Thanks, all, for answering the poll below. I wanted to double-check my assumptions before weighing in on the latest discussion making the rounds of science blogs, to wit: whether scientists should think about framing in discussing science with the public. For those of you not up to speed on the discussion, I’ll just say that there is disagreement over whether framing is lying or spin, or whether it’s just something people do anyway and one might as well be conscious of it. Bora has, I think, the best summary of people’s positions on the topic that I’ve seen, and some cogent thoughts of his own as well, some of which I think I agree with.
I do think framing science in mass writing is important, and on alternate days I think framing science is inevitable even when writing for an audience of scientists. When my writing here really works, I think, it’s because I’ve stumbled upon (what I will here call once and never again) a frame that compels attention, that brings the reader a new perspective on a topic. My success rate is subjectively determined, but I think I’ve hit the mark once or twice. I’m sympathetic to those who’d rather simply present their results in flat, straightforward form, but I have never once seen a scientific paper that did not in some way use metaphor or simile — frames — to get the point of the paper across to readers. Take a recent abstract of a notable article in Nature, which article we will revisit later in the post:
Did the end-Cretaceous mass extinction event, by eliminating non-avian dinosaurs and most of the existing fauna, trigger the evolutionary radiation of present-day mammals?
Where are the metaphors? There’s the “radiation of mammals,” an explicit reference to the way a phylogenetic schematic of a diversely branching clade looks. There’s an extinction that may have “triggered” that radiation. There’s the peculiar inversion of causality implied in the notion that the end-Cretaceous mass extinction event “eliminated” dinosaurs et al, when in actuality the extinction event and the dying out of the dinosaurs and ammonites and such are one and the same. There’s no escaping portrayal by metaphor, really.
But despite my I suppose postmodernist take on objectivity and its inaccessibility to the likes of us humans, I must confess to an extreme impatience with an undercurrent I see running through the defenses of conscious framing of science. There is an assumption regarding the inherent nature of that exchange that I find troubling, if not downright insulting. I metaframe that offensive frame below in graphic form:
The best, most neutral, least inflammatory, and yet still wholly disheartening summation of that undercurrent is this explicit statement by Matt Nisbet in a list of social uses of frames:
Average citizens use frames as schematic short cuts. Frames allow citizens to make up their minds about a topic with little or no other information, and to talk about their opinions with others.
I will say I don’t have an issue with that as a description of what is. But as a prescription for what ought, rightly, to be? Elitism, pure and simple.
Carl Zimmer had the best response to that sentiment, it seems to me:
[F]raming doesn’t seem like quite the right response to the fact that over two-thirds of people in this country don’t know enough about science to understand a newspaper story on a scientific subject. It seems more like surrender to me. Fixing high school science education seems a better plan. Don’t let kids come out of high school without knowing that a laser emits light, not sound; without knowing about standard deviations; without knowing what a stem cell is. Fixing high school science would be a lot harder than staying on message, but it would be a lot more important.
According to my statistically non-significant poll, a quarter of CRN readers claim to read science blogs occasionally despite science not being a main life interest. More than half read at least a few science blogs regularly. It’s a mistake to read too much, or maybe even anything, into that poll, especially given the venue, which if anything has spent the last four years collecting people tolerant of the author’s diverse and shifting attention. But a divide between a lethargic, ignorant public and an elite corps of pure scientists, it seems to me, would likely be expressed in fatter tails on that bell curve. I think this topic is worthy of further study and the NAS and NEA are thus each cordially invited to fund my important cross-disciplinary research, checks to be made out to the Consortium for the Advancement of Science Heuristics, which is a pretty long name so just put the acronym in the payable to line. Thanks in advance.
