Science Communication

Some people believe in science, some people do not. Science, however, doesn’t want anyone’s faith. Science wants well designed experiments that produce data and provide positive and negative controls. Without well controlled data, no one should accept science.

However, we have well controlled data about many things, yet many people argue about these things. Like vaccines. Smallpox, Polio, Measles have shown us that vaccines work. Yet, significant numbers of people don’t vaccinate their children.

I started this post and then was overwhelmed by my thoughts, as is often the case when try to write about things I care the most about. I know that I believe that people would understand science better if they had the vocabulary. I also know people love learning at their own pace and I know that people love games and the stories/characters/worlds of games. So I know my answer to the problem of people being against science is science games.

But what is the deeper analysis of why? What is the research that supports my gut? After getting lost in my thoughts, I heard this Hidden Brain episode. This episode of this great show was all about how everything we know is basically told to us from someone else– like for the most part we don’t do an experiment for ourselves to re-discover the path of planets or the number of chromosomes in our cells. This means that whom we trust has a fundamental effect on what we know.

This episode left me thinking about my favorite question, how to make people feel like science is theirs.