Reddit mentions of Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style

Related: I really liked this book http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/1597265632
The author bloviates a little too much, but the core themes are crucial. For anyone preparing a scientific presentation, I would recommend preparing as you normally do, then videotaping yourself. Then read the book and implement some of the points, and then videotape again and compare.

> I just assumed that the reader cares who I am and what I think. It might sound silly, but that really was an eye-opener.

It doesn't sound silly at all!

In fact, this is probably the single most common mistake that people make -- in all forms of interaction with others. We assume that people want to know what we are thinking, what we are doing, what we have done, etc. It is pretty much the basic bias that we all have.

This is also why the simplest hook in non-fiction is to show the reader how they are impacted by what you are discussing.

Of course, I should make it clear that this not the only approach. People read biographies all the time, and so you can get them to care about other people -- provided those other people are interesting. Or, even, perhaps the other person has a problem they find interesting or care about.

For example, another good hook that might draw the reader into a story is:

"I escaped death today."

Even though I don't really care about you yet, I might care that you were about to die. Though it is a bit salacious, it is something that people are interested in (see: rubbernecking at a car accident, where people have no idea who the people involved were, but care deeply about what happened to them).

Anyway, the point is you must make the reader care about what you are going to talk about. Same as in fiction, there are many ways to do this, but it might still be done well.



Regarding the more specific points, arguments, I am happy to discuss these further too!



>objectively most of technology couldn't be directly tied to violent motivation

I was using violence in the less common definition:

"strength of emotion or an unpleasant or destructive natural force."

I was also thinking about not just man v. man, but man v. nature, which I would maintain is the primary motivator for technological advancement.

The idea is that it is the survival instinct that provides for the 'curiosity' drive. However, the vast preponderance of 'curiosity' is linked to survival still.

Take your essay itself. By your own admission (if I am reading the story right), a major motivator for your thoughts was the idea that your survival was threatened, and could end at any given time. You then had to decide how you could live under such conditions, and this motivated the rest of the thought process. Thus, the 'curiosity' that you exhibited was inspired by a direct need to understand how one lives within a possible scenario.

Anyway, that is just my read on things.



>Yes, ultimately the simulation would be governed by the laws of physics but this places no direct limitations on computational complexity other than of course in regards to resource constraints which would impact performance, but not complexity. For example, a Turing machine can compute anything that is computable

A theoretical Turing machine can compute anything, but a real world one cannot.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics ensures that this is the case, but you can also explain it with computation as well.

If there is a finite amount of energy in a system, then their is also a finite amount of information. I am thinking of Shannon entropy at this stage, which appears to be the most direct linkage between energy and information.

Given a finite resource, if one were to compute anything, the computation would need to be reversible, as you could not afford to discard energy/information. Of course, a reversible computation requires three bits per computation (in terms of logic gates), and so this means that for every bit of information you wish to compute, you need three bits of information to compute it. (Here I am working from memory of The Feynman Lectures on Computation, which I read a while ago. I may have some details wrong, but the principle is the same).

The point here is thus, this: if we used all the energy (including mass energy) to store the computation, the simulation that results could only be approximately 1/3 as complex as the universe in which it is run, given the needs to run reversible computation.

Of course, you could get rid of the reversible requirement, but then this places a more fundamental limitation on the system, in terms of # of computations that could even be performed.

And, of course, reversible computation (at speeds less than infinitely slow) are also impossible, and so we run into the heat death problem anyway.

I think that is where I was coming from, when I said the simulation would, out of necessity, be simpler than the universe in which it was stored.



Anyway, I do hope that the all this is helpful. But even if it is not, at least it might be fun!

I would encourage you to keep writing stuff like this. This piece definitely shows that you have promise, you just need to practice the elements of writing non-fiction in a way that leverages the aspects of story telling to make it as engaging as possible.

I will be excited to see what else you write!

**

PS. I thought of some other books that I found useful, when I was first learning to write non-fiction.

[Tell it Slant](http://www.amazon.com/Tell-Slant-Writing-Creative-Nonfiction/dp/0072512784): A book more generally about how to write non-fiction (not just science-based non-fiction). It is more about how to weave a story, and leverage many of the basic tricks of literature/language to your advantage.

[Made to Stick](http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/1400064287/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463315481&sr=1-1&keywords=made+to+stick): A book on marketing, but one that shows us how important it is to keep a message simple and engaging, if we want people to remember the message. And if you are writing non-fiction, remembering the message/information, is often the goal.

[Don't be such a scientist*](http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/1597265632/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463315517&sr=1-1&keywords=don%27t+be+such+a+scientist): If you want to concentrate on science/technology writing, you will eventually run into the problem where you are giving too much technical detail and caveats. This will bog down the writing. This book shows why this is a problem, and why (many times) you will have to accept saying things that are not 100% correct, in service of the story/message you are trying to get across. I know this sounds crazy, but I am a firm believer in this now. If you write something that is 100% correct, but boring, no one will read it. You might not have even written it. If you right something where the core message is correct, but the details are not necessarily supported strongly, but it is engaging, this is more useful. It is hard to do this justice, without going through the entirety of this book, so I would just encourage you to read it.

I'm going to disagree with David here, you likely don't want to show a video in a presentation - it can come off as a little lazy.

Read this book: http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Such-Scientist-Substance/dp/1597265632

I disagree completely.

