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[Trekkin]

I kinda like Sabine's outreach efforts, especially her 'talk to a physicist' service - which, to me, seems like one of the better ways to deal with wannabe Einsteins peddling their pet theories.

That depends what you mean by "better", though, especially in the current post-information age. Scientists' training in communication still assumes an attentive audience. It's great for meeting with collaborators, but not suitable for dealing with political trolls, cranks, and general lunatics, which together comprised the vast majority of the people who I interacted with during graduate outreach -- during which time, of course, I was not doing science.

I think that, as we transition to an audience more fundamentally opposed to the idea of objective reality and the gap between public knowledge and the cutting edge widens, scientific communication skills will become far less important than crowd control, and we can relatively easily brief people trained in that sort of pedagogy on an overview of our work.

[Il Palazzo]

Have you looked into what the service comprises, though? It's, iirc, $50 per 20 minutes of full attention, one-on-one talk, or something along those lines.
If you pay dearly for just a few minutes, you wont wax philosophical over your megalomania, or go on a persecutory complex rant, or throw around buzzwords you don't understand.
This forces the crank to re-evaluate what they have created, what they want to ask, what they really know, what is the gap in the knowledge they're trying to bridge, and whether the whole endeavour is really worth it. All before they even actually talk to the physicist.
Admittedly, my working definition of 'better outreach' in this case is 'successful in discouraging people from becoming crackpots'. So this is seldom about really teaching the science to the public, as it is about pruning the false impressions of what the science is, so that they don't macerate and spread as readily.

[Egan_BW]

If you pay dearly for just a few minutes, you wont wax philosophical over your megalomania, or go on a persecutory complex rant, or throw around buzzwords you don't understand.

This assumes that people strive to spend their money effectively, which they do not.

[Trekkin]

Have you looked into what the service comprises, though? It's, iirc, $50 per 20 minutes of full attention, one-on-one talk, or something along those lines.
If you pay dearly for just a few minutes, you wont wax philosophical over your megalomania, or go on a persecutory complex rant, or throw around buzzwords you don't understand.
This forces the crank to re-evaluate what they have created, what they want to ask, what they really know, what is the gap in the knowledge they're trying to bridge, and whether the whole endeavour is really worth it. All before they even actually talk to the physicist.
Admittedly, my working definition of 'better outreach' in this case is 'successful in discouraging people from becoming crackpots'. So this is seldom about really teaching the science to the public, as it is about pruning the false impressions of what the science is, so that they don't macerate and spread as readily.

Yes, and the cost will help weed out some of the lazier trolls -- although, as the comments on her blog post announcing the service illustrate, some of them will just find the nearest free soapbox and whine about it.

My worry from an anti-crackpot standpoint is more one of triage, though. To be sure, some people will be spurred by the cost to rationally examine their theory and recognize it as aphysical, and maybe they need to be induced to do that in this way. But there are also people who arrive at unscientific ends by unscientific means, and I suspect their internal vetting process is to ask themselves whether they still think they are very smart and therefore everything they believe is true -- and then to also not bother actually talking to a physicist, more convinced they're right and more entrenched in their wrongness than ever. So now we have to ask whether those who are wrong for the right reasons and may be helped along will outnumber those who are wrong for the wrong reasons and will only be emboldened.

I think the latter are more common largely because modern American conspiracy theories and related follies are thick with them. At the root of Hammonism is the idea that Ken Ham thinks antediluvians fed Christians to dinosaurs before Noah built a floating wave-powered flush toilet and he's real smart so you should too. The Hovind Theory is little more than an excuse for Kent Hovind to pretend he has a real doctorate. Flat Earthers all cluster around their favored purveyor of well-gee-sure-looks-flat-to-me zetetic nonsense and rant about how everyone else is a CIA plant. Timecube was, by word count, mostly rants about how everyone but Gene Ray was educated stupid. Even the Dean Drive and the polywell fusor have little cults around them, and mewing runs mostly on the story that the Mews are persecuted orthodontic geniuses rather than dangerous crackpots. On the low end of the spectrum, conspiracy theorist Youtube is rife with these sorts of personal blogs about how persecuted they are by being asked to substantiate their nonsense, and the forum equivalent is about as rampant. I don't do social media, but what other people have shown me is along the same lines: as conspiracy theorists develop, they approach 100% conspiracy and 0% theory, because the point is to feel like they know something despite all evidence to the contrary.

