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GameOver22 on 06 January 2013
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Mazty said:
GameOver22 said:
Mazty said:


Presentation as in the presentation of academic work at an academic conference. 

Presenting academia for popular consumption is pointless. As posted above, that video demonstrates why this is the case. 

TV spots....TV spots are what editors of shows want you to know, not how a scientist presents his work. 
Books are not papers. Papers are where you find academic work. 

The issue here is that you are mistaking 2nd hand sources as being the actual research. This couldn't be further from the truth. Scientists don't have egos. Editors and program schedulers have to think about ratings on the other hand. The best scientific show I can think of is Through the Wormhole as that tends to offer very rounded arguments with quick overviews by the actual scientists involved in the research. Nevertheless though, it's a far cry from the actual papers. 

I think you are clearly not reading what I wrote. I clearly distinguished between academic work that is published in journals/texts and the popular presentation of it to the public in tv shows/mass market books. Fact is, the vast majority of everyday people are not going to go to an academic conference and they aren't going to read an academic journal.....which was kind of the reason for my first post that you responded to.....which is that there is a fundamental difference between the work you read in an academic journal and the work you see coming off a mass-market press.....I was never talking about academic conferences in the first place....which I think is pretty clear looking back throught the posts.

If scientists want people to understand their work, they need to make a better effort at explaining it to common people (and I think scientists are clearly becoming more cognizant of this fact....just look at how many more books are being printed on the subjects). I would wholeheartedly disagree that popular presentations are pointless. Truth is, there are some very good examples of it out there, particularly in print.


"I find it hard to believe that scientists can't find the time to address the limitations of their work in an 30 minute or hour long tv spot"

Scientists don't have the above opportunity. Ever. If NatGeo make a documentary about the Higgs Boson, it's not 30 - 60 mins dedicated to the scientists who made the discovery; it's 30-60 mins of whatever the folks at the studio want to air. 

Did you watch the video above? There is little to no point in giving someone who has no education in a field a detailed analysis of a discovery as they don't have the means to understand it. 

Scientists only want the people that matter, other scientists, to understand their work. There's no point in getting a plumber to understand the details behind nano-magnetics; it's not scientists responsibility to educate the public to a very high standard. You can't explain a lot of it to common people. On this very forum I've had people argue against anthropogenic climate change whose arguments were utter shit because they didn't have the necessary education to realise the fundamental mistakes they were making and to get them to see said mistakes, I would have to spend hours educating others. 

As I said, Through the Wormhole is a great show that offers leading concepts at a very understandable level, but still it's understandable to people who've been educated somewhat in those fields. However this is now somewhat digressing into issues with the education system rather then the root of knowledge. 

The sentence right before that:

"It actually tends to jump straight to the findings, partly because of the way they present issues......meaning they don't really address any single experiment. Instead, they condense the history of a field into more of a bullet-point presentation."

You're taking my quote out of context to make it say something I'm not. As I said, I clearly distinguished between peer-reviewed work and popular prensentation of this work.......not just in that post, but in previous posts as well.

I'll just say that the video didn't convince me of anything. If anything, it showed that Feynman didn't know his audience and was unprepared because I've seen scientists explain issues much better than that (not that particular issue). Not to say his point wasn't good....you have to explain things to people in ways they understand. As I said, there are some good examples of this. Its not like the public is expected to hold a PHD on the issues, but they are capable of having a conceptual understanding of the issues.

To keep it short, I'll just say all this is getting away from my main point, which was that popular presentations of science....the ones people are exposed to....are very different from the science that takes place in academia, in terms of the expreseed tentativeness, certainty, alternatives explanations, criticisms, etc. Because of this, I understand why the public is often confused about the meaning of scientific studies.