Hey all, this is something that's been on my mind lately and I want to hear your thoughts.
I've noticed, and I'm sure many of you have noticed, the rampant scientific illiteracy out there in the world, and it's easy to find on the internet [1]. But why? And what can we do to help?
These are a couple of possibilities off the top of my head:
1. The barrier for entry is too high. It's already hard enough to get the basics of a new field down if you're an undergrad, and extremely difficult if you don't have access to classroom education on the subject. But even assuming you have the basics, to understand current research you need to be reading journal articles, talking with people in the field, reading conference papers/posters, etc. This is all quite costly when most journals are paywalled and conferences are expensive as hell. But even setting aside cost, it took years of reading journal articles for me to start reading them efficiently, and if I'm reading something from a field that's not my own it still takes a while to acclimate. Not to mention the start-up costs of finding the literature in the first place. Pouring hours upon hours of effort into this probably isn't worth it if you're not actively working in the field.
2. It takes too much time to become familiar and stay familiar with a field. This is partially because of (1): learning the basics of a field and its terminology takes a long time, and in general reading journal articles is time-consuming. But even assuming that you've already put in months of time to get up to speed with some field, who wants to spend a large amount of time staying up to date? If you have a lot of diverse interests, this immediately becomes intractable.
As for ideas on how to help, I'm not really sure. I have a feeling that getting people to read good review papers would be a nice start, but making them publicly available and easy to find seems like a big challenge.
I'd love to hear your thoughts & ideas!!
[1] For example, I was on Reddit earlier today and someone brought up neural oscillations. Someone commented with a link to a blog post claiming to know where the "central alpha generator" is. From having read much of the peer-reviewed oscillations literature myself, the field can't even agree on whether oscillations are a real phenomenon or just an epiphenomenon resulting from spiking activity, let alone agree that there is some central generator! Agghhh /rant
People usually refer to Thomas Jefferson as the last Renaissance Man. It's been a long time since any one person could have a breadth and depth understanding of the world; one of those hard-to-verify factoids is that a person living today has been exposed to as much "information" (however you choose to define it) in a day as a person living in the 1800s saw in a lifetime.
So there will never be a reasonable case where a randomly-selected person will be literate about any given scientific subject. With any luck they'll have a basis of knowledge but it's a moving target; I'm not ancient but I'll bet you learned there were six kingdoms of in biology while I learned 5. I learned 9 planets, my kid will learn 8. The age of the universe has shifted by 50% since I first learned it (if I'm not mistaken - yet another example where "literacy" moves) and when I was a kid, Weekly Reader told me that I'd die of acid rain and no ozone layer. Nowadays it's global warming. I still remember when GRID became AIDS and it'd kill you really dead but Magic Johnson has been living with it for what? 20 years?
The important thing, from my point of view, isn't "literacy" per se but sophistication. We need people to be able to look at a news report and parse out that it's a sensationalist headline generated by one anecdotal study conducted by a grad student at an obscure university. We need people to be able to evaluate that one side of the debate is anchored by the World Health Organization and the other by Jenny McCarthy... and everything that means. We need everyone to grasp that just because there are two opinions does not mean they have equal weight.
It's not how much science you know it's how much science you can evaluate.