Here’s Eva Amsen’s idea for a event at SciBarCamp:

My idea: find 4 or 5 volunteers from different backgrounds to sit on a 20 minute panel and (with audience feedback) make a list of Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Science. Since we have a wide audience, this hopefully would be a varied list. Actually, maybe we could just put up a large sheet of paper and have people write down what they think should be on the list and get back to it later.

It’s a really interesting idea, and relates to the question in my last post about finding ways to better incorporate science into public policy.

My number one suggestion for Eva’s list is a deep practical understanding of how science works: what it means to know something, how something comes to be known, the provisional nature of all knowledge, the need to be aware of our own biases, and so on.

A sign that this is curretly lacking is the enormous pressure climate scientists are under to present a clear and simple story to the public about climate change. If they admit to uncertainty or complexity, it is seized on by their opponents as evidence that climate change is not happening. Yet such uncertainty is an essential part of the scientific process. One must confront it head on to get at the truth, and a public discourse in which this uncertainy is absent cannot possibly reflect the underlying truth; in a democracy, this means that science can play at most an indirect role in decision making. In a letter Richard Feynman explains how a colleague once saw through to where the truth lay between two competing points of view, one simple and clear, the other complex:

He smiled and reminded me he was an expert on judging evidence in difficult physics experiments. In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth

In his wonderful review of Ed Hutchins’ book “Cognition in the Wild” (read the whole thing!), Cosma Shalizi writes of the amazing things enabled by mass literacy. I wonder what changes in civilization would be enabled by mass scientific literacy? Here’s Cosma: