Just overhearing the latest talking head on CNN (ugh) discussing conspiracy theories and their attraction to many people. One thing this person notes is that to engaged and try to change the minds of conspiracy-minded folk, you cannot attack them and call them stupid etc. if you want to change any minds. Rather, try to ease into it to seek common ground and so on, find out what their fears are. I think this is good advice but I'm also going to temper that with what I admit is a bit of folk wisdom. I don't think that conspiratorial beliefs are about fear. Instead, I think they are about a kind of power and sense of privilege. They allow people who have not worked very hard to study anything, or keep up to date with current affairs, to feel a kind of sense of authority in having access to what they perceive is a special kind of truth. It is knowledge that they came to first, or early on. It's like the same sense of pride some people have when they 'discovered' a popular artist early in their careers. This feeling gives people a sense of power, either over others who are more knowledgeable than they are, or over the affairs of the world. It can be a sense of comfort providing some relief over fears, but those fears I don't think are necessarily driven by important things like economic existence and survival. It's a license for laziness to substitute for learning.
So, if you're trying to engage with people deeply soaked in conspiratorial thinking, it is indeed important to find common ground with them. However, you need to also be aware that in discussing their motivating fears, these might also be motivated arguments meant to deflect from deeper personal anxieties about self. These will likely be feelings of inadequacy that they are masking that you will not easily uncover in the course of a single conversation...
0 Comments
James Randi has passed away, aged 92. I remember seeing his "Secrets of the Psychics" PBS Nova special as a teenager. It had a profound impact on my and my journey to becoming a scientist. Randi taught us all that the easiest person to fool is ourselves. He gave no quarter to anyone espousing mumbo-jumbo, regardless of the number of kinds of degrees they had. He even held that scientists are often most easily tricked by charlatanry. As scientists we can expect the universe to be honest with us (even if it doesn't always show us all its secrets), but we tend to operate on the assumption that our colleagues are behaving honestly—something that is true, for the most part. But we aren't necessarily more gifted than anyone else when it comes to spotting fakers and tricksters. Watch Randi at his best, showing us how we fool ourselves with horoscopes: One of the things I'm sure we all noticed when our workplaces were disrupted and moved into the remote working world was either a sudden increase in meetings or a sudden realization of just how many meetings we have. The move to online media like Teams or Zoom meant that fewer meetings were happening ad hoc and more stuff was being scheduled. But this didn't stop people being trigger-happy with meeting requests. There were a number of meetings I had in the spring and early summer that were one-hour blocks scheduled and remarkably little got done. So I'm instituting some policies for myself and for those who want to schedule a meeting. This includes 1:1 meetings. In fact, most importantly for 1:1 meetings in some cases.
Rule 1: Have an agenda. Don't schedule a meeting without having an agenda (or at least promising one and following through). Very best practice: suggest the meeting with a draft agenda. Rule 2: Share the agenda with meeting participants. Don't keep it to yourself, but at least leave the participants half an hour to go over your notes. Earlier is better. More gets done when less time is wasted introducing the agenda items. Rule 3: Follows from David Allen's GTD principles: don't end a meeting without deciding on a list of next actions and agreeing who will undertake them and by when. The main purpose of the meeting should be deciding on the action steps: whether they're needed and what they are. I think these are reasonable plans for all involved in a meeting. It keeps stress levels down and productivity levels up. Things are about to get really busy for everyone in academia, and a bit of advance planning will go a long way to meeting your goals and hitting those deadlines. .We have a new paper out this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution describing a new placoderm that could push back the origin of endochondral bone and raises some interesting questions about our general picture of early jawed vertebrate evolution. I don't have time for a more extended post this week, but will put a short note here. I've put a blog post on the Nature Community page. The paper is here. And a free read-only version is here. There's also a nice News & Views piece by Valéria Vaškaninová.
As a palaeontologist, I'm constantly confronted with the question about the value of the kind of work that I do. There are areas of science that are clearly goal-directed, particularly when it comes to questions of technology and applications in day-to-day life. But my science isn't likely to affect the daily lives of most people, but it is the general population that pays for my kind of work. One of the primary defences of basic science that I have seen time and again is that we simply don't know what science needs to know. That is, basic science deals with what I call "Rumsfeld's Problem". However, I have always found that argument to be unpersuasive.
Inspired by Cal Newport's recent Wired article, I have decided to make a return to blogging. Just over a year ago, I left all social media behind and have gotten into a kind of 'digital detox'. What has followed has probably been one of the most (if not the most) productive years of my post-PhD life. I did this without working any extra hours or any insane hours. Indeed, I have probably been much more disciplined in working 9-to-5 and 5 days a week than at any point in the past. I wanted to get back to a public medium that would let me communicate my research to the world, but avoid the short-lived, rapid-fire shots of Twitter or the attention-sapping drain of Facebook.
I think it will be fun and hopefully useful to discuss how I improved my working life (and my mental health!). Along the way, I hope to share stories and insights about the research in my lab. |
Martin d brazeauPalaeontologist, fieldworker, sometimes phylogenetic programmer. Transplanted Canadian in UK. All views are my own. How to pronounce my name? Rhymes with "bureau" or "chateau". He/him/his. Archives
December 2022
Categories
All
|