I Got Into a Fight at APS: Science Communication (APS Part 2)

Article Preface:

The headline of this article is clickbait: I didn’t swing any fists. Really, this article is an attempt to rephrase my garbled question/comment at the APS session entitled Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation in the Public Arena. You will figure out what the issue was later on in the article.

Besides that, here are two discrete notes:

1. Lots of names have been changed for privacy.

2. The acronym APS stands for the American Physical Society. At the time of this writing, I was attending the annual APS conference in Denver, Colorado . This article is technically the second in a series; the first entry is Traveling to Denver, Colorado (APS Part 1)

Attending the APS Science Communication Session

I wanted to attend this session for several reasons, one of which was to see the legendary Don Lincoln of Fermilab’s official YouTube channel in person, though this was not the primary reason. The primary reason behind my attendance was to get a better idea of where the conversation in the science communication community has ended up in this era when scientific truths are treated on the same footing as horoscopes. I was curious: How do those who talk about science to the public view this matter? Are there particular strategies that must be adopted to grapple with the challenge of restoring scientific integrity into a society that has rejected the practice? Since there was to be an open discussion section after this session, I thought I could ask some of my questions then.

Perry and Amireza followed me into the session. I am certain that Perry was somewhat interested in this topic, but I am not so sure Amireza was at all. Since we had re-nucleated somehow in the vast sea of conference-goers distributed between the monstrous convention center and the Hyatt Regency and did not have any talks we were keen on attending at the moment, they tagged along with me to this session. It wasn’t long, though, before Perry had dozed off completely; Amireza and I took the opportunity to take some pictures of him with his head knocked back and mouth wide open.

We arrived during the middle of the second talk. That was my fault: bad planning. But less than half that talk was all I needed to get the gist of this session. This talk was about writing popular-science articles—think of websites like Quanta Magazine and Scientific American and whatnot. The advice was: write narrative-driven titles, like “this scientist knew it couldn’t happen—and then she observed it”; try to evoke analogies (or jokes) from popular culture. And so on and so forth. All of these things you’ve heard before.

Then, the last speaker took the stage, and I started to convulse. Not only was this talk effectively plugging some kind of organization that teaches people how to communicate with each other, but it propped up all of that talk-with-empathy fluff that I don’t believe is actually ever applied. Don’t get me wrong—I support communication with empathy. But I’m always skeptical of these people who purport to “use empathy” when speaking with science skeptics or science deniers; I think most of the time these people would rather not speak with empathy to the skeptics, and they still place themselves on a high horse. “Empathy” is the glorious word here, the word you use to indicate that you care deeply about something—because “sympathy” is not empathetic enough, and indicates that you care, just not deeply. Not only that, but look at the goddamned title of the session: “Combatting Misinformation.” Right? In an age when science and its practice have been so compromised, I often wonder if this empathy-first approach really is the optimal strategy here. I think it is categorically incriminating to even utter the phrase “use empathy.”

It was during the 30-minute open floor section that I decided I had to bring up this issue. I was agitated. More than that. But to my embarrassment, I did perhaps one of the worst jobs I ever had at communicating what I wanted to say when it was my turn in the Q&A line. Ironic, because here I was attending a session about communication and claiming that I had an interest in the subject.

I stood in that long line, its boundaries delineated by the vacancy space between the two large sections of black, plastic chairs that fill every APS session, behind about five other people. I stepped side to side, nervous. What was supposed to come to mind was not coming to mind. Maybe it will spontaneously arrive when I start talking, I wondered; I have observed that that can happen with me. But I kept turning it over and over: What exactly did I want to say, though? What I wanted to say was too detailed; my mind was starting to burst at the seams. I looked back at Perry to see that he was still asleep. Whew! I hope he doesn’t wake up to see me fumble this.

And I did fumble it. I rambled. My question took about 7 minutes to ask. And it wasn’t even a question: I ended my rambling with, “Can you all comment on [what I just rambled about]?” Not only that, but I later learned that Perry woke up before my comment—probably Amireza nudged him, saying, “[He’s] going to ask something”—and actually recorded about half of my rambling. (And so did APS: Their recording was available after the conference ended.)

