I blame Malcolm Gladwell.
Gladwell – a master of the counter-intuitive, an explorer of unexpected implications – has become a bit of a folk hero among the TED Talks set, offering insights into the way we assumed things work. He has brought research-based reasoning to the best-sellers table. And when you can buy a guy’s book at Costco, expect his words to resonate across a large swath of the population.
Take for example, the fad detective’s book Outliers, which examined, among other subjects, why the majority of Canadian hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year. That chapter alone inspired parents across North America to ‘redshirt’ their children a year from school, holding them back so they can enter as the oldest, and, if Gladwell is to believed, the most successful, among their peers.
When 60 Minutes did a piece on the phenomena, it announced that counter-intuitive was cool.
Today, too many boasting only the credentials of a social media account and access to a search engine fancy themselves ‘the next Malcolm Gladwell.’ Only problem, most aren’t doing the research Gladwell does; they are just taking the word of likeminded folks on the Internet.
And what could go wrong with that? Turns out, quite a bit.
A few weeks back, the Ottawa Citizen did a piece on the following: “As Western nations spend billions of dollars a year on science, they face a paradox: Many of their citizens don’t believe the information that all this money is buying for them. The question is, why?”
In defining the problem, the newspaper reported:
- 28 per cent of Canadians said they either moderately or strongly distrust the measles vaccine;
- 88 per cent of American scientists, but only 37 per cent of the American public, trust genetically modified foods; and
- 98 per cent of scientists, but only 65 per cent of the public, believe humans have evolved over time. Similar divides were found on vaccines, pesticides and medical research.
Numbers like these go on and on. This misinformation is maddening.
Then again, counter-intuitive is cool – just ask the climate change deniers, anti-vaxers, chemtrailers and hollow Earthers that have come to populate actual newscasts. (Seriously, read the Citizen story and find out about these people who believe the Earth is hollow and we live on the inside of its shell, with the sky at the centre. The stars, by the way, are an illusion.)
I know there have always been kooks and fools. How is a snake oil salesman to put food on the table if at least a few suckers don’t by snake oil? But now, these people are empowered to speak to the world. And few sane voices are challenging them.
All this seems to be coming to a head right at the time the academic world has abandoned its public intellectual role – either out of timidity, arrogance or a strange combo of the two. Many have sequestered themselves among peers, hiding behind obtuse language in inaccessible journals, rather than engaging and educating the general public. As the Citizen pointed out: “To read a piece of modern research requires several years of specialized university education – even with a PhD and years of experience, a biologist and a physicist generally can’t read each other’s work.”
Into that void, celebrities and pseudo-scientists have oozed, free to sow semi-literate seeds of doubt based on political or agendas, religious zealotry or simple madness. How can a society boasting its highest numbers of postsecondary graduates also have its faith in science at an all-time low?
I was about to head to the bunker, until I read the words of Charles Weijer, a philosopher-physician in Western’s Rotman Institute of Philosophy, in that same Citizen article.
“It’s hopeful that more and more scientists are recognizing the importance of clear communication of their results. That is something that the scientists I know take much more seriously now than even 10 years ago. I think, as well, we need a better dialogue about science in Canada – rather than having polarized debates that change nobody’s mind.”
Counter-intuitive may be cool, but Weijer’s words are as true and sure as the moon landing – no matter what certain folks say about either.