Guys. Hillary won the popular vote by 2.8 million people. We aren’t losing hearts and minds.
Instead there’s a lot of assholes who this time around managed to con some desperate voters in the Northeast who the Democratic Party took for granted. That and some help from Russia, lazy email-obsessed false equivalyzers in the major media and Hillary-haters at the FBI, helped them game the system just enough to slide in.
We should keep fighting against the crap narrative conservatives put forth, sure. And do it with facts, sure. But Gingrich wasn’t pushing facts back in the day - it was the exact same sorta cherry-picking thruthiness. So I don’t feel like we’re losing ground. It’s just the fight was easier for a few years, and it just got harder again.
I have listened to and enjoyed many Radiolab podcasts. I never thought they were trying to do anything other than telling me interesting stuff about things I had never thought about. The knock on the show as providing no roadmap to social change seems… odd to me. Peanut butter doesn’t do that either, but I still really like it.
Newt in the mid 90s was all about story and framing and controlling the narrative. Didn’t he write something called Language: a Key Mechanism of Control? I’m on my phone but I’ll try and look it up.
I used to be a lot more sanguine about popular science, but I’ve learned over time that the effect is that it often leads people to cement their misconceptions. Certain texts that specifically address misconceptions are the best, because they often inject nuance where it is sorely lacking, but hearing laypeople talk about Really Cool Physics (often at the bleeding edge of the field) with only a cursory understanding of what is often a translation from math to English is a bizarre experience. And it really is accompanied by the sort of excessive reductionism criticized in the OP. I think over the last ten years the public’s appreciation for science has grown, but their understanding has not expanded to keep pace.
Often scientists take great pains to be conservative in their professional estimations, but people latch onto work they barely understand that they feel confirms their preconceptions regardless of how nuanced a paper or study may be. I highly recommend watching Potholer54 on YouTube to see how frequently major media organization misinterpret studies on global warming to the point where they sometimes state the exact opposite finding from what the study reports.
I think that social sciences have lost a lot of their prestige because they’re muddier and people have a harder time using them as a means to an end in discussions, because they’re rarely sufficiently definitive to serve as means to political and social ends. But even then, the clearer a finding is, the more likely it’s going to receive media attention if it addresses one of the three Ps: Politics, Private Parts, and Pointless shit. The last category is stuff that people argue endlessly about: “This study shows why toilet paper rolls have to face this way!” We don’t care if a linguist came up with a new idea about the formation of dark Ls in English. The social science ideas that receive the most attention are the ones that prove people with different skin colors do X differently. Then you’ll get it in the ear for about a week from everyone who half read it on Facebook that everything we know about race is wrong or right- depending on the bias. The physical sciences have the benefit of offering less than can be argued about: “Gene found responsible for anger is more likely to appear in X racial group.” The narrative writes itself, and you don’t usually have a conflicting study, even if the narrative is hopelessly reductionist.
Popular science is great. The awe-inspiring IFLS porn is just the impression that science is unfathomably beautiful without the work and effort and filtration that goes into research.
We aren’t showing persons ridding themselves of falsehoods, we’re showing memes and photos and claiming in many cases breakthroughs that don’t actually match the presentations.
Also, fuck public discussion of “quantum” anything.
I’ve listened to Radiolab occasionally but I find their self-congratulatory twee voice very hard to take. When they stick with hard science they’re pretty cool; a recent episode on trees (http://www.radiolab.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/) is mind-blowing but others clearly suffer from the bias discussed in the article. I basically gave up on listening to NPR way back in 1990 when they shut out all ethical debate and cheer-led for the first Gulf War from their “liberal” perch. NPR’s pro-empire worldview remains, and they are best understood as propaganda for elite liberal intellectuals that normalizes neo-Liberalism (wars, corporate oligarchy) to the exclusion of anything resembling genuine Progressive consciousness.
Sadly, I have many friends who consider themselves Liberals who listen to NPR and don’t understand the brainwashing they are willingly undergoing. One could almost say NPR’s function is to validate the elite liberal construct field and make sure it never morphs into anything resembling a political awakening. As Rosa Luxembourg noted, “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
