An Open Letter to Scientists: Respect Open Inquiry
I would like to say a few words to scientists. Let me first say that I am not a scientist with a degree in science and with titles and letters before and after my name. Though I’ve had interest from a young age and never lost it, I started on that path in college but later chose a different direction for various life reasons. If you do have such credentials, congratulations! You’ve achieved a level of work most people don’t fathom. I hope you do great work, invent great things, make important discoveries, and, most importantly of all, help people.
You’ll remember from all your science classes (I certainly do, but maybe later generations didn’t get exposure to this), that science in its purest form is about free inquiry. If you want to understand something, ask questions about it. Form a hypothesis. Test it, and repeat. If you get the same result, you’re likely onto something and you should expand the research and publish what you’ve learned about it. If you don’t, keep trying by changing one variable at a time until you void or verify the hypothesis. The main thing is that even with things that are considered consensus understanding, in a perfect world you have the freedom to still ask the question, and even as many times as you like. If for no other reason than maybe a good night’s sleep combined with a free-association of that well-established idea with other ideas could result in a better or new understanding of the established idea, or some other new breakthrough.
You’ll also remember from your history classes about a time when science, and scientists, had no reasonable standard of free inquiry or academic freedom. They were silenced and often persecuted by heads of state and heads of faith alike. Sometimes even by regular citizens and/or the laity of a faith. There were inquisitions and witch trials that drove ideas underground which, if allowed to breathe, be watered, and get sunlight, would have grown into a tree of knowledge much earlier than they did. Instead, we got stuck with a thousand years of negative progress, loss of knowledge, and darkness of the mind.
But, thankfully, we don’t live in those times anymore. Scientists are free to explore, do experiments, write publications, and even invent new things to make our lives better. Nobody gets in their way and they can do or study whatever they fancy. People who aren’t degreed or credentialed scientists can do the same if they have the gumption and drive to dig into a problem and come up with a solution. They can research and do anything they set their minds to.
Right?
What I say next isn’t meant to reflect on all scientists. It’s about a relative few who, for some reason, have some kind of negative view of both scientists (the ones they disagree with) and non-scientists (who they define as people without their specific knowledge and/or degrees). This is about the few who give the many a bad name and, among those of us who happened to choose other occupations but still respect and even love science, also create distrust and ill will.
There’s a lot of chaos in our modern world. It needs to be explained, repeatedly, to the many by the few who are experts and professionals in engineering, technology, biology, medicine, anatomy, infectious diseases, physics, astronomy, and a host of other scientific disciplines. Sometimes the topics and explanations are simple. More often they are complex and can be subject to various interpretations depending on who is presenting the explanation, their tone, their background, how much information they share, and at what level and how clearly they share it.
Some scientists go on TV or publish in traditional print form. Some use YouTube videos. Some use Twitter or Facebook Pages or blogs. Some speak at conferences. Some stick to papers submitted to peer-reviewed journals. All of this is important and necessary for educating the public.
However, no matter how frustrated you feel, what’s not necessary nor helpful (again, speaking to just some scientific professionals) is a sneering, disdainful, condescending, sarcastic approach. Even when you think the rest of us are idiots for not understanding and miscommunicating about a complex (to us) topic that is simple (to you), it is the sign of a more intelligent, thoughtful, and magnanimous person who keeps that sentiment inside in the service of building bridges, not burning them.
Also, not all of us are “unwashed masses” of a “troglodyte” and monolithic demographic who voted for or supports [insert your least favorite politicians here]. A great number of us could go either way or even support the same policies and leaders that you do. A great number of us are also intelligent, also professionals, also curious, also concerned, and also well-meaning.
We just don’t have all the information and experience you have. And some of the information we do have, we don’t necessarily trust because of the behaviors and real or perceived conflicts of interest of the people disseminating it. Add to that the instinctive understanding of the selfishness and power-hunger of human nature in general, and yes, we begin to resent how some in the science community engage with us.
