2 + 2 does not equal 4

AHHHH! I am too confused to think, let alone write cohesively. One thing is just absolutely killing me right now is that I could have attended a public talk by Waxman on his recent book, and I was in Kansas... albeit for PhD purposes and it was highly productive, but all the same... why did Waxman have to schedule his talk when I was off in Kansas?... :P
Okay, so now I'm back, and again justifying it as a quest of my organising a climate change seminar (I have taken a truly scientific approach to this problem by deciding to gather experimental data), I attended a talk which touched on climate change and also the public's perseption of science, what is wrong with it, and how we can make it right.
Hmmm... just writing this I came to realise that when I was asked 'what is the purpose' of the seminar, I had no answer, and I guess what I have just thought of, is, what would be the 'right' scientific perception? Okay, that's for later, and I think the brief blanket answer would be an exasperated plea for everyone to think a bit more, and feel a bit less.

An interesting point brought up, and I've heard this many times now when working among scientists is this push to 'reach out' to the public (frankly I am a bit cautious of this statement as it necessarily puts up a wall between scientists and the 'public', it has a scent of the horrible 'sheep' sentiment, which we all love exploring, as we all want to consider ourselves wolves).

Anyway, yes, reaching out to the public, how to talk about what you do, and how much fun it is.
I wonder where this push is coming from? Why does the general public need to understand what 'scientist' do? Possibly because people under the label of science have started to tap into peoples emotions and it is starting to get political momentum (climate change being prime example), and money is there to be made. The reason I ask this is not because I think people shouldn't marvel at the wonders of nature, and be exposed to generalised (or watered down) scientific messages, it's just that science isn't always fun, it's a job (a means of making money, and that is all it is for most people).
Well, just imagine an athlete asked to talk about how much 'fun' his training program is, putting in 8hrs a day of exhausting labour, or a concert pianist to try to engage the public's imagination on the 8hrs of practice in front of the piano, when the weather is perfect outside, and all you want to do is play in the sunshine, but no, you must sit on your behind and play that damn Chopin (I love Chopin btw), again and again and again.... Thrilling really. Same with science, for every bright star that 'makes it' there are millions of people who 'do' science 9-5 and it's actually repetitive, numbing and boring, but it pays the bills.

And this push to get science into the public arena can be argued of course to stem from the fact that it is becoming relevant to peoples lives (specifically with climate change and evolution (perhaps). But is it because of this new found relevance or again because of political momentum? I would argue for political momentum, and I hope you agree, it's kinda obvious, but I wanted to illustrate this, or support it with two examples, namely cooking and medicine. Both of these professions are integral and very relevant to our lives. I guess not surprisingly I am terrible at cooking, I used to think this was cool, back in the day I was all about being a tomboy, but then I realised what a handicap it has become, and I wanted to get better, I even tried reasoning with myself that it was just like writing a program (declaring variables, and writing functions, making calls, which is fine, except there's no debugging feature in cooking, once it's done it's done, and as most programmers know, there's always a bug...). Okay, so I've solved this by having simple tastes, and when people come over, we 'all' cook pizza :D.
Anyway, big off topic rant, point is cooking is quite relevant, and well, we aren't all very good at it, and yet, we don't petition cooks to 'reach out' to us the public, and teach us how much fun it is. Or maybe they do? Hahaha, wait... actually come to think of it there's Jamie Oliver, and actually probably bad example, as I said I'm not good at cooking, I don't (should?) watch those shows. Actually just got a hilarious picture of the union of cooks gathering to discuss how to make cooking well more accessible to the general public - "how not to burn water" or "the art of debugging your roast". Okay, so perhaps a weak point?
The other is medicine, it's very relevant, and yet, I definitely don't see doctors reaching out to the public (yes they have their TV shows where doctors, surgeons specifically) are idolized, but in no way is there a message that is it for everone, (...that's homeopathy, and you're a tree hugging hippy if you think that'll make you better [tone of sarcasm]). But I guess I can't stress enough, and again obvious point, how relevant it is! Why are we not pushing this in schools, say, making all high school students pass a comprehensive first aid course, and some basic knowledge of common illnesses and how they may be prevented and treated? Because there is money to be made in not educating people?

