ACT I
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What does it mean in the 21st century to say that science is politically neutral?
What does that mean for political activists?
There was a lot of debate about this in the run up to the first March for Science in 2017.
The fact that science is politically neutral makes a lot of people feel that scientists are supposed to be politically neutral.
When leaders in science promote science, a lot of people listen.
But when leaders in science get involved in political activism, a lot of people feel it undermines their professional reputations.
So what are scientists supposed to do when they need to take political action to promote science?
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Science has always been the systematic search for reliable information.
That’s done through the five steps of observation, self consistency, universality, reproducibility, and debate.
That’s never changed.
But how have the ideas surrounding science evolved over the past 500 years?
Like education?
Communication?
Child development?
Morals?
What about the foreseeable future for humanity?
When I say the word science, what do people who aren’t scientists think of?
Those people are the general public who we’re trying to get to learn more about science.
ACT II
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Science is a mental tool.
Tools don’t have morals or political goals.
The systematic search for reliable information doesn’t have morals any more than a shovel has morals. Science doesn’t have political goals any more than a paintbrush has political goals.
But at the same time, science is a way of thinking. When people think about the world, they think about their goals. The moment anyone uses science for anything that involves at least one other person, morals get involved.
Scene 2
Public education is also politically neutral. But not in the same sense that science is politically neutral.
On the level of Democrats versus Republicans, education is politically neutral because everyone has a right to an education. Teachers help students learn reliable information they can use to succeed at their goals, without the teachers telling them what their goals should be.
The success of education is measured by the empowerment of the student.
But on another level, political neutrality gets more complicated.
On the level of people having the right to vote, or not having the right to vote, public education is a political agenda. Now we’re talking about people having effective decision making power. For education, that means the right to be well informed about what you’re voting for.
On this level, political neutrality means political equality through the empowerment of everyone.
The success of education is measured by the empowerment of the student.
On this level, those words take on a new meaning. The politically neutral empowerment of everyone affects what people vote for. A better education system would affect what people vote for even more.
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Based on what people knew about the world 500 years ago, science being politically neutral and education being politically neutral fit together well.
Scientific laws are unaffected by whether or not people believe in them. Or by what people want to do.
If you teach science in school as one of many things people think about, and you teach it mainly as a job skill, then you put the moral and political neutrality into effect by essentially giving everyone the choice whether to learn it or to ignore it.
But now we live in a country full of people who feel they have the right to ignore science. Now those people have turned science political, by turning anti-science political.
That 16th century solution to a 21st century problem isn’t really working, is it?
Scene 4
Any constructive way forward for humanity now depends on effective public science education. The purpose of education is to prepare students for the future. And now we can see the environmental crisis is the future.
Science isn’t just a job skill anymore. Now it’s life or death for civilization.
If nothing else, the future of science depends on effective public science education. Cities are already being threatened, and sometimes destroyed, by hurricanes, tornados, and wildfires. That includes all the colleges, universities, and science laboratories in those cities.
How do scientists plan on doing their Good Science while standing in line for food in a FEMA camp?
ACT III
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Effective public science education in the age of politicized anti-science and climate change depends on actively undoing people’s reasons for not believing in science.
Measuring people’s success at learning science through their levels of individual accomplishment works well for teaching science as a job skill. Where people will be responsible for using science at the individual level. But there are other uses for science. And there are other things people care about.
Why do you have clubs in school?
Because people like doing things together.
Why do teachers give lectures in their classes? Why don’t students just learn everything by reading their books?
Because people like doing things together.
Because hearing people talk, and being in the same room as people who are learning the same things at the same time turns on parts of your brain that aren’t turned on when you’re reading a book by yourself.
What makes live music and live theatre so emotionally powerful?
It’s because you’re in a big room with a lot of other people who are hearing the same music or seeing the same story you are. And because the performers are there in the room with you too.
What makes going to church so much more emotionally powerful than reading The Bible by yourself?
You’re in a room full of people who are all hearing the same story of the world you are.
How do you do something like that with science?
How do you turn science from a class in school into a social movement?
How do you teach science in a way that turns people’s social instincts on and
makes a lot of people feel that a lot of other people are learning the same things they are, and that they’re moving forward together?
There are teachers who have developed strategies for making education more social and who have had great successes with them. Some have written books about them, like Ken Robinson and Christopher Emden.
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One thing this means is that scientists need to learn more communication skills.
If you turn out to be good at communicating science, you can do the communicating yourself. You can be the next Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
Or you can collaborate with people who are good at communicating.
Some people have better talents for communicating than others. But in the age of climate change and anti-science, getting an education to prepare you for a future in science doesn’t mean much at all if you don’t learn a basic understanding of how to get people to believe in your ideas.
Scene 3
I’m a theatre artist.
The height of the art of theatre is educational.
We start with concepts the audience is familiar with. Then we build upon them until they stretch people’s mental horizons in new directions.
Sometimes we tell stories about historical scientific discoveries.
Like Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson.
Or Annie Jump and the Library of Heaven by Reina Hardy.
Or Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler.
Behind every scientific discovery is a story of a talented and committed person who had some ideas and noticed some clues and followed them wherever they led.
Even when we don’t tell stories about science directly, every story is about how differences among people and differences in their situations lead them to make different decisions in the pursuit of the same motivations.
Every theatre artist I know loves to help tell that story in their own ways.
Scene 4
Much of activism is communication.
Activism depends on a lot of art, because it depends on using sensory input to change how people feel about something. .
If you’re an activist, artist, or anyone else with good communication skills and you want to help, read books about science. Watching documentaries and reading articles is a good introduction, but they don’t really go into enough depth.
Books by scientists and science writers cover their topics in enough depth to give you a sense of what scientists actually do. Gathering data, sifting through it, formulating hypotheses, and testing them is a lot of work. It depends on certain abilities and skills.
Sometimes the evidence leads to unpopular conclusions, which they don’t have time to explain in articles and documentaries. That’s how the environmental crisis was discovered in the first place.
Now that we know about the problem, we can see that any kind of positive outcome depends on a lot of new technologies and social developments, in everything from energy to economics to transportation to agriculture.
That has to be a group effort because there’s so much information involved that nobody can be an expert at all of it.
The more well informed people we get participating in those kinds of discussions the better off we’ll be.
So read modern books about the environment and human psychology. Lots of them if you can.
ACT IV
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One of the main problems with trying to make improvements in the education system, whether it’s for science classes or any other subject, is that the teachers and administrators we have now all graduated from college. Meaning, they succeeded at the education system we have now.
Whatever they know about people getting so bored or frustrated with the education system that they drop out, they’ve only heard about from other people.
There are many teachers and administrators around the world who have been experimenting with new approaches to education and making great advances. But not all the teachers and administrators are in on it.
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Now here’s what what that means for scientists.
Scientists, like teachers and anyone else, work their way up to leadership positions in their fields by working at them a long time.
The global environmental crisis was discovered in 1968.
Now think about what those numbers mean.
The people who discovered the environmental crisis are the oldest generation of scientists now.
They’ve been the leaders in environmental science all this time because they’re the ones who pioneered it. It took a lot of talent to make the discoveries they made, and people have looked up to them for a long time.
Now think about child development. This is where things get weird.
The scientists who discovered the global environmental crisis discovered it as adults.
That means they grew up in a world where nobody knew about it. Or talked about it.
They didn’t grow up in a world where anyone was trying to do anything about it. Or trying to prepare for it.
When they were in college they learned how to fit into an academic world that was led by people who had never heard of the environmental crisis.
Science depends on observation, self-consistency, universality, reproducibility, and debate no matter what century you grew up in.
But how much of the professional and academic culture surrounding science is useful and relevant to the situation we are now in?
