Society
OOPS! It was the Best of Science. It was the Worst of Science.
Citizens, Scientists & a Tale of Two Fails
A quick google search of Massive Fail offers up 260,000,000 results, whereas its awesome cousin Epic Fail [much more big-time, audacious, and ‘dude’] only gets 115,000,000.
Both searches deliver a tsunami-like mash-up of videos, pics, memes, gifs, glyphs, tropes, #s, and more.
Massive and Epic Fails seem to be so much a part of our everyday socialised life and speech that we could be forgiven for thinking that the ordinary man, woman, and child in the street is super-relaxed about failure, almost to the point of it being a cool pursuit in itself.
Hell, what’s the worst that can happen — a #massivefail film of you, well, ermmm, massive failing in some way goes viral, gets Hs of Ts if not Ms of views.
All PR is good PR, right? Maybe not so much, especially in the intersection between science and humanity.
In a recent Round Table on Gene Diplomacy, [the genesis of which was in on this very platform] we were discussing how we might use some form of diplomatic layer to de-risk the bioeconomy in favour of humanity. This pointed to the need for a tangible and meaningful degree of reciprocity, dialogue, and trust between the scientific professions and practices and the general public.
Now for those things to actually happen in the real world, the people having the dialogue need to arrive with a few things already in place.
They need to share the same worldview and a similar set of cultural, moral, and ethical belief frameworks — underwritten by broadly equivalent degrees of understanding of the topic in discussion — and in a perfect world, both would be predisposed to a shared, higher purpose which everyone is in service to.
BUT.
Therein lies the flaw when it comes to finding a level playing field in the collision between science and humanity — especially when it comes to the matter of failure and its role in our evolutionary progress towards better.
There isn’t one.
Ordinary people’s current ‘issue’ with Experts and the role of mostly faceless institutions and the academics, scientists, technologists, and clinicians that populate them is that they find them untrustworthy.
Now I would love to point to certain self-interested leaders and politicians as being the fabricators of this ‘myth’ of untrustworthiness between the general public and the professionals that make up what can be called ‘Experts’, stirring up dissent and fear where none existed before. But that would be in itself politicising BS. All they are doing is poking a universal constant — a pre-existing human reflex and hotbed of emotion that lies barely disguised and easily provoked.
The human capacity for distrust is a wonderful evolutionary thing that helps to keep us safe from harm, and in many instances alive where recklessness might predict otherwise.
Distrust is primed to spot glitches, irregularities in the fabric of our normal — anomalies sources of threat, disturbance, rupture. Volatility and evidence of it puts us on alert.
When we view our Experts through this lens, it’s easy to see where things start to go wrong.
People often perceive that Experts change their minds, change the rules, back-track, reverse, obfuscate and confound. The questionable nature of these occurrences and actions are then further exacerbated by the whiff of condescension that sometimes accompanies the Experts’ efforts to then ‘explain’ these U-turns, reverses, corrections, and miscalculations to people who are ultimately incapable of grasping them [as is anyone without a deep knowledge of the Experts given subject matter.]
When Ordinary people are said to value the traits of honesty ‘straight-forwardness’ ‘no-nonsense’ and ‘straight-talking’ in others — that usually refers to their preference for dealing with people who speak in their language, use their terms and operate within a worldview they understand. Therefore, these ‘Experts’ with their fail-fast culture of relentless test and learn, and their arcane lingua franca, are another universe to the ordinary person. To the ordinary man and the woman, they speak in riddles and seem to play quite fast and loose with their sometime absolutes.
The average person on the street’s response to the shifting sands of scientifically-based directives about everything from: butter vs. margarine, the correlation of red meat to obesity, safe sex, and drug legalisation, to mental health, and education tends to be quite emphatic:
Make your f%*&ing mind up.
The ordinary person’s need for certainty is strong. What scientists see as the acceptable turbulence and, ultimately, positive value of failure is simply uncertainty to the ordinary person — which makes it dangerous; a potential threat.
Therein lies the chasm we need to cross — the grand canyon of challenges.
Human beings value certainty — it’s hardwired into us. Its presence is evidence that the counterbalance to volatility and flux — to uncertainty — is working in any given moment, situation, or environment. For most of us, uncertainty = danger at the most primal of levels.
Our avoidance, dismissal, or distrust of ‘uncertain’ science is a ‘creature fear’ first and foremost — one that is often irrational, and amplified by associated sub-conscious emotional fears. That’s before we even get anywhere near the more tangible and identifiable fears fuelled by historic abuses of certain gender, ethnic, and demographic groups in the blind pursuit of scientific breakthroughs or answers.