It’s a bit ironic. I decided today I’d better write something about this once I meet my paid writing deadline on Wednesday, then went off to get this week’s hay fever shots. They make me wait after, as I have mentioned, and I used the opportunity to catch up on the reading that had piled up while I spent February and March hiding under my blanket. I had missed, for instance, the fact that Jennifer had snagged a spot in the Valentine’s Day edition of Nature, which is cause for unbridled admiration and a little envy. And I read that piece, and then I turned to the above-mentioned Mammals in the Cretaceous article, the gist of which is that mammals seem to have diversified abundantly tens of millions of years before dinos went missing. There was a graphic in the article which I’d seen on people’s blogs:
I took a good look at the graphic in print, with reading glasses, sitting there in the allergy clinic waiting room, and suddenly the floor fell out from under me and I was doing my best to stifle sobs, and failing.
It’s a phylogeny chart, a graphic representation of the relationships among existing families of mammals, drawn roughly to scale in the time dimension to give an indication when different groups of mammals diverged from one another. The time line begins at the center of the circle, and along any path the closer you get to the perimeter the closer you get to the present day. The meat of the article is expressed in that dotted black circle, the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Most of the branching that represents the evolved diversity among mammal families took place after that event, but a surprising amount of that diversification took place in the shadow of the dinosaurs, a cool enough conclusion in any event. The chart is color coded to represent the five major mammalian clades as described in the article: monotremes, marsupials, Afrotherians, Xenarthrans, Laurasiatherians, and Euarchontoglires. Primates are Euarchontoglires, as are rodents and rabbits, and a couple small families closely related to but not primates: the tree shrews and flying lemurs. Marsupials seem to have diversified after primates, an interesting blow to an old preconception of marsupials as somehow far more primitive than placental mammals, let alone our own vaunted order. Tarsiers and monkeys split before possums and kangaroos did.
There are lots of little tidbits like that in the chart, and I was finding them and enjoying myself, and then I noticed that Euarchontoglires and Laurasiatherians diverged about 100 million years ago. About 100 million years ago there was a population of weird little mammals, and some of them went off to become the ancestors of the Euarchontoglires, and others to become the ancestors of the Laurasiatherians.
I am, as implied above, a Euarchontoglire.
Zeke was a Laurasiatherian.
I looked at the point on that chart where the green Laurasiatherian branches and the red Euarchontoglire branches shared a common root, a hundred million years ago, and tears welled up. A hundred million years ago we diverged, our family riven, and an impossible length of time afterward we met, our lines scourged by a half-dozen mass extinctions and the good times between them none too pleasant at that. It is ridiculous to think of it as a reunion: I may as well weep to be reunited with my distant cousin the grass pollen making my eyes water, lost lo these billions of years. It’s a stretch, in fact, to think in terms of families. The chart describes populations, not individuals. The two clades may have diverged a million years after my common ancestor with Zeke perished.
I am but an untutored yokel and the complexities, the obligatory qualifiers are no doubt lost on one like me, without a Learn’d Scientist there to explain to me how I am wrong.
But a frame is a frame, and I wept in the fucking allergy clinic waiting room looking at lines on a phylogenetic map for a beloved cousin found and then lost again.
Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.
24 comments on "Understanding"“I may as well weep to be reunited with my distant cousin the grass pollen making my eyes water, lost lo these billions of years. “
Maybe so, but I think this is part of the magic of a relationship between a human and a dog. The interrelationship of all living things is a cliche, but it’s pretty hard to recognize in that grass pollen. What is familiar and what is alien to us seem so well-balanced in dogs that we can see in one dog both intimate family member and complete mystery. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why we so readily recognize our kinship with them. At times, we can look at any member of the family and see the same paradox.
Carl Zimmer’s flat response It seems more like surrender to me. Fixing high school science education seems a better plan. is the one that your US situation appears to need most - from the point of view of an averagely secondary school educated Australian.
Citizen US has been very poorly served by your education institutions so far in matters of basic education. Thus, how fragile will be a “win” by “Science” and the humanist obverse of Bora’s described republican ascendancy if framing is mastered by both the internal and external ethics pushers?
It’ll be a horse race call every day with quick persuasion everybody’s main game.
Oh, hang on, it’s already like that anyway; only about 40 years ago, “Science” as a basis for the improvement of society was very widely worshipped.
Humanists and progressives had their foot in the door (frame) then, so why did the chance get squandered?
I have no answer.
