The root of the problem

Yikes, Chris Mooney said what this time? I'm glad I stopped subscribing to his feed a few weeks ago.

Indeed, ignoring Chris appears to be much more pleasant than "enabling" him. Glancing at his "Hearts and Mind" post though, he comments that it is worse for someone in the media to be ignored than rebuffed. Maybe he's right - and I'm starting with him.

For the run-of-the-mill creationists though, it doesn't work that way. They're not in the media, or behind Expelled, they're just the ones lapping it up. Ignoring them, and letting the creationists monopolize their time, isn't an option. We need to be educators, NOT framers.

I finally washed my hands of Mooney. His latest tactics, his incessent whining, his refusal to answer his critics in substantative ways. All this tossed away my last shred of respect for him. I do have flock of dodos, and I will watch it, but if what I heard is true (how creationist friendly it is), then I have serious doubts about it as an anti-creationist/pro-science vehicle. It sounds like the idea of Framing, as Nisbett, Mooney, and maybe Olsen think it, may be the real Dodo in the room.

I thought the original article in `Nature' or `Science' or whereever it was had a good point. The attempts at popularizing science over the last 40 years in the United States have not, by and large, worked. PBS Specials with Carl Sagan and (now) Neil deGrasse Tyson aren't an effective way to get science across. Their point was: we have to come up with something better, and they want to use the sociological concept of `framing' to do so. For focused things, like getting a law passed, I think they're right: having Brad Pitt speak persuasively on Leno's show about the importance of stem-cell research is much more effective (at getting that bill passed) than yet another NOVA special. On the other hand, turning around the general attitude towards science in the United States is a much more difficult problem, and I don't see how any of these `framing' strategies would be all that useful.

Just posting to agree with you and most of the other commentators here. Mooney has really jumped the shark with these last few Expelled posts. As you say, using a creationism-friendly metric in order to pretend Expelled has been a success just to maintain an "I told you so" attitude is transparently self-serving and dishonest. I no longer respect Mooney, and that means I won't be buying what he's selling. The man has made himself an irrelevant outsider in the culture wars.

Way back in the mists of blogotime, when the Framing Wars first burst forth, many of us were concerned that Mooney and Nisbet were importing the worst aspects of politics and thereby devaluing the truth — which is, damn it all, the primary thing which science provides. Far be it for me to suggest that events have justified this fear.

But if "framing science" has turned out to be fundamentally anti-scientific (or to put it more precisely, inimical to communicating good science), then won't ignoring it be just as harmful as turning a blind eye to any other well-publicized form of anti-science? If "framing" glorifies itself with the borrowed airs of science, becoming a kind of cargo cult institution, then won't it require the same kind of attention as other institutions of the same variety?

Yes, there are important practical points to be made: people tend to reject the unfamiliar, we rely upon our emotions to judge ideas outside our experience, etc. But if "framing science" was ever about considering these points, it has long since left them behind. Now, it insists that the only messages which can ever be sent are the ones which ruffle no feathers; that, contrary to countless lessons from social reform movements, agitation by the extremists can never make comparatively temperate innovations look reasonable by comparison; that, contrary to environmentalist ethos, long-term thinking must be sacrificed for short-term gain; and that, against every principle and advance of the Enlightenment, a diversity of approaches can never be tolerated.

I removed The Intersection from my feed several months ago ... and only once in a while hear rumblings from this "debate" (usually through other blogs). I agree with Brian and the commenters here, it has now devolved so much that there's not much to be learned. What a cluster#$@k it has become. Too bad.

About that "cargo cult" business: I'm perfectly serious. Remember that AAAS panel on "Communicating Science in a Religious America", and remember how every single thing which came out of it was sloppy and shoddy? Remember how people with different views on communicating science weren't even invited to join, so that the panel lacked the touchstone of open criticism? Yeah.

We have a communications specialist, whose natural function is to do communications stuff, being criticized by physicists and biologists, who themselves are busy doing physics and biology. Shouldn't we expect that all such panels and events organized in the future skew towards the "make no waves" attitude and the approach which we strongly suspect is un- or even anti-scientific? "Framing Science" will become a process where words are arranged following the rules of the game, and the strings of words which best meet community approval earn respect and advancement for their speakers — never mind any concern for the facts of the world or for solving genuine problems.

