Writers on this blog often appeal to emotion, unapologetically: eg David Gorski’s comment that Mark Crislip’s writing had ‘just the right mix of snark, science, and statistics’. The snark means I cannot refer non-believers in science to articles on this site. They will read that writers here have already judged issues (eg acupuncture), and then infer that they are trolling the research for things which reinforce that belief.

I hugely appreciate the massive (and voluntary) effort put in by writers here to not only write, but to do the work of thinking and analysis.

But if you want to convert people, leave out the snark — or find ways of using your audience’s emotions effectively.

“Homeopathy only treats symptoms, not the underlying cause” might be a useful campaign to start with.

Autism – my sum total of exposure to this condition was Rainman – until I recently became aware of products that families use support environmentals for their autistic kids. I am not an expert or physician, but I’ll tell you – seems to me drinking water, eating food and breathing air loaded with chemicals and getting 3 hours of sleep a night doesn’t exactly support growing the healthiest baby possible from EITHER PARENT – these children are born behind the 8-ball – then – give them shots – sure, some of these weak bodies will react! It’s the sum of so many moving parts – and if we don’t clean up our air, water and food and sleep – 1 in 150 kids is going to get even more epidemic than it already is.

Your article is one of the sanest I’ve seen in a long time – my recommendation – stop looking to others for your health and well being, wake up and take care of your family – then teach others to do the same.

Two words: Sanjay Gupta. Meaning, the ones that go about it the “right way” end up being douchebags who put their public image ahead of their opportunity to educate, and they either talk a lot of meaningless nonsense, or else act solely as a mouthpiece for CDC and NIH advisories.

The solution that I am still clinging to in all of this is a better understanding by the public of human physiology and biology (as I suggested in my question to you *wink*). Many pseudo-scientific claims can be easily debunked by a simple understanding of how our immune system fights viruses and bacteria, why we get runny noses, or how over the counter pain relievers works. A rudimentary understanding of how our bodies work seems to be completely missing from the social consciousness. Whether this is the fault of public school science or health teachers, busy doctors (as you suggested) or some greater mistrust and fear of science, I have no opinion.

Some might counter my argument by saying that “a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing,” but I would argue that a lot of ignorance is more dangerous than a little knowledge.

We need more Tim Minchins and George Carlins!!

I think you post on SBM more than any of the regular commentators. Do you mind giving us a short bio of who you are and why you are here?

Feel free to remove any identifying factoids. I’m just really curious about the who and why of you. I think all I know is that you are female, you practice yoga and have a skeptical naturopathic world view. That and you have the time and ability to write prolifically to a (mostly) hostile audience.

I’m just curious

I think the approach to this question is to talk to those who have succeeded the most in educating the masses about science.

Carl Sagan though his widow and his writings
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Mythbusters.

I think it takes showmanship that a lot of science lacks…

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When the world doesn’t end on the predicted date, the apocalyptic sects just readjust the date or claim that their activities prevented the event.

The exposure of Wakefield’s many sins against science have not deterred his large body of followers from believing his research proved MMR causes autism.

True believers simply refuse to admit into their consciousness any information that would discredit their belief. Or if they admit it, they can easily rationalize it away.

There is a fundamental difference between how one arrives at a correct idea and how one arrives at a belief. A belief is arrived at by being influenced by someone else; it is a top down imposition of a belief via communication. The “teacher” conveys an idea which is adopted as being “true” by the “learner”. The “learner” has no way of evaluating if the idea is true or not, it is simply adopted as being true.

A correct idea can only be generated from the bottom up, from facts tied together with logic. If you don’t know the facts or don’t have them tied together with logic, you have no way to tell if the idea is correct or not. If you can’t tell if an idea is correct or not your default should be to put less credence on the idea than if you do have facts and logic to back it up. Unfortunately, this is not the way people think.

The degree of certainty that people hold depends on the “influence” of the individual spouting the idea, not the facts and logic which may or may not be present. There are no facts and logic that support a 6,000 year old Earth. YECs believe in a 6 kyo Earth because and only because someone told them it was correct and they (erroneously) believed it. No one ever arrived at a belief in a 6 kyo Earth using facts and logic because there are no facts and logic that support that idea. No amount of facts and logic are going to change the belief because it has no basis in facts and logic.

Often the way that people lose their “faith” is when the charismatic leader who imposed the belief on them is shown to be a dishonest lying hypocrite. It is not that new facts and logic have changed their belief; it is that the credibility of the person who influenced them to have the belief has changed.

Belief is attaching a truth value to an idea. Understanding is being able to calculate the truth value of an idea from more fundamental concepts, from facts and logic. If you attempt to calculate a truth value using flawed premises or flawed logic, you will end up with a flawed truth value.

The ability to “influence” is the ability to invoke beliefs in others when they lack the facts and logic to generate those beliefs themselves (i.e. in the absence of understanding). In many cases (in virtually all non-scientific cases), the reason the person lacks the facts and logic to arrive at that belief is because there are no facts and chain of logic that gets you there because the belief is in fact wrong (i.e. the 6 kyo Earth).

When scientists develop and use the ability to “influence”, that is to get people to believe without supplying facts and a chain of logic to connect them, then they cease doing science.

I think that many scientists don’t want the ability to “influence” because it will very much get in the way of doing science. Science is hard enough as it is without worrying about fooling yourself. If you had an increased ability to generate belief without supplying understanding, there is the temptation to use it on oneself. This is what Feynman warned about, “the easiest person to fool is yourself”.