Maybe the cog scientists could manage a more robust model for how beliefs, once grabbed by framing, can be reinforced and prevented from getting dropped as soon as a more appealing frame pops along.
It can’t be possible that the US citizen - and I suppose the rest of the world that consumes US culture is partly affected at the same time - is really such a child.
The U.S. interest in “framing” around science can’t be understood without the history of the Republican War on Science. That war extends further back in time than most people allow. The ur-text around framing science is a 1989 quote by Steven Schneider, so often mis-quoted that I have a page listing the right one.
Calling this elitism is buying into the GOP frame, in my opinion. The main alternative is to abandon a model of public involvement in science policy altogether, and say that change will happen around the formation of scientific consensus and its adoption as legal liability. That, frankly, is much closer to what we’re actually managing in the U.S. than any kind of politics per se, but it’s a lot more elitist than any scientist deciding to use metaphors.
The “who reads science blogs” poll really should have had a separate poll line for PZ Myers as the only science bloggers read regularly. He’s the scientist as culture hero, which is a good thing to be, but I would guess that most of his readership wouldn’t show just for his pieces on evo-devo. It’d be interesting to see how many read blogs like RealClimate.
(Trying this comment again without a link since your comment software thinks that links mean spam.)
The U.S. interest in “framing” around science can’t be understood without the history of the Republican War on Science. That war extends further back in time than most people allow. The ur-text around framing science is a 1989 quote by Steven Schneider, so often mis-quoted that I have a page listing the right one.
Calling this elitism is buying into the GOP frame, in my opinion. The main alternative is to abandon a model of public involvement in science policy altogether, and say that change will happen around the formation of scientific consensus and its adoption as legal liability. That, frankly, is much closer to what we’re actually managing in the U.S. than any kind of politics per se, but it’s a lot more elitist than any scientist deciding to use metaphors.
The “who reads science blogs” poll really should have had a separate poll line for PZ Myers as the only science bloggers read regularly. He’s the scientist as culture hero, which is a good thing to be, but I would guess that most of his readership wouldn’t show just for his pieces on evo-devo. It’d be interesting to see how many read blogs like RealClimate.
Calling this elitism is buying into the GOP frame, in my opinion.
You missed my point. It’s not the use of framing that’s elitist. It’s saying it’s necessary because the American Public is a bunch of ignorant yahoos, and that said framing must need consist of watering the science down to a fourth-grade reading level, that’s elitist.
I don’t think I am ignorant, and I read the science blogs I have bookmarked/on Bloglines in order to become less ignorant, but I have to admit that lately I have indeed been lethargic, and have been reading mostly the non-scientific posts at Pharyngula, Cosmic Variance, Asymptotia and so on. (On the other hand, I have been reading a lot about human gestation and child-rearing and pediatrics online and off…)
I had a fairly good science education (especially AP Biology), but I will never forget the 8th grade science teacher in 1980 a public school in Orange County, CA telling us that evolution was as unlikely as monkeys at typewriters producing the Bible. I don’t know how many of the students agreed with him.
Please tell me you’re gonna repost this at Pandagon. ;)
One thing that makes me annoyed at the people who think there’s something sleazy about the reframing thing is just what you’ve pointed out—-“framing” is a sexy new metaphorical framework to bring up the boring old tradition of advising writers and rhetoricians of all stripes to be cognizant of their metaphorical framework. To start, don’t mix your metaphors. In addition, use appealing language and avoid jargon. Etc.
Where framing is an interesting subject is because by repackaging it as science (which is fair, imo), you really show how the mushy middle can be convinced through good rhetoric.
Where it’s problematic is that it makes it seem like framing is some sort of cureall that will woo the hard right or something. You’re never going to convince the people who love the patriarchy to switch to your side by decidedly avoiding patriarchal metaphors. But by invoking other metaphorical frameworks, you can at least appeal to the mushy middle that is entranced both by talk of tradition and talk of liberty.
Anyway, post it on Pandagon!
On the elitism angle, I agree. Framing is presented, unfortunately, as a way to lure the yahoos of the right, and doesn’t give credit to the fact that they choose yahoo frames because they like their yahoo ways. ;)
There are a lot of smart people who are torn between the Enlightenment and conservatism, though. We need to discuss framing as a way to best speak to those people without insulting their intelligence.
Chris: “You missed my point. It’s not the use of framing that’s elitist. It’s saying it’s necessary because the American Public is a bunch of ignorant yahoos, and that said framing must need consist of watering the science down to a fourth-grade reading level, that’s elitist.”
I don’t think that I really did miss your point, Chris. Look at the way you present the Matt Nisbet quote as exemplary of an elitist undercurrent, and how it’s now become characterized as “watering the science down to a fourth-grade reading level”. That swoop from one to the other is exactly what I’m talking about.
As far as I can see, you’re caught right where the GOP wants you to be caught. The GOP does a neat two-step; first, destroy secondary science education, second, call anyone elitist who suggests that maybe secondary science education being what it is, perhaps a fourth-grade reading level is about right if you really want science to be involved in broad-based politics. You can’t simultaneously suggest that high school science education needs to be fixed and say that scientists are elitist when they write for the actually existing American public.
Yeah, post it on Pandagon so I get even more traffic! ;-)
I love science. Love it. I was a Science Major for about 1.5 years, took chemistry as an elective in order to begin loading up for my (imagined) pre-med future. I still think and talk in terms of Science sometimes. To me, the triad is psychology, science, and philosophy. The traid of much truth or at least truth-seeking.
Your post was very beautiful. In a scientific, philosophical fashion…whch made it interesting as a tribute to a lost friend.
I have no real answer on the other thread. People….I do’nt know about them and what they know or want to know. Myself, I was taught to go to the primary sources…journals or even the NYTimes Wed Science section. That’s pretty robust. Maybe some Science mags are good, too. But once Science news gets watered down from there, or finds its simplified way into Newsweek and such, it becomes bubblegum headlines for the masses, too easy to reframe in their own interests. So…I have no real answer to that question.
You can’t simultaneously suggest that high school science education needs to be fixed and say that scientists are elitist when they write for the actually existing American public.
Good thing that’s not what I said, then.
I tried to cut and paste a SCIENCE essay from 2003 here on the use of metaphor but found it exceeds the word limit for postings. So I suggest a Google search emplying these terms: snakehead unwanted poster. You will find the essay popping up at the top of the hits. It is worth a read.
OK, then I don’t understand what you said at all.
You first comment read:
“It’s not the use of framing that’s elitist. It’s saying it’s necessary because the American Public is a bunch of ignorant yahoos, and that said framing must need consist of watering the science down to a fourth-grade reading level, that’s elitist.”
The current American public is, on the whole, ignorant, and can only understand watered-down science. I view that as a known fact. If you want to address the public, and not a small subset of the middle class that comprises the readership of science articles, then you need to water down the science, whether you call it framing or something else. I don’t see how you’re not characterizing this attitude as elitist.
That is a great article, biosparite. I realized at around paragraph two that I’d read it shortly after it came out. It’s here for those interested.
“I wept in the fucking allergy clinic waiting room looking at lines on a phylogenetic map for a beloved cousin found and then lost again.”
And now I’m weeping, too. Over a “beloved cousin” of a cat I lost to old age 6 years ago. He adopted me some 5 years earlier; he was a crotchety curmudgeon of an oldster with his own definite ideas about things. He didn’t talk much, but we understood each other. I loved him, and I think the feeling was mutual. Fur/skin, four feet/two feet; we were still part of the same family. Cousins. I miss him.
Nan McIntyre:
“Oh, hang on, it’s already like that anyway; only about 40 years ago, “Scienceâ€? as a basis for the improvement of society was very widely worshipped.
Humanists and progressives had their foot in the door (frame) then, so why did the chance get squandered?
I have no answer. “
This echoes my post on my blog from yesterday. No links here, I understand, so go to wanderinweeta dot blogspot dot com and look for “My two cents worth”.