I do not recall virtually anything that they said in response to me after I asked the question. I only retain the memory of inching closer to the microphone posted up in the middle of the gigantic room between those two rows of seats. Unexpectedly, the person who came after me for a question started by saying, “I echo what that gentleman said.” Holy crap! I did not mean to start an uprising here, and I hoped that these panelists were not preparing their pitchforks to fend off the offensive.

It was perhaps an hour after that session that I decided I needed to find these panelists again, apologize for my idiotic rambling, and then clarify what I really wanted to say. I managed to only successfully do two of the three—I still could not clarify what I wanted to say. I kept returning to the word “deception” over and over, and the third panelist especially disliked it: “It’s not deception,” she said. I know, I know, but… what do I want to say? I wrestled in my head. Finally, after a bit more struggling, she said, “You do it the way that makes you comfortable.” I noticed a certain gentleman that I definitely did not want to exhaust again looked exhausted listening to me. God, this guy is here again! I imagined him thinking.

So, I decided to think about what I really wanted to say at that time. Hopefully what I write below clarifies what exactly I have been thinking about, and why I get so agitated when I hear these communication folks talk.

Dear Panelists, Here’s What I Meant to Say

The main reason we cannot continue to blindly appeal to the research-backed communication techniques with people who are anti-science is because these methods enable the reverse outcome just as easily. Typically, the resounding conclusion of those who have studied how people converse and connect with each other is that we must be open and curious about how people arrived at the ideas that they have—whatever those ideas are. But here is the major point: We tend to ground this entire discussion with the preconceived notion—the “correct” one, in the eyes of us scientists—that we are holding the moral high ground here. We do not. The “high ground” that we hold is founded upon generations of human endeavor to build up a body of scientific evidence.

Don’t get me wrong at the outset: I do think that there are effective methods of communication that are supported by many research findings. I do think that these methods include the ability to really listen (“active listening,” which I find to be such a funny phrase…) and engage in what people have to say. Some of these findings run totally antithetical to a naïve model of human behavior and decision-making: If we consume the relevant information, we will always make the “right” decision. Running completely counter to that, findings from social psychology and communication science tell us that if you wish to suggest a change of opinion to somebody else, you must not even remotely allude to any difference of opinion. Rather, the best way to engage is to draw out what they think and how they came to that idea, typically found in the form of a personal experience or a unique way of “connecting the dots” between various pieces of information. In other words, you have to sort of skirt around what you perceive to be a totally stupid belief before you offer any counter pressure. This is a strategy that Charles Duhigg advocates in Supercommunicators .

One of the major things that was said in the talk that I took issue with was when I heard the words “…outcomes we hope to create…” Here, the underlying instrumentality becomes visible: From this perspective, we go into these conversations not really to learn about someone’s story or the reasons why they arrived at their perspective; we really have an ulterior goal, namely the “outcome we hope to create.” In this case, what is the outcome we want? To convert someone from being a science scorner to a science inquisitor. Of course, yes, we want people to get vaccinated, because it prevents needless death and bereavement due to, for example, the loss of our “measles-free” status, as ordained by the WHO.

But the major point we must agree upon, as a scientific community, is that the practices of scientific inquiry are valuable to our civilization, and that scientific findings ought to be meaningfully integrated into our culture. If we have determined through scientific methodology that inoculation substantially reduces the risk of disease and its complications, and therefore suffering, we must consider quite seriously that, for the sake of our species’ happiness and longevity, inoculation should be integrated with our lifestyle; it ought to be something we live by. For quite a long time, we did! Now, we do not.

An instance of this story is brought up in Supercommunicators . Duhigg described a story in which a doctor recommended that somebody get vaccinated based on all the available evidence that we have of its efficacy. The patient was still hesitant. The patient brought up the statistical anomalies of people turning into Resident Evil zombies that they read about on VAERS, and wasn’t keen on that whole trajectory. It wasn’t until the doctor started talking about how God wanted the best thing for his children, and one of those things is being present for their growth (i.e., not dying early) that the patient finally accepted to get vaccinated.