Blake, I completely concur. Wait until the politicians really lock onto "framing" as a way to control the message coming out of the scientific community. Remember that Bush lackey who issued a memo telling all the NASA scientists not to mention the Big Bang as a fact since it might upset some religious people? Yeah, expect a great deal more of that sort of thing. Compromise sounds like a wonderful goal until you're told to compromise the truth. When "framing" becomes a tool to muzzle inconvenient facts, look for it to end up in the wrong hands.

Despite Mooney's repeated protestations that he's "not trying to tell anyone to shut up," demanding that they stay on a pre-approved script amounts to the same thing.

This whole framing thing started out with everyone talking past each other, so it's no real surprise that it's only gone downhill from there.

We're all in this game for different reasons, we have different goals, we're talking to different audiences. It's a real shame that everyone can't just get a clue, acknowledge that, and get on with talking about science and scientific issues as they see fit, rather than damaging us all with this endless infighting over trivia.

Framing, from what I understand of it, is just a different way of saying "spin." And it's descending rapidly into "pandering."

Subjugating truth to religious sentiments doesn't work so well. If you look at European history, if you look at Islamic history, flourishing cultures became ignorant backwaters once they let religion have the upper hand. There's no reason why science and religion can't get along, mind, but the last thing science needs to do is "frame" itself to fit an ideology. Science has verifiable truth behind it. Science is vital to human well-being. The last thing it needs is to be crippled by fear of causing offense.

The basic idea of framing is fine: portray things in such a way that they become understandable, highlight the instances where science and religion compliment each other. That's not a bad thing, and it could do a lot of good. But when you start subjugating the truth to frames, when you try to silence people who don't toe the party line, when the frame becomes more important than the thing being framed, framing does far more harm than good.

I'm glad most scientists aren't allowing science to be framed into oblivion.

You've got two guys, Mooney and Nisbet, who call you names -- and boy is that stupid -- and you're ready to give up. Galileo, Darwin, and company are spinning in their graves over that lack of gumption.

Q; I don't see what invoking Darwin & Galileo in calling me a wimp is going to do. What I said (or at least assumed would be understood) was that Chris & Matt are convinced they are right and have effectively shut themselves off to criticism. If that's what framing is all about I'll continue to criticize what I feel are bad arguments from them but I'm not going to invest a lot of time trying to figuring out just what it is or why I should care. They've been pushing framing for over a year and still have failed to make it sound in any way convincing; what I wrote had more to do with a loss of sympathy for listening to what they have to say than "lacking gumption." If you've got any actual constructive criticism, fine, but otherwise you've contributed nothing but a personal attack.

I think I hit on the problem of "framing" science. My reading of Nisbet so far has him implying that the point of framing is to make things more palatable, to the audience by fitting it into something the audience can understand. The trouble is, the anti-science audience finds *real* science to be to unintuitive to common experience.

And the reason for that is simple.

Real science is unintuitive to common experience.

I discussed gravity on Grag Laden's Blog the other day - yeah we "get" gravity in knowing 32ft/sec2 and all that lot, but the idea of *mutual* attraction, the idea that we're exerting gravity to everything around us, people simply really don't get. Because the force is so small, its simply not believed. It's a mathematical convenience just as much as Copernicus's orbits were a mathematical convenience - they couldn't possibly be "real", right?

So too, most aspects of science when you start to get to the heart of what is really going on, they're all unintuitive, they all violate "common sense", from evolution, to continental drift (which so violated experience that even real scientists resisted the idea for decades), to a rotating earth (in the past - we're mostly used to this one by now), to a moving sun, to the idea that the galaxies are still accelerating away from each other, to the idea that by magnetic repulsion at the molecular level, "touch" is actually physically near impossible and doesn't really happen.

None of it "makes sense" until you really see the numbers in great detail.

Now, most of the time that hasn't been too much of a problem. The problems came for specific religions that coded specific parts of their "common sense" into a book that a few specific sects of that religion decided was literal and infallible.