This is what’s at work in the space where humanity and science collide.
Science by its very nature lives at the edge of reason — testing what we know and what we think we know; as well as reaching far beyond it using what some see as unreasonable acts. In a recent paper on the Online Information Environment, Professor Frank Kelly of the Royal Society rightly stated that science stands on the edge of error. Whether that be Test-and-Learn or fallacy modelling — everything in the scientist’s world points to a constant, irrepressible, immutable series of real and theoretical, highly-controlled, evidentially-framed failures pursued in the wish to develop and evolve the progress of scientific thinking. Fail is a byword for rigor, integrity, understanding, revelation. Failure is good.
But in the ordinary person’s world, failure is bad — something to be feared.
Failure denotes sub-standard, sub-optimal, personal acuity and ability, seriously hindering our capacity for success. Failure makes us ‘visible’ in all the wrong ways. Failure puts us on the back-foot in the gene-pool-imperative stakes.
Failure is not a mate-magnet by any stretch of the creature’s imagination. Failure fuels shame, fear, humiliation, vulnerability, and ultimately, the purest creature fear we have — rejection.
Rejection can be a source of catastrophic concern for people. At its most extreme, the fear of failure or negative evaluation has a formal clinical name — atychiphobia. This is the extreme persistent and crippling fear of failure. A recent article pointed to some Penn State Research that estimated that atychiphobia is experienced by some 2–5% of the American public. Though this cites the extremities of the fear of failure, culture and societal norms would probably offer up a far greater number of people who channel a subconscious fear of failing on a daily basis in almost all they do. The causes of atichyphobia range from parents and family members demeaning a child, extreme trauma, or a significant early life failure to a potential genetic predisposition toward anxiety that exacerbates the condition. The inherently competitive nature of society and its implications for failure can also magnify the condition with negative consequences.
But when viewed through the muscular rationality of a scientific, academic. or technological mind, ordinary people’s reactions, and fears can often be seen as misrepresentative or misguided at best and, at worse, conspiratorial, and ‘hysterical’. — evidence of an emotional, irrational reaction wholly disproportionate to what the scientist or academic sees as a wholly benign subject or idea.
The psychological impact and influence of the average person’s fear of failure would be powerful and irrepressible if just taken by itself. But mind and body are both working against us in this instance.
In Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art cites it thus:
“Fear of rejection isn’t just psychological; it’s biological. It’s in our cells. Resistance knows this and uses it against us. It uses fear of rejection to paralyze us and prevent us, if not from doing our work, then from exposing it to public evaluation”
When science fails, people get scared — and there have been enough previous instances of it doing so, sometimes to a catastrophic degree, to warrant that fear. For example:
Thalidomide affected a generation of children in the 1960s- with an estimated 10,000 babies affected by the drug worldwide with around half of those dying within months of being born.
Fen-Pen — an anti-obesity treatment that utilized two anorectics marketed as Pondimin, by Wyeth, and merrily handed out to patients by overly keen physicians as an obesity-solve-all was ultimately shown to cause potentially fatal pulmonary hypertension and heart valve problems — in the process uncovering the sometimes questionable relationship between doctors, clinics and Big Pharma
And on a lighter, slightly more Hollywood, yet still fatal bent:
Massed swarms of genetically-altered Africanised Bees or ‘killer bees’ introduced into South America in the late 1950s moved up through the Americas killing an estimated 600 people while leaving a trail of dead livestock and devastation in their wake.
Equally, science has also often failed to communicate the potential benefits of some scientific breakthroughs in ways ordinary humans can engage with, process. and find meaningful value in. And in the vacuum, that miscommunication leaves, risks, and threats become magnified with increasingly negative impacts on ordinary people’s perceptions.
In an EMBO report on the Public backlash in the UK to Genetically Modified foods:
Risks are also seen as more serious if they are inequitably distributed, inescapable by taking personal precautions, if they arise from an unfamiliar or novel source or if they cause hidden and irreversible damage. Danger to small children, pregnant women or future generations also arouses particular dread, as does the possibility of certain forms of death, injury or illness. Risks are perceived to be more threatening if they damage identifiable rather than anonymous victims. Finally, public fears also increase if the issue seems to be poorly understood by science and is subject to contradictory statements from responsible sources. GM soya scored positively on many of these factors.