And how much of it is just an ancient relic that the leaders in science believe in that’s left over from a bygone era no one else today ever saw?
Based on conversations I’ve had with scientists, when I say things like, “The future of science depends on scientists learning better communication skills,” I expect for scientists in their 70s and 80s to try to explain to me something like, “Well, what you need to understand about science is that it’s an intellectual process…” and then they say things that would’ve made sense back in the 20th century.
A lot of scientists in their 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s who look up to scientists in their 70s and 80s say things like that too.
Scene 3
The problem here is that even though science depends on the same five step process as it did 500 years ago, the ideas surrounding science have evolved so much that the word science has taken on new meanings.
People use the word science to mean three different things, and they often mix them together in the same conversation without even noticing they’re doing it.
Is science a mental tool?
Is it a body of information?
Is it a source of information?
Science begins with observation, self consistency, universality, reproducibility, and debate. That’s the intellectual process that scientists do at their jobs. That makes science a job skill.
Science as a body of information is the discoveries that intellectual process led to. That isn’t an intellectual process. That’s knowledge.
Science as a source of information is an understanding of the intellectual process and of the importance of the reliable information it led to. That’s an intellectual process also. But it’s a different one.
That’s learning to use science in real life. That’s science education.
But that’s not the way the pioneers of environmental science learned science 50 years ago.
Scene 4
If you fly an airplane at a constant altitude, that means the lift the plane is generating equals the weight of the plane.
If lift is greater than weight, you ascend.
If lift is less than weight, you descend.
Those are all morally and politically neutral statements. But at the same time, if you’re flying a plane, that automatically means that you’re making a decision to make one of those three things happen. That’s an intellectual process of learning the discoveries that relate to your goals and deciding how to use them.
If I say that drinking arsenic will kill you, that’s also a morally and politically neutral statement. But unless you want to die, your intellectual process will always lead you to make the same decision about whether or not to drink arsenic.
So which intellectual process do people use to understand environmental science?
If you want to be an environmental scientist, you learn the job skill version.
If you don’t want to be an environmental scientist, that means you’re trying to understand it for some other purpose. Maybe you’re just curious how environmental scientists make their discoveries. Or maybe you have a different goal.
How abstractly you think about environmental science depends on how you believe the environmental crisis will affect you, how much, and how soon.
Scene 5
If you’ve grown up hearing about the environmental crisis, and learning about how a global environmental disaster could kill hundreds of millions or billions of people, it’s probably hard for you to talk about environmental science without sounding like you have goals connected to it.
Academic culture is based on the assumption that the best way to study ideas is to think about them in the abstract, with no connection to real life. Science, as the systematic search for reliable information, was founded in academic culture. Which is how the pioneers of environmental science learned science.
Many people feel that the oldest way of thinking about science is the most, or the only, legitimate way of thinking about it. Ironically, that’s how religious fundamentalists feel about religion.
On the other hand, during World War II, science was pursued with political goals too. Because winning a war is a political goal. That’s how Alan Turing pioneered computer science, for one.
It’s okay to study science and to have other goals in life at the same time. As long as you still go through the five steps of observation, self consistency, universality, reproducibility, and debate to reach conclusions that are consistent with real life.
If you talk about science in terms of political neutrality through the empowerment of everyone, you’ll talk about science differently from people who interpret the political neutrality of science as a set of laws that are unconnected from human concerns, and therefore that everyone has the choice to believe in or ignore.
Even if you read lots of books about science, education, politics, and other issues surrounding the environmental crisis, you might still run into resistance or indifference you didn’t expect from leaders in science. They might start talking about the environmental crisis as an intellectual problem and saying things that would make sense if it was going to start affecting us in 20 or 30 more years from now, but don’t make any sense today with the effects of climate change upon us.
Ironically, the leaders who have helped us get this far aren’t necessarily the best people to lead us forward from here.
At some point you might have to shrug and say, “Okay, boomer.”
