You sound as ambivalent as I am, Frank. This is one part of the larger tapestry of the decline in critical thinking and skepticism. The principled solution would be to try and raise the level of education of the public, but we've been struggling, seemingly in vain, for a long time to accomplish that. Maybe we've been trying to play the game by the wrong rules?

I worked for years as a technical writer, and learned some practical truths about getting a message across. I learned that I have to communicate in the language of my reader, and select word-symbols that would expand into the correct concepts in my reader's mind. The way that I think and what the words mean to me is irrelevant, and trying to keep to the high road and educate the reader in my way of thinking is self-defeating. What works is to design the material to produce the desired outcome.

Is that elitist? Perhaps, but in a most benign way. I had a social contract with my readers, an understanding of my responsibility as the expert to do right by my audience, and give them the information they needed to succeed. The onus was on me to see that they did the right thing.

I think that scientists haven't done a very good job upholding their social contract with the public to help them make the right choices in matters of scientific public policy. Scientists seem to want the public to make the educational journey to their mountaintop and speak their language. It won't happen, and scientists need to bend a little and communicate in terms the public can understand to lead them to the scientifically correct answer. If that means routinely overstating the case and using simplistic yet vivid symbolism as a bludgeon, so be it. Advertisers and politicians are scientists too, experts in the study of human nature; and it would behoove classical scientists to study their methodology and adopt their proven techniques.

I'm ambivalent. That isn't the best of all possible worlds, it's just the world I find myself stuck in. "Needs must", sayeth the Minbari.

--Robert