A point to be made is that the niche of the scientific profession is that scientist are/truly/really those people that are anti-social and anal (really they are...). This is what science is about, it's about being tediously focused on the 'obvious' when others had moved on to bigger and better things. Okay, Einstein makes his appearance here, consider if he was just like everyone else and accepted ether as the 'truth'? He would never have made his discovery, and you know during the time he was thinking about this, he would have most probably been the most tedious person to talk to... Scientists are the ones that question the obvious, by no means are they (we) generalists, we are specialists, and this is the only method by which scientific progress can be made.
If you're acting as a scientist, you'll find people generally don't enjoy talking to you (unless its in your professional setting) as you're constantly needing to define/outline/establish a common framework, what is obvious for others is not obvious for you, and for that conversation with you is tedious and boring to most.

The reason for this is that so many people love lossy compression (and not just for your 'jpegs'!) What I mean is: How is it possible to learn to compress 100 pages of text (which some reasonable person wrote) into a number of bullet points.... without allowing the possibility of missing something? (In most cases, there are always exceptions, I very aware I'm contributing to this right now, but practice makes perfect!) This is what lossy compression is, you necessarily loose information when you present it succintly, and it fails to be reflection of the truth, just a distant artifact, but important point is that it's an irreversable loss, you can't get the 'true' picture back from your lossly artifact. And the same in science, you just cannot present the 'facts'/truth to a person who doesn't share your 'context'/framework without loosing information and necessarily compromising the integrity of the message. This compression is not science, it's not a scientific message, it's a lie (or less categorically, it is a message with a hint/flavor of truth).

I was thinking about this, because at this talk we were presented with an 'astonishing' statistical 'fact' that only 7% of PhD graduates go on to tenured positions. I started thinking - 'how many tenured positions were actually available?', this would present the figure in a more realistic light. And then I started thinking whether it was honest of the person to state this figure, after all, I'm sure there's a paper out there somewhere which was published in a peer reviewed journal, with that number in it. So is it the truth or not? Well, my conclusion for now is that it is not a fact, that it is actually a lie (which implies an intent to deceive, which may not have existed, but it is at least an error made in neglect and lack of conscientiousness), yes this is where I am tedious and boring. The data should have been presented in a context, in order to judge how closely the figure is a representation of nature, I need to know the context which was not presented. The context was assumed, it was a shorthand statement, and hence leads to misinterpretation. So I guess this example illustrates how tedious science is, and provides an idea of how science is used to 'send a message'. A little note on the side, I'm about to start reading a book on this very topic 'How to lie with statistics' :) (Ah, a fascinating statement - correlation does not imply causation.)

Oh, and one last thing, this is scattered I know, but I wanted to finish on by exploring again this disturbing trend in humanity to... categorise, class, classify, and subtly to differentiate with the necessary implication of heirarchy. We all do it. And this is especially relevant now as well: journalists/evolutionists/creationists/scientists/public (whoever they are?) etc.... this classification takes away common ground, and this is not conducive to either engaging people or changing their point of view (if you so desire). It was sad for me to hear ideas supported at the talk such as - evolution is the right (implication of universal thruth here) theory, climate change is fact, and etc, and the difficulty in 'converting' creationists and making them see the light. You know it dawned on me this idea that perhaps the reason it is hard to convince people or reason with them is that when we do it, we are for ourselves convinced 100% that it is us that are right. We hold the truth, the answer, and for whatever reason: ignorance, stupidity, lack of time, the people we are arguing with hold the 'wrong' opinion. Their opinion is inferior, not just different, again we are heirarchialy classifying. Our disagreement most of the time may arise because we have different context/frameworks with the people we are arguing/convicing. Blinded however, by our personal truth and apparent ignorance of our opponent we do not address the relevant points, and hence fail to achieve our aim. It's like watching people fight sometimes, they seem to just talk at each other, and answer each others questions without addressing the question... it's the weirdest thing... (I do this too, it's just easier to observe in others).

Ultimately I come back to Kant's great words, presented here without context, as with a context they would loose their magic/supernatural/ephemeral and insightful quality and become so darn obvious it would be a waste of time to read: "we do no see things as they are, but as we are".

Underlying case is we are all human, and most of the time we are all wrong.