Fame and Misfortune and Science Outreach · 9:36pm Feb 19th, 2018
This is a personal perspective on Fame and Misfortune. I first jotted down the idea for this post after the episode aired in August, but didn’t write it then. Partly because I was chasing an eclipse in the US and had more interesting things to write about. And partly because the episode seemed to animate some people so much that a cool-off period seemed a good idea.
I had an instant liking to the story as I could relate to what Twilight goes through. She publishes her book with big visions of teaching everyone about friendship, only to be confronted by readers who all, in various different ways, miss the point.
Some fans did not rate this episode very highly. Which is understandable as it deals with a concept so alien to our fandom that the plot obviously seemed strange and contrived and so unlike anything that would ever happen at a brony convention that it was unreasonable to expect them to be able to relate to it.
But this is a not-dissimilar experience to doing science outreach. Nearly all the science festival stuff I do has a list of objectives. These include things like: “to let people know physics is cool”, “to get children to think about careers in engineering”, “to encourage more girls to study science”. Sometimes they are more specific, such as: “to show that spending millions of taxpayers money on particle accelerators is a good idea”, “to increase awareness that climate change is a real threat to our future and needs action”, or “to get people to plant more bee-friendly flowers in their gardens.”
If someone is giving you funding to do something, there will be Terms and Conditions: a document setting out what you aim to do, how you plan to achieve it, and how you will assess whether you have succeeded. The last point is the reason why if you attend a science festival, you can expect to be assailed with questionnaires politely demanding which bits most engaged you, how the event changed your perspective of science, are you more likely to engage with science after attending (answers on a scale of 1 to 5).
However whatever primary objectives the event has will likely be completely lost on most visitors. We get people who come up to our stall wanting to talk about aliens, extrasensory perception, their own theory of dark matter… We get the fringe religious nutters, the occasional creationist, climate changer deniers... And plenty of people who just don’t really get whatever we are doing, and latch onto some random detail.
So what do we do? We smile. We listen to them. We answer their questions as best we can, and wait for an opportunity to inject a bit of science into the conversation. When you’re doing public relations you always have to stay cool and be friendly. Remember the people who don’t know anything about science are exactly the ones we most need to talk to. This is the whole point of outreach.
Then you have the nerds who do understand the science, and will keep you busy for ages talking about the last thing they read in Wired and their ideas about cold fusion, when you really want them to move on so you can talk to more visitors... And the kids who just get out of control and stick their fingers where they shouldn’t, and upturn your carefully prepared Lego brick demonstration of nucleosynthesis so they can build a spaceship…
Whatever happens, take it in your stride. Stay cool. Smile and be friendly. And take regular breaks.
And every once in a while a young child will come up to you, without any prompting, and tell you that what you’re doing is really cool and that they’re going to be a scientist when they grow up, and then it all seems worthwhile.
Uh. Yeah. Sorry about the Wired thing. Im not allowed out much.
To quote Starlight Glimmer. "...You're messing with me."
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That is some quality shade-throwing right there.
4800814
If there is going to be a flame war here, I expect it will be about something far more controversial than creationism…
I will just do what I do at science festivals… and try not to contradict you… but just explain that the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community is that life appeared on Earth some 4 billion years ago. We can study from fossils how it has evolved from early single-celled micro-organisms to the plants and animals we see today… Go to the Museum of Natural History on Parks Road and see for yourself! Admission is free... We can see evolution in action by watching things like bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics. Our modern understanding of genetics provides a mechanism to explain this, and has also led to breakthroughs in medicine. Evolution really is a fundamental part of modern biology… I would look to suggest a public talk by someone who could explain it better than me. Such as the amazing Alison Woollard
4800842
Oh indeed! Simply marvelous.
4800814
I'm not a creationist, but I sometimes run into similar issues with people seeming to denounce ideas with unwarranted certainty. I found something that helps, not with all cases, but with the vast majority of them: be very specific with the terms and phrases you use.
Evolution means a lot of things to a lot of people. Some people think of it is as something so general, that it can be applied to almost literally anything. On the maximally general extreme, "evolution" could refer to a change in a system. That's literally any change in any system, and when you say that you doubt "evolution", some people think you're doubting this.
Closer to the maximally specific extremes, some people might think of "evolution" as the emergence of cultured homo sapiens from uncultured non-homo sapiens through some combination of an iterative, semi-random divergence process and an environmentally-determined selection process.
Somewhere between these two is what the other person is thinking. On one side, evolution obviously happens in the same sense that change obviously happens (whatever that means). On the other side, there's a very specific claim with a very interesting implications that has never been reproduced or experimentally tested to the extent of the claim. I imagine that a lot of people would find it absurd if you were to doubt the existence of one of those things and within reason if you were to doubt the second.
On a related note, if anyone happens to know a minimal mutation and selection process I can to use to generate something as intelligent as humans using (on the order of) a billion iterations, I would very much like to know. For anyone unfamiliar with the difficulties, here's a related article on the problems of reinforcement learning algorithms, which are given far more smarts than a genetic algorithm. This doesn't denounce evolution in any way, but it is a bit disheartening that it's so difficult to get evolution-based algorithms to learn even the task at hand properly, let alone more general aspects of problem solving. If I had to guess whether this reflects our ignorance on intelligence or on evolution, I'd say it's probably both.
About the creationists, ugh. About the cranks:
At 1 time we knew nothing so random guesses were all we had. bAbout .1% of the time, it they were right. Nowadays, because we stand on the shoulders of giants, to paraphrase Isaac Newton, the odds of discovering anything new out in the wilderness is very low. I suggest this approach:
Humor the crank for a minute and then politely interrupt. Say that the idea is interesting but it is a reinvention of the wheel, so to speak, and has been superseded by better models inspired by it. Suggest that the crank take courses in physics so that the next attempt will take advantage of standing on the shoulders of giants and be a TeslaAutoMobile instead of the reinvention of the wheel and dismiss the crank. This takes 2 minutes which is much less time than arguing with the crank until security shows up.
4800814
I hate to tell you this, but the creationists deceived you. You might want to watch the Fundamental Falsehoods of Creationism by AronRa: