
Popular Science Writing: A  Challenge to Academic  Cultures [pdf] - lainon
http://ou.edu/content/expo/brainstorm/jcr%3Acontent/contentpar/download_37/file.res/Erickson-Popular%20Science%20Writing.pdf
======
veddox
Alexander von Humboldt believed that a scientist never interacts with nature
in a purely rational manner, but that there are always emotions involved as
well. And those emotions, he said, ought to be a part of the way he
communicated his findings.

His philosophy shows in his books. His writing style superbly captures the
beauty, awe and grandeur of nature as he experienced it on his South American
expedition. The result was a series of books that became bestsellers, because
almost everybody could read and appreciate them. At the same time, copious
footnotes provided the accuracy and comprehensiveness his fellow scientists
needed.

Of course, he also wrote books that were entirely technical in nature, as is
perhaps inescapable. But I wish more scientists today would take up the
challenge of communicating not just the truth of their findings, but also
their beauty.

------
whatshisface
> _Going against an epistemological vein of science, popular science writers
> make the discoveries of scientists available to non-specialists by empha-
> sizing what academic scientific papers necessar- ily exclude: the human
> stories and emotions of the scientists behind the discoveries._

This is a really weird statement. Professors love telling stories about how
this-or-that is discovered; there's a downright _attraction_ to the human
side. Further, a human story about how an idea came to be can make great
reading whether or not the idea turned out to be true in the end - Freud's
cases are still interesting, but these days mostly as literature. A fun story
might pique your _interest_ in something, but it better not convince you that
a theory is true! (i.e. keep your aesthetics separate from your epistemology
for a long and happy life.)

So, Feynman's storytelling doesn't go against any vein of science, and even
worse for the author's point _aesthetic human stories aren 't strict
epistemological resources in any context._ So in that sense the claim seems to
miss the way the veins flow in science, and the way epistemology works in
general.

~~~
mxwsn
The key phrase here is "academic scientific papers", which certainly strongly
discourage human stories and emotions.

------
erasemus
I remember at my school students were forced to choose between arts (AKA
humanities) and sciences at 16. The science students were on the whole
brighter than the arts students, through no fault of their own. The arts
teachers tried to sweeten the pill by saying things like, "Those scientists
don't understand human beings." The implication was that we were insensitive
and callous individuals. Comments like this left a mark on me, a science
student, and the rest of my life I've been trying to compensate. And I think
it's also one of the reasons science writers do what they do.

~~~
iorrus
Saying things like that is just a sign they were insecure and compensating.

~~~
theoh
Actually, there's a bit of 'fire' here, not just smoke. From the harmless
stereotypical CS professor who doesn't grok humans, to Zuckerberg's dangerous
obliviousness to the humanistic tradition.

The Wikipedia page for the two cultures has an interesting section which maybe
doesn't belong there:

"In his opening address at the Munich Security Conference in January 2014, the
Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves said that the current problems related
to security and freedom in cyberspace are the culmination of absence of
dialogue between "the two cultures": "Today, bereft of understanding of
fundamental issues and writings in the development of liberal democracy,
computer geeks devise ever better ways to track people... simply because they
can and it's cool. Humanists on the other hand do not understand the
underlying technology and are convinced, for example, that tracking meta-data
means the government reads their emails."[12]"

Of course there are well-rounded, humane people in the hard sciences. But it's
not a job requirement.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>"Today, bereft of understanding of fundamental issues and writings in the
development of liberal democracy, computer geeks devise ever better ways to
track people... simply because they can and it's cool."

Rubbish. Geeks do it because that's what they can get a job doing.

~~~
theoh
The quotation doesn't reflect my opinions, but I think you are taking an
overly simplistic "people are driven by money" line.

It's not unusual to encounter this kind of view expressed on HN, and it's
disturbing because it is so reductive. I mean, seriously, you think "geeks" in
general have no choice but to build the software that maximizes revenue? Geeks
are, if anything, more likely than other people to pursue activities for
intellectual satisfaction, to attack difficult problems for fun, etc.

The previous time this came up, someone was claiming that every restaurant
owner only cared about their bottom line -- and that absolutely no restaurant
owners were in it for the love of hospitality (as a social good or something
more professional) and self-expression/self-actualization. Honestly.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I don't think people are driven _only_ by money, but if inventing cool stuff
doesn't make any, you do it in your spare time after you take someone's money
to push ads into eyeballs.

------
dash2
> Academia’s fracture into a limiting cultural dichotomy has been an ongoing
> contemporary meta-discourse since 1959.

Sheesh. You read Feynman and then you write stuff like this.

------
iorrus
[edited:re read and changed my opinion]

~~~
veddox
I think you missed the point of the article. The author isn't talking about
the language scientists use when talking to each other, but about the
communication between scientists and non-scientists.

The way we speak and write in the scientific community is optimized for
precision and succinctness. Within the confines of a talk or paper, we just
don't have the time or the space to go into all the fundamentals of our work.
And neither do we have to, because everybody in our audience has spent years
of their life accumulating the necessary background knowledge to understand
what we're saying.

But when it comes to talking to outsiders, that doesn't work anymore. Whether
we are explaining our research to politicians or our grandmother, we need to
find new ways to express complex topics. The aim is for the explanation to be
readily understandable but not oversimplified. And that is the conflict the
author of the article is aiming at.

