Following is a transcript of this video; note that errors are possible:
Rohin Francis, MBBS: This video is about how we talk about science. Now, science is responsible for the immense progress that has led to you watching this video on an electronic device and probably living to a ripe old age. Science is the very foundation of the modern world. But has the noble righteous image of science slipped?
You've probably heard of the term scientism before. It's usually used to refer to people who have almost replaced religion with science but seem to make the same mistakes that the religious historically have, ie., the belief that their way of thinking is the only one that matters. The classic example of someone who embodies this that tends to be given is Richard Dawkins, who is a particularly divisive character and a fairly good example of one aspect of scientism.
But I don't really want to talk about him aside to say that I put him on a par with Carl Sagan in terms of his science communication legacy and quality. I mean the selfish gene was written long before I was born and yet it's aging far more gracefully and it's far more relevant to the modern world. It's one of the most awe-inspiring science books you can read even to this day and yet I frequently find myself double Picard face-palming at the image of science that Dawkins projects.
I don't want to focus on famous people like Dawkins, but it's safe to say I think most of us can recognize that condescending form of scientism. Instead this pandemic has made me think about a more subtle form of scientism. I want to turn the lens onto well onto people like me, science communicators, and talk about soft scientism that tends to fly under the radar, but I would argue is just as problematic.
If Dawkins and deGrasse Tyson are the high priests of scientism, what role do the devotees play? I'm not even sure they have a name, but I tend to refer to them as the "Yay science!" crowd, mindless cheerleaders for this ill-defined, vague concept of science in capitals with an exclamation mark. Social media accounts with names like "I F**king Love Science"! "It's Science Bitch." Or, "Amazing Science!" People who post gifs of Jesse Pinkman and Bill Nye in response to people who disagree with them, without really any understanding of what they're talking, about just parroting things that they have heard. People who carry banners at the march for science that say science doesn't care if you believe in it or not. People who love watching conspiracy theorists getting owned. People who say wow a lot. Yes. Before I continue, I want to say that I've been guilty of almost all of these things at some point too.
I mean, hell, my YouTube banner, which I've been meaning to upgrade for ages, literally says amazing science on it so I'm nothing if not a hypocrite. This isn't meant as an attack on anyone. It's more just sharing how my own thoughts have matured and changed on the matter.
Okay. It is meant as an attack on some people because to be honest I f**king can't stand the f**king love science crowd. This is what I refer to as soft scientism. I'll also pause at this point to say that a lot of science is communicated to the public by non-scientists, i.e., journalists. While I read and love many journalists' writing on science and think it's wonderful, we all know the kind of complete BS science that gets reported in the press, which is often no fault of the scientists involved but university press offices who often hype up and creatively report findings so that the meaning is completely misinterpreted by the journalists who then put their own additional spin on it. Please don't think I'm giving the media or university press officers a free pass. They're just not the subject of this video.
The "Yay science!" crowd fit into two overlapping categories, the cheerleaders and the debunkers. Now, again, don't get me wrong. I'm a cheerleader for science myself, but I'm fully aware of the complex way we make progress, the missteps, the human biases that are superimposed on discovery and implementation, the corruption, and just the highly erratic quality of published material. Science is a messy business.
Science itself is not inherently good nor bad, but cheerleaders, I think, on the whole are good people. They believe in science's role in improving the world, but perhaps they're a little idealistic. They might be quite junior in their career and full of enthusiasm, fresh out of their bachelor's or their doctorate. I know this makes me sound like the grizzled cop sitting at the end of the bar telling the rookies, "I was just as naive as you kids once upon a time," and I really don't intend any condescension here because I reserve my real ire for those who have been around a while and still remain unable to pick good signs from bad.
During the COVID pandemic, a blind belief in everything published in the scientific literature has played right into the hands of those who seek to cast doubt on real science. I'm sorry to say that some of the science communicators to whom people have looked for an unbiased account of what's happening have contributed to the scaremongering, which is yet another thing that I think social media has drastically worsened because scary headlines result in more clicks.