I teach statistics, so I have even more of a problem than what you're up against. Most people hate statistics (real statistical inference, not memorizing batting averages).

Most people can't relate to what you are calling the scientific method and don't want to. And nothing you can do will cram it down their throats. Scientists who want to communicate science to the public need to read Don't Be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson, which says that most scientistics don't have a clue how to talk to ordinary people, which is (part of?) why they can't get their message across.

Let's take a concrete example. Suppose you had a cancer that has a very low survival probability (you've been given six months to live, and expect it to be horrible quality of life, lots of chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy and lots of pain). And there is a randomized clinical trial of a new treatment currently enrolling subjects. You decide to give it a shot. What have you got to lose? How do you feel about the randomization? Wouldn't you rather be assured of your chance at a miracle cure?

Explaining why the randomization is essential is very hard. The only textbook I know that deals with this in any depth is the first two chapters of Freedman, Pisani and Purves and they refuse to deal with any of the psychological issues and everyday reasoning of ordinary people. They just say if you don't have randomization, then it isn't really "controlled" and isn't really "scientific" but they would need a whole book (or several books) rather than just a couple of chapters in a "statistics for poets" book to really deal with the subject.

The real answer has to go over the history of clinical trials showing that without randomized controls, they can and do give wrong answers. And that getting a false positive in a clinical trial is a disaster because a bogus treatment becomes established and crowds out possibilities of real treatment until the bogosity gradually comes to light the hard way (years or decades of so so results). Clinical trials are much sharper tools than just the general consensus of the scientific comunity which follows trends, jumps on bandwagons, chases the money, and it sensitive to advertising and charisma of "thought leaders". But all of this is very hard to understand.

If ordinary people really believed in the "scientific method" our politics, culture, economy, and religion would be very different. That in itself explains much of the resistance.

Even certified scientists (PhD, academic position, grants, long vita, etc.) are people too and do not apply the "scientific method" when they don't have to. Not in their daily lives, and not even in science except where it is absolutely required.

I have a joke that many scientists think P < 0.05 means "Statistics has proved that every idea I have is correct." Almost no one thinks it means "A straw man has been duly knocked down. There must be some signal in our data. It is not all noise." Or
"The smaller of the two statistical models being compared fits the data as well as the larger one."
[Edit: oops! make that does not fit.] Yet these bloodless, lifeless phrasings are all the hypothesis test really says.

So if even scientists don't understand the scientific method (and if you are a hard liner about what the scientific method is, you can see violations in every paper in every journal), what is the point of teaching it to the general public?

A much richer and much more complicated view of the subject is in order. [Edit: IMHO]

I agree that her position is wrong, and that it's dangerous, but calling people dingbats is not a good way to convince them (or others) that you're right. Don't be so unlikable.

>Hello Reddit!
>
>My name is Randy Olson. I was a scientist, I became a filmmaker, now I’m back working with scientists and environmentalists, helping them strengthen the narrative elements of their communication efforts using the narrative tools I present in my 3 books. My first book, “Don’t Be Such A Scientist” (Island Press, 2009) outlined the problems faced in the communication of science to the public. My recent book “Houston, We Have A Narrative” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) provides solutions via the tools I have developed — especially the ABT Template (And, But, Therefore) that I derived from Hollywood screenwriting techniques. Now I am about to embark on “the action plan” of the book which is putting the tools to work through my Story Circles Narrative Training. We are running Story Circles with a wide range of institutions from NASA, USDA, US Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service to universities including Yale Forestry School, UCLA Institute of the Environment, Tufts University and entering the biotech world with Genentech. Story Circles is a new approach to communications training built around 10 one hour sessions that are more “workout” than lecture. It takes time, but is fun, powerful and applicable to everyone. I’m eager to share the details of the training and the powerful ABT Template that we have labeled “The DNA of Story.” Looking forward to this AMA!
>
>I’ll be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything!

>Hello Reddit!
>
>My name is Randy Olson. I was a scientist, I became a filmmaker, now I’m back working with scientists and environmentalists, helping them strengthen the narrative elements of their communication efforts using the narrative tools I present in my 3 books. My first book, “Don’t Be Such A Scientist” (Island Press, 2009) outlined the problems faced in the communication of science to the public. My recent book “Houston, We Have A Narrative” (University of Chicago Press, 2015) provides solutions via the tools I have developed — especially the ABT Template (And, But, Therefore) that I derived from Hollywood screenwriting techniques. Now I am about to embark on “the action plan” of the book which is putting the tools to work through my Story Circles Narrative Training. We are running Story Circles with a wide range of institutions from NASA, USDA, US Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service to universities including Yale Forestry School, UCLA Institute of the Environment, Tufts University and entering the biotech world with Genentech. Story Circles is a new approach to communications training built around 10 one hour sessions that are more “workout” than lecture. It takes time, but is fun, powerful and applicable to everyone. I’m eager to share the details of the training and the powerful ABT Template that we have labeled “The DNA of Story.” Looking forward to this AMA!
>
>I’ll be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything!

Communicating science can be just as important, and much more difficult than the science itself. You have to capture your audience's attention, avoid jargon as much as possible, and tell a compelling story. There are some great books out there about the subject. Connection is my personal favourite, but Escape from the Ivory Tower, Don't be such a Scientist, and Am I Making Myself Clear are all good reads as well.