Rich: The attitude that I’m characterizing as elitist is the attitude that the current scientific (or other) ignorance of the mass is in any way inevitable. (As I said — rather plainly — in the post, in my response to the material I quoted from Matt Nesbit.) I do agree that the ignorance exists, and that it’s incumbent upon those of us who would advance scientific knowledge to make that science accessible. (As I also said — rather plainly — in the post.)
But Nesbit didn’t say “frames allow the public to gain a preliminary understanding of issues with which they are not yet familiar.” He explicitly said that frames allow the average citizen to have and to share uneducated opinions, and implied that a proper use of framing is to make sure those uninformed views correspond roughly with what we educated folks see as the truth.
You say I’m buying into the GOP framing. I’m saying that Nesbit’s framing is just the GOP frame seen from the other side. It’s a false dichotomy based on an uncharitable misinterpretation of the result of years of assaults on education in the US. Ignorance is not stupidity, but the GOP and Nesbit frames conflate the two.
That chart is a beautiful representation (dare I say a “visual frame”) of descent. Am not sure how successful he was, but I did like Dawkin’s attempt in The Ancestor’s Tale to pattern the narrative in a way that basically reflected this picture (expanded in width and depth.) His Canterbury Tales tie-in was clever, but perhaps too clever (in a Godel, Escher, Bach kind of way.) for attracting a broad audience.
Chris, I accept that you’re making this distinction between the actual and the ideal—as you say, you plainly state it—but I still don’t see it. The public that we have is the public that we have, for this generation. I don’t think that anyone is really talking about what should be done in the decade-plus future.
Sure, the situation could be changed, given time. But the situation is the product of many, many mistakes and purposeful interventions for the purpose of evil over the last decades, and can’t be turned around quickly. Therefore, I think that the distinction that you’re making doesn’t really operate. It ends up critiquing what people actually have to do in favor of the ideal. When some scientist tries to speak in public and is accused of trying to lead their audience, they can’t say “Oh, I’m trying to give you a preliminary understanding of issues with which you’re not yet familiar”—the image is the one you’re referenced, of Dr. Whatshisname from the Simpsons talking to Cletus. Until we stop describing playing the game with the cards that we have as elitism, we don’t get to even play the cards we have.
But even without talking about the tactics involved, I don’t see the problem with “frames allow the average citizen to have and to share uneducated opinions”. I’ve worked with a whole lot of uneducated people. They have jobs and families and no time to become educated about every scientific issue that affects them, unless we’re really going to change how all of society works—but that change doesn’t happen without organization. Sometimes what they really want, so that they can start participating in politics for themselves as quickly as possible, is a frame—or ideology, really. Passing on useful ideology does not necessarily make you a vanguardist.
The trend in the responses to “framing” seems to be positive. I agree. In fact, to refuse to “stoop” to framing could be made out to be elitist; the unscientifically inclined needn’t be bothered with.
Another issue on framing is one might be science literate in one field and ignorant in another. The following is an example from a blog today.
An article from PLoS Biology was headlined:
Aphid Thermal Tolerance Is Governed by a Point Mutation in Bacterial Symbionts
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050096
which I blew right past.
The next headline was
When Bacteria Lose a Single DNA Base, Aphids Suffer
which caught my eye. It was essentially the same subject matter but with a less dense presentation. I never knew aphids could have symbionts (My training is in chemistry, not biology); I just knew I didn’t like them on my plants and they could make big messes under trees.
So framing makes a difference and I think should be encouraged. This is what teachers do on a daily basis and we don’t accuse them of oversimplifying.
Geez, guys, important elements of science ARE explainable to the general public. For example, the model of the expanding universe as raisins caught in dough. That nicely encapsulates why every point of view perceives itself at the center of the expansion (absent gravitationally bound structures such as the Local Group of galaxies).The proving up of many theories is too rigorous for the layman to comprehend (and I include myself in that category re physics, etc.), but the implications of the theories can be put into appropriate metaphors without great harm. Where the crunch comes is communicating those metaphors to the closed minds of those people who have swallowed the mythology from ancient Hebrew fireside stories or other folklore. And I should insert the caveat that I learned from reading Rhys Isaac’s LANDON CARTER’S UNEASY KINGDOM that a sociologist looks at mythology as a culture’s way of explaining things, and untruth is not a necessary element. Isaac gives some examples of myths from our own culture and time: atom; Big Bang; and the like.
