{"id":107,"date":"2013-04-01T12:24:23","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T16:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/?p=107"},"modified":"2013-04-01T12:26:57","modified_gmt":"2013-04-01T16:26:57","slug":"ignorance-explainers-and-knowing-what-we-dont-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/?p=107","title":{"rendered":"Ignorance, Explainers, and Knowing What We Don’t Know"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"From<\/a>

From Wikimedia<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

One of the most interesting parts of being a knowledge omnivore is discovering a blind spot. You can be pursuing some obscure technology that existed for 5 years at the turn of the century and suddenly you stumble on Omnipresent Bit of Modern Life That You Do Not Understand. At All.<\/p>\n

That was me, last week. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been researching the real technological roots of Steapunk science for a talk I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m giving at the Steampunk Empire Symposium<\/a> at the end of April. I found myself down a rabbit hole of dead end steam tech innovations when I started wondering how we switched from external combustion engines (aka steam-based) to internal combustion engines. So I started looking up the early history of internal combustion. The first thing I noticed was that internal combustion engines were developed much earlier than I thought they were (1876 for the gasoline engine and 1878 for diesel! How cool!). The second thing I noticed was that I was lost when the articles were talking about variations on internal combustion engines.<\/p>\n

Completely and totally lost.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I consider myself an educated consumer. \u00c2\u00a0I research best medical practices and pay attention to my health. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve read altogether too much on GMOs vs. organic vs. actually being able to feed most of humanity. I know that climate change is a big frakking deal. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m intensely worried about antibiotic-resistance. I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fix most appliances, but I can understand how they work and why they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re broken. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m understand both the software and hardware aspects of computers and spend hours meticulously reserching each and every technology purchase, to the point that Cnet can probably tell when I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m thinking of buying new gadgets.<\/p>\n

But I drive a car every day and didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t actually understand the engine that makes it work. I had a vague knowledge that fuel was burned and oil lets the parts move. I knew the engine turned the wheels. I knew that there was coolant involved somehow and that I needed to periodically check the tires.<\/p>\n

I knew I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a car person and that I would never be the one fixing my car. (Not because girls<\/em> can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fix cars, but because I<\/em> can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fix cars.) But I thought I at least had a working knowledge of the basics.<\/p>\n

I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. At all.<\/p>\n

I do now, since I spent several hours reading about it and sketching out diagrams and trying to understand, but more importantly, I know what I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know and what I still need to read more about.<\/p>\n

So how do we know what we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know? How *can* we? And how do we communicate those concepts to others?<\/p>\n

The traditional, deficit model would say that my ignorance was a failure of science communication. That the experts should have somehow reached out to me more. That they should have \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fixed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d my lack of knowledge.<\/p>\n

But here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the thing. I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t consider myself ignorant of car engines. I never would have read a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153how car engines work\u00e2\u20ac\u009d article, even if one came across my radar (which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure many have, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve just ignored them or brushed by them, in search of what I considered novel information.<\/p>\n

We get frustrated when people won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t read the climate change pieces that we put so much work into. Or when they skim the GMO articles and pick out the bit that they already relate to and think they know. We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand how friends on Facebook don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand that their views on evolution are not scientifically literate and make them look silly.<\/p>\n

But to them, there isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a lack of knowledge there. Of course they understand how climate works. Weather is simple. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve lived with it every day of our lives. Of course they know that GMOs should probably be avoided, since they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just not natural. And while vaccines may not cause autism, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just not entirely comfortable with having that many shots that early. They are only being responsible consumers, after all.<\/p>\n

There is a profound ignorance in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153common knowledge\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Mine was in assuming I knew how an engine worked. And my ignorance wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t fixed by a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153how car engines work\u00e2\u20ac\u009d post. It was fixed by a somewhat-unrelated intellectual tangent. I would have been horribly affronted had someone told me that I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand this huge force of modern life, because what kind of idiot doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand cars? But by following up on details, I learned that I had a lot to learn.<\/p>\n

I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean this to be a treatise against explainers. I love them. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re some of my favorite kinds of writing, particularly if they are explainers that incorporate a historical view or an understanding of the people behind the science. But here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the thing: I only tend to read explainers if I think I need an explainer. In my case, that means I seek out explainers on new science concepts, things that I might have to teach (ie, in my field), or things that I already know that I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know. (I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a sucker for astrophysics explainers. I am well aware I am profoundly ignorant in that area and I already know I want to know more.) I find the audience for explainers, judging by the responses I get to sharing them tends to be similar: people who have opted in. People who are already interested. And people who already think they have something to learn.<\/p>\n

In my own science communication, I use explainer\/101 types of communication in very specific ways. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re popular at conventions, where you can tie some basic science into things that people are already curious about, whether that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Airships, Superhero Fashion or TARDIS Physics. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the place where explainers really shine – where I have an audience that has already opted into a topic.<\/p>\n

In online science communication, I try to use explainers in a more subtle way. There are some people I would never link directly to a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Climate Change 101\u00e2\u20ac\u009d article because they already think they know the details, but if I make a comment on a facebook post mentioning how extreme winter weather can actually be a symptom of global warming, with a link to the appropriate section of a climate change article, then people will often be curious enough to engage with that particular detail and read a little bit. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll probably then go back to arguing with me about how anthropogenic climate change isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a real thing because… volcanoes, but they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll carry that one isolated fact with them.<\/p>\n

And who knows, with enough little isolated facts poking their heads into people’s minds, eventually we might be curious enough to look up the lines that will connect those dots. All without ever being told that we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most interesting parts of being a knowledge omnivore is discovering a blind spot. You can be pursuing some obscure technology that existed for 5 years at the turn of the century and suddenly you stumble on Omnipresent Bit of Modern Life That You Do Not Understand. At All. That was me, last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scicomm"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thisview.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}