Upon a first pass of Supercommunicators , you might be convinced that indeed the doctor did the right thing: The doctor “scored!” Hooray! These communication techniques do work! You might think. And the reason the doctor bats a home run is because Duhigg fundamentally assumes in some sense (not explicitly either) that getting vaccinated is an inherently good thing; the strategies of communication were employed to achieve a good, heart-warming thing here.

We need to ask ourselves why we have told this story in the light of a “success story.” Let us briefly concoct the “inverted” version of this story to see how it might play out.

Suppose a doctor is going about their daily business and is confronted by a vaccine skeptic. The vaccine skeptic says that they read all this data and academic papers and books and concluded that administering the shot was dangerous. The doctor laughs, and goes about their daily life. Elementary mistake, we think, on the part of the vaccine skeptic. They should’ve used the empathy-grounded strategies! Now, the vaccine skeptic, having been equipped with the sly strategies of supercommunication, tries a different approach: Instead of confronting the doctor with facts and evidence, they talk about how their cousin suffered myocarditis after their first shot of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine. Their cousin changed irreversibly; the myocarditis has complicated the chances of their cousin’s ability to continue playing American Football and obtaining a scholarship to their dream college. What can the doctor say? “That sounds really difficult,” they start. “I’m sorry to hear that the vaccine induced myocarditis in your cousin. We do know that this can happen in some rare cases.”

“Yeah, so why are you continuing to administer it?” the skeptic inquires.

“No, you’re right: there is a chance that we can forever alter the lives of young men aged 18 to 30. I’ll speak to the department head about a moratorium on administering these vaccines.” The skeptic walks out of the office, elated.

Do you feel the same warmth here after the end of this story? Hooray! These communication techniques do work! Of course you do not. Now it is time to ask yourself why you do not. Perhaps it is because you believe that getting vaccinated is a good thing for people and for everybody else. That is the symmetry-breaking factor here. The communication technique itself has not changed in this example; what changed was our judgment about the thing being communicated. We regard vaccination as good because of the evidence we have consumed up to that moment, manifesting not only in academic publications and empirical experimentation but also in the fortunate recognition of the peace of mind that comes from having avoided preventable illness. In Duhigg’s example, we retroactively interpreted the doctor’s successful persuasion as a success. If the same conversational machinery produces an outcome we regard as harmful, we no longer celebrate the machinery. The supercommunication technique did not tell us what was good; our prior judgment did.

And let it not just be me who points out that the “inverse” situation can occur. As I elaborately ranted on in my (unreleased) A Scathing Review of Supercommunicators article, Duhigg begins his book with a story of how a United States intelligence agent effectively deceived somebody for the purpose of giving up vital information on an (adversarial) foreign government. It is remarkable that Duhigg chose this story to serve as the first chapter of the book, because anybody who has read what American intelligence agencies have been up to recently most certainly did not read that as a success story of supercommunication.

What we must ask ourselves is if we want to stand behind this strategy when it involves such manipulation. After all, the process of doing science has always been a collaborative one. What we think of as “science communication” often is grounded in an image of a scientist or science journalist speaking to a non-scientist, but science communication happens between scientists all the time; it’s “intra-science communication,” and it’s just as important! If you cannot explain to me why a symplectic manifold has exactly the structure required to formulate Hamiltonian mechanics, then you have not communicated science even internal to the practice itself. What we wish to inculcate, then, is that it is not just the “scientist” who is a scientist here: everybody has the instinctual scientific inquiry inside of themselves. What we wish to accomplish is to induct these people who reject science into the scientific lineage that we (the scientists) are fortunate enough to have secured an official career in, to help them realize for themselves that there are reasons why there is such thing as “prevailing scientific sentiment”: we wash our hands for a reason; we wear masks during surgeries for a reason; we wear helmets when biking for a reason; we wear seatbelts for a reason; we have food expiry dates for a reason.

