetry magazine blog

Posted using ShareThis

On The Media: Transcript of "Blogging the Stimulus"

The following quotations are passages I highlighted in this article using diigo:

• On The Media: Transcript of "Blogging the Stimulus" (March 27, 2009)

  • Steve Coll is a fearless journalist, going deep into territory that many deem impenetrable. I refer, of course, to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a.k.a. the stimulus bill. He’s reading every page of it and blogging about it for The New Yorker.
  • I came in [LAUGHS] on a Monday morning and I was full of vim, and I thought, well, I ought to print this bill out and read it. And I was reminded of some other blogging that I'd read and been inspired by, by a guy named David Plotz at Slate, who had blogged the entire Bible by reading it cold, and it had been very funny and very interesting.
  • But he was dealing with source material that is filled with drama and tragedy and morality. And you were starting with a Stimulus bill.
  • Right, and I figured that out soon enough. At first I thought, well, the wonkiness of it, the actual material will be sufficient to generate interest, and then I pretty quickly discovered that wasn't the case. So I decided that the only way to do it was to treat it as a travelogue – to see the landscape of the federal government as illuminated by our Congress and its decisions in the Stimulus bill.
  • And then there are obscure corners of our government that you encounter through this travel that you realize, just reading the text, are occupied by an entire subculture of specialists [BOB LAUGHS] who, for [LAUGHS] many years, unexamined, have been going about their work. And just to contemplate what it is they do and what they're now going to do with a billion extra dollars has been interesting.
  • Now, we've discussed this project as being Plotzian in nature, but it also is kind of a throwback to I.F. Stone, who always spoke of how close reading government documents enables you to find hidden stories with great drama. What have you discovered that you think fits into that category?
  • he bill is kind of a pastiche of theories about how to spend the government money not only to jolt the economy but to create a different political economy after the recession is over.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

On The Media: Transcript of "The Infinite Shelf"

The following quotations are passages I highlighted in this article using diigo:

• On The Media: Transcript of "The Infinite Shelf" (March 27, 2009)

• Interview with Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library

• • In 2004, Google began digitizing the collections of major libraries for a service it calls Google Book Search. Soon after, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers joined forces for a lawsuit on behalf of copyright holders, who were never asked for permission, thank you, and wanted fair compensation.

    Well, the parties have since reached a settlement, putting Google in a position to be a modern Library of Alexandria with full texts of millions of titles online. And libraries are free, right? Um, not this one.

  • So there are roughly three kinds of books – those in the public domain, those that are under copyright and in print, and those that are under copyright and out of print, and there’s a vast number of those in the latter category that no one would have access to if Google didn't digitize them and put them online.
  • And Google will make these books available everywhere in the country, maybe someday everywhere in the world. So imagine a small library in, let's say, a small town in the Midwest. By subscribing to Google Book Search, readers there will have access to, well, a library that will be something like the Library of Alexandria - certainly, I think, in a few years, greater than the Library of Congress.
  • You've said that you admire many of the business practices of Google, but you’re concerned that they may one day impose exorbitant prices, and you cite the example of scholarly journals as a kind of cautionary tale.
  • I think once people get used to this fabulous access, they will say, this is a necessity of life. Maybe not one particular book, but the general service of having at your fingertips the largest library in the world, this is too good to be believed, and it could result in what we call “cocaine pricing.” That is, you sample it for a while and you find that the service is great. Then it becomes a bit more expensive and still more expensive, and nothing can stop the ratcheting up of the cost. Now, I don't believe that Google is out to do evil at all. I just think that it’s a monopoly, and monopolies have a way of charging monopoly prices.
  • Right, because the settlement evidently does not allow for actual competition to Google.
  • That’s correct. There is something called a “most favored nation” clause. That means that if any competitor came along, that competitor could not be offered more favorable terms than the terms that Google already has.
  • And though Google, as you say, may not do evil, you do note that the purpose of the settlement was to, quote, “maximize revenues” and not to facilitate the spread of information.
  • Well, the enlightenment dream, which you see everywhere in the works of the philosophers of the enlightenment of the 18th century, is a dream in which the printing press is put to service in order to spread knowledge.
  • I think ordinary Americans actually believe in it. They think that knowledge will empower you, enrich your life, and that it ought to be basically free. That dream is something that I think was foremost at the founding of our republic. ... I love books, and I really think that there is a democratic quality to digitization. But if those supplying it are simply trying to maximize profits, the whole thing could turn sour.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Marianna Torgovnick's insights on Depression-era entertainment

The following quotations are passages I highlighted in this article using diigo:

• The Buoyancy of Depression Entertainment - ChronicleReview.com

  tags: chronicle.com

  • It's as though Americans don't just fear a clearing of the economic slate but may actually be courting one.
  • Polls leading up to the 2008 election showed that a majority of Americans disliked the past eight years: the increasing gap between rich and poor, the concentration of wealth in the top 1 percent, and immersion in two wars. Could it be that Americans leapt from the idea of cyclical, if profound, recession to epoch-changing depression not just because the economic facts were bad and even scary, but because we wanted a change, and we knew that only a strong reversal of business as usual could provide one? The economic downturn is seen as catastrophic, but also felt as an opportunity.
  • Despite, and perhaps because of, the economic troubles, the arts and entertainment thrived during the Great Depression in ways that, in large part, created today's cultural universe.
  • Timed almost to perfection with the decade's end — and current enough to be referenced recently by the impeached Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich — Jimmy Stewart's character in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) affirms a wholesale faith in American values. Appointed as senator by men who expect him to be a pushover, Smith finds his reputation smeared when he speaks his own mind. His idealism inspires a wisecracking girl Friday (another Depression staple, in this case played by Jean Arthur) and a diverse group of citizens to help him defeat corruption in business and government and to reinvigorate a compliant media — conditions strikingly similar to those that motivated the 2008 vote. Working together, people of all ages and backgrounds feel their patriotic spirit rise and help Smith make an awfully familiar looking delinquent Congress buckle down.
  • As the movie approaches its climax, the camera cuts repeatedly to African-American characters who play subliminally subversive roles. ... a black train porter quite literally leaves a corrupt politician holding his own bags. The movie returns several times to the Lincoln Memorial, frequented by Americans of different ages, backgrounds, and races who gaze respectfully at the martyred president.
  • Depression entertainment reflected how economic hardship, while certainly not unknown in the past, cut across social classes, regions, ethnic groups, and races as never before. It fostered a collective, inclusive sense of what it means to be American and the feeling that we — immigrants and blue bloods, Southern whites and African-Americans, city folk and farmers, vaudevillians and businessmen, people from the West and East — were all in this together.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.