Experts: You Live in a Bazaar, Not an Elevator

So avoid the trap of mere science communications.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

When I ran science communication workshops years ago, a speed-dating message box was one of my go-to exercises. (Romantic it was not.) I had each of the workshop participants a) create a “message box” for one of their new papers or new work they were doing, and then b) deliver that message box in “speed dates” with other participants, dates that got shorter with each new round—two minutes, 90 seconds, 60 seconds…Decision-makers value brevity above everything, I told the participants as they hyperventilated after the 30-second round. Since in real life you usually only have someone’s attention for a few seconds, I went on, can you figure out a way to convey to them the essence of your work before the elevator doors reopen and they get away? (Nobody objected to the premise; this was the early 2010s, when people still spoke of “elevator pitches”—apparently because they actually spoke in elevators.)

Of course, the exercise was—how might I put it in under, say, five seconds? — batshit crazy. Talking about your new work should never be an exercise in captivity (although it feels that way during many scientific presentations, as well as during the speed-dating message box). While concision is great, the core problem in communication isn’t how to be concise for yet another impatient, self-important decision-maker. It’s how to be interesting and useful — which by definition is: interesting and useful to a person other than yourself, perhaps even a decision-maker, and certainly someone outside your discipline. If someone thinks you’re interesting and useful, they’ll probably let you go on quite a while, or perhaps stop you and say, “This is interesting. I want to hear more, but I’m late for something. Can we connect later?” They’re not going to say that just because you raced to finish your message box in 30 seconds. Life is not a soapbox derby.

What Science Communications Thinks Is Important vs. What People Want

My underlying mistake was one science communicators often make: confusing what science thinks is important in communicating science (e.g., clarity; concision; having a model of your audience, however abstract and unconvincing) with what people actually want out of most science — connection and utility (and awe). It’s a slight of hand in science communications that fools only ourselves, the science communications practitioners: We say we are thinking about the audience and how we would like to engage them in dialogue, but we are really just always talking about ourselves and what we want to say at them.

Once you see this slight of hand, you’ll also eventually see that science communications alone is a trap, and a straitjacket, for scientists and other researchers who want to apply their expertise to solve problems in the world. The structural limitations of “science communications” are right in the name: It limits your communications to just science, and its objective is to communicate that science come hell or high water, sidelining the larger creativity of your applied expertise and grooving an expert-lecturing-the-non-expert dynamic that reinforces your isolation from non-expert audiences.

“Science communications” has gotten so big and industrialized, however, that it threatens to push other kinds of research expertise off the stage. For instance, the writer Charlie Becker recently published a piece (“Simplicity, Expertise, and Bullshit”) attacking the folk wisdom that anyone who truly understands something, no matter how complex, can explain that thing in terms anyone can understand. (The touchstone quote — “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” — is attributed to Einstein, but there’s no evidence he ever said it.) Becker argues here that “understanding something and communicating that understanding are two entirely different skills,” and that “if your criteria for the best explanation is that it is the simplest and most elegant, you are ironically more likely to fall victim to bullshit.”

I agree with all this, especially with how simplicity as a standalone goal reinforces anti-intellectualism in the audience, trading in the syllogism that, if the audience has to work to understand something, the problem is the expert’s — i.e., they’re not really an expert. (Which, of course, makes communication not about communication, but about ratifying both the expert as expert and the non-specialist as knowing all they need to know already.)

But the way Becker defines “expertise” really only applies to those limited situations in which you the expert are tasked with “communicating your understanding” — of a concept or a finding. The much more abundant and urgently needed set of expert interventions lies in experts applying their expertise to problems in the world — an exercise that goes far beyond mere “communication” to comprise our old friends interesting and useful. At least, if we want those applications to be heard — or we even want to take the risk of making them.

Physicist Chad Orzel, who had some light criticism for Becker’s piece, encapsulates quite neatly how science communications sees its brief:

“The place where I definitely agree with Becker is that there’s a lot of specialized skill involved in communicating a complex subject like physics, that’s at least partly distinct from the specialized skill involved in doing physics. This involves things like a flair for metaphors and some skill in language, but also a kind of mental modeling of the audience you’re attempting to reach, and the level you want to bring them up to. That requires a reasonably high level of understanding of the subject matter, but also a willingness to set aside some of the abstruse details that are essential for deep understanding in the interest of communicating more cleanly.”

Orzel is an excellent communicator and physics is often not an applied science — but nowhere in that quote (amidst the modest demands of “flair for metaphors” and “mental modeling of audience” do we see anything about the process of understanding what the audience might find interesting or useful; just where you the expert “want to bring them up to.” Traffic on the street of science communications continues to flow only one way.

I apologize to all those workshop participants I led astray many years ago. The lesson I should have been teaching you is: You’re not in an elevator — you’re in a bazaar, and it’s noisy and colorful and distracting and you have to win attention and hold it. So say what you’ve got to say in a way that’s interesting and relevant and useful to your audience, to maximize the odds they’ll keep leaning in to hear more.