When all is said and done, I wish to invite the science communication community to remember what our motivations are. Indeed, we want to “win the battle,” and we should want this. We need to win the battle, especially against people like RFK Jr. and Russell Vought. But let us not forget the bigger objective here: to re-establish the relevance of science to our civilization and well-being. If we are speaking to a Patrick Bet-David type, or our uncertain grandmother, or our aunt who still believes in miasma theory, then let us engage in these conversations using the strategies of connection through conversation but never lose sight of what attracted us to science in the first place: the insatiable curiosity about our place in this universe, and the methodology that enables us to understand more and more about it.

It is, in my view, much more effective to fold into the discussion all of the ways in which science has fortified our civilization. For example, a source of disillusionment to me has been the way in which we have decided that the smartphones that we now all carry in our pockets are (implicitly) valued as safer than the routine schedule of vaccines that we all receive in order to prevent the spread of malady and its associated suffering. Both are founded upon various principles that the scientific method has uncovered: in the case of smartphones, it’s a whole array of nanotechnologies, including MOSFETs, and everything from semiconductor physics to electromagnetism and information theory.

Or GPS. Or the Internet. Or WiFi. Where do we think all of this technological fortification comes from? It does not drop out of the sky; these are the victories of science for all. (Obviously, there always lurks the question of whether these technologies are used appropriately.) It is these victories that we must wield whenever we defend science. We must not strive to deceive others into accepting our stories because we cannot convince them through the traditional form of argumentation. We must not adopt these strategies with the intention to change minds on the basis of simply wanting to do so in isolation: We adopt these strategies keeping in mind the dignity of the human being and the sovereignty of the human mind, but also keeping in our minds all the efforts we have gone through to establish a more perfect union fortified with science. It is through this method of conversation that we win. And we all win together!

Notes/References:

1. “…the legendary Don Lincoln of Fermilab’s official YouTube channel…” Fermilab’s YouTube channel is Fermilab. Don Lincoln is the channel’s main science communicator.

2. “…noticed a certain gentleman…” Who do you think that is?

3. “…you must not even remotely allude to any difference of opinion.” There are a whole host of possible references I can provide for these kinds of statements. An excellent starting point is A philosopher’s 350-year-old trick to get people to change their minds is now backed up by psychologists.

4. “…loss of our ‘measles-free’ status, as ordained by the WHO.” There are several articles that provide coverage on this issue. Here are a few: Canada loses its measles-free status, with US on track to follow, World may be ‘post-herd immunity’ to measles, top US scientist says, and Measles – Region of the Americas.

5. “Duhigg described a story in which a doctor recommended that somebody get vaccinated…” See the book Supercommunicators , starting on page 176.

6. “…Resident Evil zombies…” Resident Evil is a classic video game.

7. “VAERS” is an acronym that stands for Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. The website is VAERS.

8. “…brought up the statistical anomalies of people turning into Resident Evil zombies…” Look, this is not a nice thing to say. There are indeed people who are hesitant to get vaccinated out of fear that it will have rare side effects, and we should not shame them for this fear any more than we should shame people who don’t want to swim at the beach for fear of being Great White meat. However, there are also people who capitalize on scientific ambiguity and uncertainty to sculpt an enticing narrative about how mRNA vaccines will do irreparable harm to society, and so “passively” taking a shot is like willingly listening to the siren song and sinking below the gelatinous, pink fluid filling your spawn capsule like in The Matrix (1999) . Typically, these people are the ones who claim something like vaccination is equivalent to zombification. So, we’re using that kind of language here.

9. “…the doctor started talking about how God wanted the best thing for his children…” This is completely true, and it is discussed in Supercommunicators on page 195–6. The passage is:

“…‘You know, I don’t usually talk about religion with patients, but I’m so thankful that God gave us these brains, and these laboratories, and the ability to make vaccines. Maybe He gave us vaccines to keep us safe?’” Then she left the room. ( Supercommunicators , p. 196)

10. “…how a United States intelligence agent effectively deceived somebody for the purpose of giving up vital information…” Again, completely true. Charles Duhigg begins the book with this story. To read the story, find it in Supercommunicators , starting on p. 3.

Updates:

1. 2026-09-14: Added linked references.