So, when we get wind of something that, to our less-informed minds, doesn’t align with other things we see, we feel threatened and concerned. We don’t know where to look or whom to trust for information, especially when it looks like the conflicts emanate from the scientific community itself. We begin to ask some “unorthodox” questions and come to some “heretical” conclusions. We re-evaluate our stances on things we were told to do, say, think, or believe. When advice and numbers become contradictory, get confusing, or come from too many people in too many ways, it begins to cause a cognitive dissonance that can manifest itself in leaps of logic or “conspiracy theory” thinking.
It’s understandable when you stop to think about it. Some conspiracies, after all, have, historically, been found to be objectively true. If not in totality, at least in substance and consequence. And not all “new” conspiracy theories are automatically worthy of ridicule as if “such things are done away with” in an enlightened age. Human beings do still collude together in corrupted ways, as endless parades of political scandal stories clearly illustrate. Furthermore, people having an active B.S. (and no, I don’t mean Bachelor of Science) detector is actually a healthy sign of a living and vibrant democracy. Nobody likes having the wool pulled over their eyes about anything. That’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing, especially for science!
Besides, even if you disagree with a particular conspiracy or feel like people have too little understanding to comment, incessantly and rudely making fun of them just makes it spread faster. People come to view you as an enemy — a happy co-conspirator — rather than someone just trying to help them make sense of it by providing more or different information than they might already have. If you constantly flex and whip out your impressive…uh…credentials and start swinging them around, slapping people in the face with them, and crowing about how smart you are and how dumb they are, how are they going to see that as anything more than the self-congratulatory indulgence of your own ego? All that accomplishes is reinforcing their resolve and creates a Kessler Syndrome of colliding arguments that litter the conversation. It just serves to spread even more of the (mis)information you wish hadn’t “gotten out” in the first place. More about that in “Please, Please, Please Don’t Mock Conspiracy Theories” by Whitney Phillips at Wired.
So, a little humility and forbearance wouldn’t go amiss. Over the past quarter-century that I’ve been an avid follower of science topics online, I’ve personally witnessed not a few conversations where someone with ivory tower titles gets “owned” by a layperson or ten. Through common sense, natural talents in deductive reasoning, and enthusiasm for participating in “citizen science” for its own sake, the “uneducated rubes” have made mincemeat of more than a few dozen PhDs and the like. I don’t say that as a clap back. It’s embarrassing and awkward, especially for the titled “owned”. I just mean it as an observation that we all can learn something from the questions others are asking and the information they’re offering, even if it would never occur to us to ask the question or see the facts the way they do.
Citizen science is, to a degree many are not even aware anymore, how we got to be the pinnacle technological civilization in all of recorded human history. If it were the case, forever, that only uber-credentialed scientists had a voice and opportunity to learn about, think about, or practice science, we wouldn’t have benefitted from the Wright Brothers’ invention of the airplane. A number of great amateur scientists would never have been taken seriously.
Would Nikola Tesla have been “allowed” to develop alternating current to the point that it and other discoveries and inventions of his have become the standard foundation of nearly all our current technology? (He very nearly didn’t if it hadn’t been for fellow citizen scientist and then “favored expert” Thomas Edison’s failed and unscientific PR stunts to try to discredit alternating current).
Would Einstein (yes, he had a teaching degree), at the time he was a mere patent clerk, have dared to construct thought experiments that would eventually lead to the world-changing and yet deceptively simple-looking formula of E=mc²?
We NEED citizen scientists…always…no matter how kooky some of them may sound to our modern sensibilities…to push back on “prevailing wisdom” on a great many things. Don’t discourage us. Otherwise, our society will turn scientists into priests and then gods who can never, ever be questioned. Historically, in the past century especially, that has led to very bad outcomes.
Yes, we get it. You’re smart. That’s not bad or wrong at all. Just realize that you’ve stood on the shoulders of giants and you’re the giants on whose shoulders the next generation will stand. So set a good example to them. Realize that your experience doesn’t mean everyone else who doesn’t think like you do or know what you know or have done what you’ve done is stupid. It also doesn’t mean that yours should be the only voice that gets to be heard or even believed. And if someone genuinely provides an actual, objective fact that you honestly didn’t know about or consider, it’s simply rude to return offensive insults in response to soothe a bruised professional ego.
Lead. Be a better example that we’ll want to respect and follow.
Related Stories
Covid-19 Research Scandals Illustrate What’s Wrong With Science