Some people will only abandon belief systems that are devoid of facts and logic when the “leaders” espousing those beliefs are shown to be lying frauds. I think this is one of the fundamental problems of trying to have a civil debate with such people. If the debate is civil, the followers misinterpret the civility as respect for the person and their flawed position, not respect for using facts and logic to try and evaluate the truth value of an idea.

It also doesn’t help when you have people out there like Cancer Treatment Centers of America, pushing their treatment style with the standard testimonial of “The stone-faced doctor-bully told me I was going to die.” Oh, and the never-mentioned-here cranky annoying jerk addict Dr House from the TV show of the same name probably doesn’t help either.
(potential CoI: I actually watch House reruns…. they’re sometimes amusing. )

People like McCarthy find emotional triggers and use them to forward their agendas. Fact, truth, objectivity are all meaningless.

McCarthy uses “save our children” and grand conspiracy arguments. Creationists use fairness and “teach the controversy” arguments. Post-modernists and New Agers appeal to democratic instincts, laziness, and/or self-importance by assuring people that all opinions have equal value regardless of how much education someone has.

And then there’s the whole segment of the society that simply is not influenced by logical, data-based arguments, but are instantly convinced by the right anecdotes.

It’s so hard to influence people once they’ve staked out their ideological turf. Science must be as aggressive in using tactics to promote itself.

This is unnatural for science. As others have said, good science makes poor theater. And scientifically-minded, problem-solver people do not make good marketers. This was dramatically illustrated when Carl Sagan was denied entry to the NAS because he was viewed as wasting his time on popularizing rather than doing hard science.

Somehow the “reality-based community” must find and fund popularizers. Promoting science – lobbying, advertising, participating in debates, TV shows and appearances – these should be lucrative career alternatives. And since ideologies are often cemented early in life, it is CRITICAL that we focus on children and schools. This all gets so much easier if kids start life with some literacy in science, even if they don’t pursue it as a career. Critical thinking, *how to think*, should get more hours of school time than the study of foreign languages or music.

To daedalus2u’s point, we need to shape those brains to be capable of rational, scientific thought.

Finally, young people are on the internet. Everyone here should spend some time where the kids are. I strongly recommend spending a few minutes a week in the “homework help” or “biology” or “alternative medicine” sections of Q&A sites like Yahoo!Answers. You’ll come up against idiots, but you’ll also encounter real people with real questions. And your answers will be seen by young people whose minds and world views have not yet hardened.

Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Story

A lot of the recommendations above touch on one or more of those elements. Similarly, the book The Science of Fear touches on a number of common cognitive distortions around fear, and ways to either be aware of or to counteract them.

All communication can only be the transfer of mental representations. One individual has an idea which is instantiated in his/her brain (via mechanisms we do not understand). To communicate that idea, the individual converts the mental representation into a data stream of language via what I term his/her “theory of mind”. The data stream is transmitted, speech (spoken language), gestures (sign language), text (written language), body movements (body language), and so on. The receiving individual then must up-convert the data stream back into a mental concept using his/her own “theory of mind”, which must be able to emulate the theory of mind that the first individual used to generate the data stream. If the data stream cannot be up-converted into a mental concept, then communication cannot occur.

In principle, there is no “correct” theory of mind, a theory of mind is only “correct” if it matches that of the individual being communicated with.

There are several ways that communication can fail; the most fundamental way is if the receiving individual doesn’t have the neuroanatomy to instantiate the idea as a mental concept. By “neuroanatomy”, I am meaning the physical structure including all the connections (which changes on a daily basis as new connections are made and old ones broken). The only way you can think an idea is if you have the neuroanatomy to represent that idea. I think that is why learning takes a long time; the brain has to be remodeled to generate the neural structures that the new concepts map into. Until there are neural structures that the idea can map into, the idea cannot be understood, or even thought.

This is one of the fundamental difficulties that non-scientists have in trying to understand science. They don’t have the neuroanatomy to do so. They could acquire the neuroanatomy, but remodeling one’s brain such that it has the hardware to instantiate scientific ideas is what a scientific education does. A scientific education takes a long time because scientific ways of thinking are not “hard wired” into human brains the way that communication and social ways of thinking are (for the most part, but this is complex, people with ASDs have more of a “theory of reality” than do NTs (see the blog)). Language is acquired easily because there are hard-wired structures that cause it to happen without conscious effort on the part of the individual learning the language. It is not an “easy” thing that is happening, is simply seems “easy” because all the difficulty is transparent to the user.

Different brains do have different degrees of facility in acquiring new ideas of different types. That degree of facility depends on what the initial neuroanatomy is, and what remodeling is necessary to achieve a neuroanatomy that can instantiate the idea.

Being “influential” means being able to generate a data stream that compels remodeling of the receiver’s neuroanatomy such that they understand and believe the idea being conveyed is correct. The idea does not need to describe actual reality for this to happen. Being influential doesn’t convey understanding, it conveys belief. That belief can be in things that are correct, or it can be nonsense.

Being right means that your idea actually corresponds to reality; that is the idea follows from facts using logic and so are consistent with all that is known.

The ability to be influential is a property of the dynamic between two individuals. Like all communication it requires two parties. A single individual can be correct. It takes two individuals for one of them to be influential.