Now, I've tried to avoid this on my own channel. I have attempted to take a more sidelong view at some of the issues during COVID and indeed made several videos attempting to reassure, or cut through some of the exaggerated claims on all sides. However, one video I made in March when things were really hitting the fan, when we were all scared at work, my ITU was overflowing -- it was I was tired after a shift and I shot this at night -- it was a bit more serious than my usual. It was just a presentation of some audit data, but it quickly became my most popular video ever. I wouldn't call it scaremongering. It was just an honest message from me to take things seriously.
I remember looking at YouTube analytics that week and seeing my views were up 8,000%. I realized that if I was so inclined I'd be able to keep racking up the views or the retweets with more of the same and that's exactly what some channels and Twitter accounts have done. Drama, fear, doom, and a blind belief in everything published, this stuff sells.
I'll link to a great article by Jane C. Hu about one of the most prominent voices on social media who started the pandemic with 2,000 followers and now has something like 400,000. I don't want to single him out because, again, I try to avoid doing that, but I think he's a classic example of someone whose intentions I believe were good to start with. He was trying to correct harmful lies spread by anti-science commentators, but who quickly became seduced by popularity and has fanned the flames of hysteria around COVID with sensationalist Tweet threads. He just seems to have no ability to differentiate between good and bad quality research, and he's far from alone.
A common thread with side commentors that I have noticed, who have overdramatized things, is not having any background in epidemiology nor infectious disease. The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect was described by Michael Crichton, referencing his friend, Nobel Prize winner, Murray Gell-Mann, who named the quark amongst other things. It's where you're reading a newspaper and enjoying the articles and then you come across one article in your area of expertise that you're just appalled by how inaccurate it is, error after error, misinterpreting the whole thing. But then you turn the page to the politics or the technology section of the same newspaper and you're back to thinking everything is accurate, especially because we all tend to buy newspapers that agree with our worldview. In other words, you only spot errors in your own field and you're especially blind to mistakes that support your point of view in other fields.
I have thought about this a lot this year. Of course, it applies to people too because now we follow individuals, not just publications online, and you can inherently trust everything that comes out of a scientist's mouth until one day they talk about your own era of expertise, and for me that was all the cardiac COVID stuff. I thought, "Well, if they are getting this so wrong, why do I think they have been getting everything else right?"
The famous philosopher of science, Karl Popper, delineated the difference between science and what he described as pseudoscience, a term we're of course very familiar with today. In a nutshell, he said that true scientists look for evidence to disprove their hypotheses, but pseudoscience looks for evidence to support it. Now, you, of course, know this as confirmation bias and my opinion is that out of all the cognitive biases that the human brain is susceptible to, confirmation bias is the most important and so far all the evidence I have found supports my view.
We all know the complex, intersecting Venn diagrams on the anti-science side of the debate around COVID. People who ideologically refuse to accept masks have any benefit people. People who downplay COVID severity. People who refuse to socially distance and who say vaccines will let Bill Gates track you, and masks are government mind control, and so on.
Now, they form their beliefs based on ideology, not science. But the other side, the side that I'm on, sometimes claims that science shapes their viewpoint and yet sometimes can be just as ideologically attached to certain positions. Now, lest I be accused of false equivalence here. Let me be clear that the science deniers are immensely more harmful. I understand the frustration of those attempting to oppose them, who want to highlight data that support their arguments, but cherry-picking studies helps no one because you'll be found out and you'll be open to accusations that you're biased, you're untrustworthy, and made into a straw man to attack all scientists.
You have to trust in the scientific method that ultimately the weight of evidence will show the right answer. But I do accept that as data comes in it can be contradictory and normally in science that's okay because we rarely do things based on one study. We wait to get a bunch of evidence pointing in a certain direction. But this year, the world has read every freaking study that's come out as soon as it's come out, even before it's published on pre-print websites, and either panicked or used it to deny COVID is harmful.