This service is tantamount to an offer to put up or shut up. Some of them will try to do the former and realize they should really do the latter, sure, but we already select against crackpots willing and able to do either. The majority of loons who last long enough to spread their nonsense have already developed a defense mechanism against ever having to do either, so all this will do is motivate them to get out ahead of it.

If you want to prune false understandings of what science is, I think engaging with their purveyors is already taking the wrong tack. Detailed explanations of how bad science is bad are boring. Inviting people to come point and laugh at these stupid assholes who believe wrong things and are bad is sinking to their level, yes, but that's the level on which all of society operates now anyway, and it does have the advantage of being more engaging.

[Il Palazzo]

If you want to prune false understandings of what science is, I think engaging with their purveyors is already taking the wrong tack. Detailed explanations of how bad science is bad are boring. Inviting people to come point and laugh at these stupid assholes who believe wrong things and are bad is sinking to their level, yes, but that's the level on which all of society operates now anyway, and it does have the advantage of being more engaging.

I think yours is a too polarised a view. If there were only two kinds of people in the world - the sensible ones and the hardcore crackpots - then I'd be inclined to make a resigned sigh and agree that we might just as well give up and at least try to derive some fun from the situation.
But people don't become crackpots overnight. It's the repeated reinforcement of bad ideas and the skewed world view that hardens them against reason. Constant ridicule seems like a certain way to push them into the sweet embrace of cranky echo chambers.
So I think it's worth engaging in good faith those who are yet only at risk of sliding down the crank ramp. The format of the service ensures that most anyone who is already certain that the cabal of ivory tower scientists is out to get them won't even bother, while those who are still trying to understand how things work will make a valiant effort to sort their beliefs out before they spend the money. And when they do, they won't dismiss what was told outright, since it'd be admitting to wasting money.

I don't claim to know what is the best approach, really. However (for what it's worth), for some years now I've been hanging around in one of the sciency forums with strong moderation, and while I've seen a fair share of die-hard attention-seeking crackpots receiving banhammer treatment, there's just as many genuinely curious but confused people who get told off in brusque manner, which puts them in a defensive mindset and paints an unwelcoming picture of the scientific community. It's throwing out the baby with the bath water, so to speak. I just don't see how it helps anyone.

[Max™]

I spent far longer than I'd like to admit arguing with anti-relativists, to the point where I had stopped trying to explain why GPS suffices as a regular easily tested example (Am I standing here? Yes, I think so. Does it say I'm standing here? There ya go sport!) to inane arguments over fucking geometry.

I've seen these dudes make tinker-toy models and photograph them to demonstrate their point supposedly.

After a while I had to start repeating to myself: comfortable beliefs are not dislodged by uncomfortable facts.

[Trekkin]

I don't claim to know what is the best approach, really. However (for what it's worth), for some years now I've been hanging around in one of the sciency forums with strong moderation, and while I've seen a fair share of die-hard attention-seeking crackpots receiving banhammer treatment, there's just as many genuinely curious but confused people who get told off in brusque manner, which puts them in a defensive mindset and paints an unwelcoming picture of the scientific community. It's throwing out the baby with the bath water, so to speak. I just don't see how it helps anyone.

Oh, I'm not saying to mock otherwise harmless members of the general public just for believing unscientific things. As a strategy, going after the arch-wackos, the professionals, with as much memeable vitriol as we can muster may help people understand emotionally what they probably can't yet appreciate logically.

See, I think that more crackpots are salvageable than we can presently try to help, because we assume an order of events in the progression to crackpottery that is far from universal. I think we tacitly assume that people start believing untrue things and then willingly distort and dismantle their own bullshit filter in order to ignore the problems with their ideas, but the opposite process -- starting with a broken filter and then accruing appealing nonsense they failed to reject -- better explains both crank magnetism and how some scientists can also believe patently untrue things in something other than a literal sense without starting that slide into spouting unscientific nonsense and generally being useless. When I've asked my colleagues about it, they generally refer to some variant of non-overlapping magisteria.

So, if we work off the idea that crackpots are, at their core, people who can't recognize nonsense, then trying to bring them back through calm and patient explanation of the facts is tantamount to trying to reason someone out of something they weren't reasoned into. I don't think that can work. Faulty logic can be identified and fixed, to be sure, and you're right that we're often more hostile than we should be to people who are honestly wrong, but I think that once someone chooses to believe things based on how they feel about them, they have too ready a way to just ignore all efforts to point out how dysfunctional that is. They are, in a fundamental sense, lost to science. We need another way to bring them back before we can do anything else, particularly since that kind of broken filter rapidly metastasizes into identifying as an expert based on little more than their own desire to be taken seriously without anyone having any reason to do so.

I think ridicule can be that path back. Some of the people on the slide to crackpottery might want to jump off if we shine a light on the giant pool of bullshit at the bottom, so to speak, as well as the very vocal people currently neck-deep in it. If we want to put the imprimatur of actual scientists on anything in order to damp down crackpottery, I think we can more effectively do that by pointing out the ridiculous in whatever way is most memorable and leave patient dissection of the merely wrong to those with the pedagogical expertise to do so effectively, particularly since most of that wrongness is on an elementary level.

[wierd]

RE: Max

They are in people trained to accept empirical results.

The issue, is that most people are given messages (either by friends, family, or the mainstream media, as may be) that they are entitled to their own facts, or worse, that personal opinions are more important than objectively real phenomena, outcomes, or events.


Take for instance, the current issue with Trump.  We have some pretty damning evidence that he misused his office in a criminal matter, the prescribed remedy for which is removal from office via impeachment.  Rather than go "Oh, our guy really did do something bad for our country that cannot be excused", the Trumpists instead grip harder to their (alarming and absurd) views that the media is "Out to get Trump", and that "He did nothing wrong", or worse, that "his behavior is how you get stuff done in international politics", etc... 



Training people that "No, your senses, and as a consequence, what you perceive (and thus what you view with comfort) are fallible.  Being able to identify when your senses have failed you, and knowing how to test for that occurrence, will let you know what is truly real. There are some well tried practices for that-- They are used by scientists all the time for this very reason, and you can use them too." is not very popular.  This is because the basic message "No, what you experience can in fact be wrong." is not well tolerated, especially by the more emotionally minded.  Emotions are illogical and irrational things; Being guarded in your decisions, especially based on faulty sensors, is a thing that requires strong rational thought to underpin.  People have to be comfortable with self-doubt before they can easily accept an uncomfortable fact.  With the emphasis these days on "Self Esteem! YAY!" in the media, which often gives some dangerous messages, which reinforce emotionally based decision making (and thus less rational thought, and more automatic behaviors, as long as they make people feel confident and self-assured), this is getting to be in vastly short supply in the general population.  The cultural emphasis is not on "Being the best person you can be" (where "best person" is aligned individually to that individual's interests and persona, as they relate to a shared, and objective reality and its consequences), but instead on "Being happy" and "Self-confident." 

I don't think I need to mention dunning-kreuger as more than just this one liner, but maybe I should:  As self-confidence goes up, typically-- competence goes down.  This is because there is less self-doubt driving the seeking of that shared objective reality and its consequences, and more of the "It feels right to me" based decision making.

At some point, society has to answer a very prickly question.  At what point is it justified, and even essential, to stomp on a person's emotionally based view of the world, and bring them kicking and screaming into the harsher, objective shared reality?


We are at that kind of point now with Climate Change.  When is the common survival of the planet and its remaining lifeforms more important than the "feels" of the majority of the human population?


I think that when we reach that point, the media will have no choice but to alter its message, and then people in general will be less prone to crackpot bullshit, because the educational message will have changed along with the status quo.

[Il Palazzo]

I think ridicule can be that path back.

But have you seen this actually work, in practice? From all I've been able to experience so far, it just devolves into rabid name-calling and entrenchment.

I certainly agree, btw, that crackpottery can have something to do with inherently faulty epistemological toolbox rather than just its gradual erosion over time. But then again, it's probably most likely that it's a bit of both.

[Max™]

I mean, it would be nice if we could somehow shake the idea that beliefs and opinions are defensible on their own, much less when they clash with observable and testable reality.

I don't think it is likely to happen tomorrow, or the next day, and so forth. As someone who values honest doubt and would rather accept a usefully true statement with caveats... it would be easier to just ignore that I can't prove a vast number of the many assumptions I make about the world around me, and pretend the asterisks I append to every fact-like thing I seem to know aren't there.

It's easier to walk around on a flat surface of belief than it is to juggle torches on a tightrope while riding a unicycle made of doubt, and at the end of the day I'm not gonna get many people to join me up here, there are goats and pigs over at the petting zoo tent!

[Trekkin]

I think ridicule can be that path back.

But have you seen this actually work, in practice? From all I've been able to experience so far, it just devolves into rabid name-calling and entrenchment.

I certainly agree, btw, that crackpottery can have something to do with inherently faulty epistemological toolbox rather than just its gradual erosion over time. But then again, it's probably most likely that it's a bit of both.

Well, since we're aiming to convince third-party observers anyway, I'd argue that seeing it appear to work would be evidence it's failed; we want people watching to go home and think, not convert to fanatic scientism on the spot, and you're right that the target is a lost cause anyway. There have, however, been people who subsequently became vocal anti-crackpots who cite more acerbic rational (mostly atheist) Youtubers as the reason for their coming around, Paulogia being one of them. If you can stand to do it, trawling through Logicked's comments sections turns up a few more, and he's closer to what I'm thinking of than most.

If you know of a more direct way to measure gradual disengagement from comforting nonsense without it being self-reported (and loudly at that) I'm all ears.

[Max™]

Helping people learn to examine their thoughts and the frameworks their thoughts operate inside of is a decent starting point.

Understanding that you're allowed to explore outside the "bounds" of typical conversation or discussion so you can better appreciate the common threads which tie together reality based views could help.

Case in point: you don't have to answer a broken question, if the asking involves assumptions which don't apply to you, say so.

I have no favorite baseball team, asking me which is my favorite is therefore broken, as is the assumption that any answer to that question involves me. I don't have a zodiac sign, belief system, IQ, favorite X-box game, or preference regarding country music. Asking me which one I have doesn't mean you get to slot me into a category when I don't answer, it means you need to ask better questions, perhaps research them more beforehand.

I can't say for sure that more people being comfortable with questioning things would reduce crackpottery, but teaching people how to more thoroughly question their own assumptions might by way of helping them ask better questions than "what if I'm smarter than Einstein" type bullshit.

[Telgin]

This is arguably a bit off topic, but I've been kicking around an idea in my head for a little while now to try to write a sci-fi story that takes place in a nonrelativistic universe, and I've had a bit of trouble finding a summary of known phenomena that are caused by relativistic effects that I'd need to change or remove.  Does anyone know of such a reference?  Skimming the Wikipedia articles didn't really help a lot, but if it's the best there is I can go back and reread in more depth.

Naturally, quite a lot depends on how said universe works differently from ours, but it would be a start.  Things get really weird if you can do stuff like outrun gravity and electromagnetic fields (ignoring that magnetism probably doesn't exist without relativity), but it might be fun to imagine what that's like.  That would be completely different from a universe where forces travel infinitely fast.

Maybe it's too much to try to imagine a realistic nonrelativistic universe that's recognizably similar to ours.  I'm guessing almost all of chemistry and quantum physics would have to work so differently that it might as well be magic at that point.

[Max™]

What do you know of Baxter (i.e. Xeelee stories) and Banks (Culture stories) off hand?

[Telgin]

Nothing.  I'm not much of a reader and only have a passing familiarity with some of the big name classic sci-fi authors like Asimov.  I haven't actually read any of their stories though.  Kind of counter to the goal of trying write in the genre, I know, but the scientific aspect was probably going to be less important than the story itself.  I mostly wanted to get the details as correct as possible for my own satisfaction.