18 million football coaches and exploding knowledge
28 june
To A. working on science communication.
Yesterday writing on the perils of nationalism, I mentioned in passant a complain that goes: “In the Netherlands we have 18 million virologists”. It is a complain about a country in which every person have an opinion that believes to be strongly founded. Speaking as a statistician, the chance that those 18 million instances are the same, or even coherent, is nihil. Which is kind of a difficult situation, surely if we are talking about making policy for such opinionated population. How could you possibly gain any trust? And how can you run a country without trust?
After having lived in few countries, I am sure that The Netherlands is no exception. Yet this country has a very interesting making. On one side, NL is, if not the cradle, one of the original loci of modern liberalism. Which is based in giving a strong position for the individual and her opinion. On the other side, The Netherlands has created a very capable and articulated network of social services, based on the strong belief that the community is relevant and is a service provider for the individual. Hence the expression. It is meant as a criticism. You will hear “we have 18 millions of… ” at any conversation aiming at criticism the pigheadness of the dutch. But it is also said with a nuance in tone, as if it is a difficult reality of which we are… kinda proud? Better have 18 million of opinionated cheeseheads than 18 million sheep, right?
The thing is that this is due to worsen, by any possible forecast.
Science, that machine that produces and renews knowledge, is as efficient and productive as never before. Communication platforms and literacy levels are at unknown levels in human history, and due to go on increasing. Which means, in a 1+1=2 manner, that more and more people will have access to newly developed knowledge. Which is a great blessing, and of course, a curse.
Language does not help here. When I use the word knowledge, I evoke something stable and fixed and true. When I say science produces knowledge, I am speaking truthfully, and yet I am implying that all these successfully working scientists are creating stable and reliable truth, which is certainly not true.
Meanwhile the amount of people that has access to the product of the scientific process increases exponentially, the numbers of people that understand how this product is made, and what are its limitations, decreases. And that is a serious problem. The 18 million virologists of The Netherlands are persons that have had access to information created by scientists, and so have formed an opinion. But perhaps 17.9 millions are not aware that the nature of that information is that it will be superseded, contradicted and replaced by something else, as soon as the next paper in the matter is published. Certainly in matters that are subject of active research, as an active and evolving pandemic is. Scientific knowledge, surely at its bleeding edge, is a dynamic and changing beast. It takes decennia for it to become stable and solid.
So plenty of those 17.9 million are likely to feel betrayed, and to loose their confidence in scientists, when that next paper contradict what they hear past week. Take WHO recommendations to prevent the spread of COVID19. For a long while, they were all about cleaning your hands. This is because the well known transmission mechanism of other Corona viruses is through fomites, surfaces contacted by the infected, that infect the next person to come in contact with. So cleaning hands make lots of sense as recommendation. BUt as long as we understood the transmission of this particular corona virus, we realized that was air-borne, and that masks were of crucial relevance, and hand washing, not so much.
When I followed this development, past year, I was ecstatic. How cool to see how new knowledge influences and shape policy, right? But I was bullshiting myself. Even today, in a great deal of places, the hand soap is at the entrance. And even today, with that agressively contagious variant delta in the increase, plenty of people refuses to wear a mask, and tells you that “we needn’t wash our hands, he? why should I believe that the masks are really needed?”
And here we are, at the challenge of our age. We have more knowledge, and more people with access to information about that knowledge. But we have a dramatic shortage of understanding the nature of our knowledge.
How we deal with this challenge will shape our next decennia.
PS: the lines above were written thinking in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on science communication. A sketch of the issue is here: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/15/e2104068118?etoc=