Just to underline the degree to which ‘meddling with ‘nature’ and the flip-flopping and reverses of science might confound and rattle ordinary people, in Elizabeth Kolbert’s investigative book, Under a White Sky, in which she explores multiple examples of gene-editing and their potential impacts on nature, one short passage stood out:
The ability to “re-write the very molecules of life” places us, it could be argued, under an obligation. Of course the argument against such interventions is also compelling. The history of biological interventions designed to correct for previous biological interventions reads like Dr Seuss’s The Cat In the Hat Comes Back, in which the Cat, after eating cake in the bathtub, is asked to clean up after himself:
Do you know how he did it?
WITH MOTHER’S WHITE DRESS!
Now the tub was all clean,
But her dress was a mess!
That an author whose flyleaf sports Barak Obama, Bill Gates, and Al Gore [individuals not unused to rarified and complex topics and moral ambiguities] seeks to use Seussian riddles and ‘nonsense’ in her book to best describe the contradictory and confusing nature of scientific intervention, what chance do those who live in a far less rarified and intellectually aspected atmosphere have of making sense of them?
The hesitancy and fertile distrust generated by this perception of science’s highly plastic moralities, logics, and intentions, further compounded by historic failures in its application and its communication, are to be found in everything from AntiVax activism, Climate Conspiracists, and A.i. doomsayers to the more immediately costly consequences of canceled clinical trials due to an inability to recruit enough participants to meet the test sample requirement.
This is therefore not just some big, philosophical, cultural, and societal impasse that needs to be reframed. It has an immediate and direct impact on how science sustains its ability to deliver the potential of some extraordinary breakthroughs in everything from human to non-human bio-solutions.
Until something can be done to short-circuit ordinary citizens’ creature fear of the mostly unseen deep sciences and the failures they feed on to deliver meaningful innovation and breakthroughs — until they see that ‘failure culture’ as a positive attribute to be embraced and not as a negative outcome to be rejected — we will struggle to find the commons in which real discourse and reciprocal collaboration between scientist and citizen can flourish.
So perhaps, instead of just doing things to move the people towards the science, we need to move the science towards the people — towards the masses who are understandably wary of those things they do not understand and often see as potential sources of calamitous failure.
How might we do that? What sort of potential solutions might unlock a better discourse? In answering this it really does seem that we need to remind ourselves about that chasm we spoke of earlier.
Keeping things on a people-powered human trajectory, we might start perhaps by humanising the more arcane cohorts of scientists, academics, and technologists.
We might do this by presenting their personal flaws and fallibilities in easily sharable and consumable bite-sized pieces of entertainment. We could present their #epicfails and #massivefails in human terms, not scientific ones. In doing this we will show that they are flawed and fallible in ordinary everyday ways. In doing that we might make it possible for ordinary people to reconsider more positively their protestations of the other kinds of failures they encounter and embrace [the scientific ones] as being equally good and a positive thing for humanity — and not just a brush off.
So, here’s to the media platform in my head that might do just that. It’s a glorious thing — packed with some of the greatest scientific minds of our time and any other for that matter, engaged in prat-falls, skateboard smashes, rope-swing bloopers, kung-fu-kicked light fittings, table collapses, bad bike jumps, wedding dancing carnage and anything else that might get the £250 pay-out from You’ve Been Framed.
Imagine:
Jennifer Doudna doing the ‘one-foot-on-the-boat-the-other-on-the-jetty’ splits and water dunk? I’d share that.
Marie Curie’s TikTok dance ending head-first in the TV set? Come on!
Too Youyou riding roller skates with a home-made rocket-pack on her back? Straight to Insta.
Galileo front-wheeling his BMX into the ground along with his face!? Yes please.
Stephen Hawking coming off the wrong end of the Red Bull trick ramp? All day long.
Ridiculous? ‘Never going to happen?’ I sense that you are right. But until we find a way of resolving the impasse, I think it’s OK to dream.
About the Author
Julian Borra is a creative writer working in the commercial communications industry, with a particular passion for using creativity to make complex things simple, most particularly in the sustainability, tech, and science spaces. Long term projects include shaping a more inclusive and aspirational sustainability conversation, most particularly through his work with Peggy Liu on her China Dream project, as well as his continuing works as the Lead Creative Strategist on Socialising the Genome, a Wellcome Connecting Science & Genomics England Initiative, now entering its next major phase of works centred on Engaging the Disengaged to create a fairer, more inclusive healthcare future.
Julian also writes the odd book, having co-authored Liferider, a NYT Bestseller, with Laird Hamilton, legendary big-wave surfer, and waterman amongst other things.
To find out more about Julian and his work connect with him out on LinkedIn or go to thinairfactory.com.