Now, I have seen apparent trusted voices of science tweet scathing attacks on studies supportive of things like hydroxychloroquine or suggesting that the fatality rate is low, who then tweet praise for equally bad studies supporting things that they agree with, and this is confirmation bias in action. I had never even heard of the term "science communicator" a few years ago. A friend of mine asked me to come and tell some geeky jokes on stage with a kind of science audience and I had a great time. It was it was good fun and I figured, hey, I could do something with this. That was how I kind of stumbled into.
I have had no training. Whereas I think a lot of people go into it much more deliberately with the intention to share their love of science and often this manifests as boundless enthusiasm because they feel that will connect best with an audience. "Amazing breakthrough, faster than light particles discovered." "Wow! Incredible surgeon on the brink of first head transplant. Cool!" People are just less critical of research that either they think is cool or they agree with.
Of course, the other cognitive bias at play here is the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people overestimate their ability in certain fields. Now, I'd just like to take this opportunity to say that when I made a video about this, Professor Dunning himself shared it, which I guess is understandable because I am an exceptionally good filmmaker and pretty much a professional psychologist. Because a lot of science communicators set themselves up as a kind of general science consultant or perhaps they are required to cover disparate fields for their publications, we've had people commenting way outside their areas of expertise.
Some of the people fueling the fear and uncritically sharing medical studies have absolutely no background in medicine at all. But then again, as you've heard me say on many occasions, doctors can be complete plonkers too.
Now, many would describe me as a complete plonker, but just like the vast majority of doctors or scientists that I know, I feel very nervous when I speak outside my area of expertise. When I do, I try not to paint myself as an expert just as someone who is trying to find out answers myself. Whereas there is no end of people on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook happy to give the impression they have been studying viral pandemics their whole lives.
There is a big difference between neutrally communicating science that you've learnt and giving opinionated takes. The second is fine, people are allowed to do that, but they don't dress it up as something else.
I was going to talk about the role of debunking in scientism at this point in the video, but I did something foolish and I asked a question on Twitter last night, the night before I was planning to record this, and I got a lot of food for thought from their replies including from people like Destin, Joe Hanson, and other friends on YouTube, so I think that's a topic for a separate video in itself which will allow me to take a deep dive and look at something I have been wondering about a lot over recent months. Does debunking actually change anyone's mind?
Most people that watch this channel are already interested in science. Do you really need a video from me about the Earth being round? Probably not. Do you need a video from me about why homeopathy is fake? Maybe, but there are already lots of videos out there from people who can explain it far better than me.
Now, I'm not saying that debunking videos don't have value. A lot of people will be drawn into science in this way because it's fun, but let's not ignore the fact that mocking people who get the science wrong can perpetuate the image of science as we're the clever ones and everybody else is a big poopiehead.
So why is this important? Because science doesn't exist in a vacuum. We need the public on board and that's never been more apparent than this year. Now, previously I've said we need the public on board primarily because they fund our research. But with people refusing vaccines and masks, it's never been more urgent and dangerous to have people rejecting science.
In fact, I could refine that statement slightly. Yes. Of course, there are some people at the fringes that believe in ancient aliens and 5G death rays, but there are millions of fairly normal intelligent people skeptical about what scientists are up to and I don't think that's because they reject science. In fact, surveys show that most people have positive feelings towards science, but I think they reject the philosophy or the attitude associated with it. They reject scientism, which is something I need to think about going forward on this channel until the views start dropping and I inevitably resort to dunking on quacks for the clicks.
As I said, I've got more videos on this topic rattling around in my brain. This one was just about us, regular people, not world famous scientists who maintained this image of science as a magical monolithic band of wizards that issue edicts from on high. Now, we're not all scientists, but we can all be scientific. Science isn't something you need a degree to do. It's just the application of logic and common sense to try to understand how the world works. It should be a welcoming place, not a sneering, snobbish, closed shop. While it can be the most frustrating thing in the world to deal with people who seem hell-bent on rejecting what science teaches, who are motivated by blind faith, political allegiance, or just being massive bell-ends, if we abandon rationality and evidence, then we're no better than them.