“For example, the model of the expanding universe as raisins caught in dough.”
Not a very good model, actually, since anything with raisins in dough has an outside of the dough. I always preferred spots on a balloon. If you consider the universe to be everything on the skin of the balloon, you can see how as the universe expands/the balloon is blown up, everything gets farther from everything else without there being an edge of the universe anywhere.
The raisin-in-dough thing is both a frame (of sorts, if you consider any metaphor to be a frame; I usually think of frames as having ideological content) and a dumbing down to the fourth grade level. (Balloon-with-spots probably is too, although it’s more accurate. I’m not exactly sure what the fourth-grade level is.) Which is fine with me. But if you object to either frames or dumbing things down, you should object to it.
Someone on Pandagon wrote that Carl Sagan didn’t dumb things down, he sexed things up. Well, he did a great job at popularizing science, but I disagree with that description. His catch phrase was “billions and billions of stars”, after all. That does a good job at communicating a basic sense of wonder, which people respond to. But it’s also dumbing things down. People just don’t like to think of their favorite metaphors as being dumbed down. (It’s pejorative to call it “dumbing down” instead of “popularizing” or something, but since that’s what people always refer to when they talk about elitism, I’m going to use it.)
From George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, 1860.
He very soon set down poor Tom as a thoroughly stupid lad; for though by hard labor he could get particular declensions into his brain, anything so abstract as the relation between cases and terminations could by no means get such a lodgment there as to enable him to recognize a chance genitive or dative. This struck Mr. Stelling as something more than natural stupidity; he suspected obstinacy, or at any rate indifference, and lectured Tom severely on his want of thorough application. “You feel no interest in what you’re doing, sir,” Mr. Stelling would say, and the reproach was painfully true. Tom had never found any difficulty in discerning a pointer from a setter, when once he had been told the distinction, and his perceptive powers were not at all deficient. I fancy they were quite as strong as those of the Rev. Mr. Stelling; for Tom could predict with accuracy what number of horses were cantering behind him, he could throw a stone right into the centre of a given ripple, he could guess to a fraction how many lengths of his stick it would take to reach across the playground, and could draw almost perfect squares on his slate without any measurement. But Mr. Stelling took no note of these things; he only observed that Tom’s faculties failed him before the abstractions hideously symbolized to him in the pages of the Eton Grammar, and that he was in a state bordering on idiocy with regard to the demonstration that two given triangles must be equal, though he could discern with great promptitude and certainty the fact that they were equal. Whence Mr. Stelling concluded that Tom’s brain, being peculiarly impervious to etymology and demonstrations, was peculiarly in need of being ploughed and harrowed by these patent implements; it was his favorite metaphor, that the classics and geometry constituted that culture of the mind which prepared it for the reception of any subsequent crop. I say nothing against Mr. Stelling’s theory; if we are to have one regimen for all minds, his seems to me as good as any other. I only know it turned out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as if he had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness which prevented him from digesting it. It is astonishing what a different result one gets by changing the metaphor! Once call the brain an intellectual stomach, and one’s ingenious conception of the classics and geometry as ploughs and harrows seems to settle nothing. But then it is open to some one else to follow great authorities, and call the mind a sheet of white paper or a mirror, in which case one’s knowledge of the digestive process becomes quite irrelevant. It was doubtless an ingenious idea to call the camel the ship of the desert, but it would hardly lead one far in training that useful beast. O Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being “the freshest modern” instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor,–-that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?
Tom Tulliver, being abundant in no form of speech, did not use any metaphor to declare his views as to the nature of Latin; he never called it an instrument of torture; and it was not until he had got on some way in the next half-year, and in the Delectus, that he was advanced enough to call it a “bore” and “beastly stuff.”