Trayvon Martin and Outrageously Bad Decisions

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve heard about Trayvon Martin, and his death at the hands of George Zimmerman, a Florida “community watch captain.” Trayvon Martin’s tragic death has prompted a national debate about racism in 21^st century America, “Stand Your Ground Laws” and the expansion of gun rights, and how biased the LIEberal Media is (Warning: Link to Fox News, go down the rabbit hole at your own risk). In all the heat about hot-button issues and the he-said-she-said arguments about the exact circumstances of events surrounding the shooting, we’ve lost sight of two important issues.

George Zimmerman shooting and killing Trayvon Martin was a human tragedy, but what transforms it from a tragedy to an outrage is that George Zimmerman walked out of police custody without being charged with any sort of crime on the recognizance of a very small group of police officials. We like to believe that the justice system is about finding the truth; that the law looks like 12 Angry Men. But the truth does not exist out in the world, to found and collected like a pebble. In law, as in science, the truth is constructed: A single version of reality emerges from the rhetorical contestation between opposing parties.

We accept how the legal system constructs the truths of innocence or guilt because it combines the technocratic expertise of lawyers, prosecutors, and judges, with the democratic deliberation of a jury of our peers. By and large, we believe that the system works, and in cases where it does not work, we can point to the transparent functioning of the system, and critique how the case diverged from our desire for justice.

In the Trayvon Martin case, justice was constructed by the Sanford Police Department, interpreted according to a relatively new law passed by a vocal and powerful political minority of gun right’s advocates, rather than the broader Common Law understanding of murder and culpability. That a man can walk away from a shooting death, without any sort of judicial inquiry, purely on the recognizance of the police, is outrageous.

The second fact which has been lost is that the reason Trayvon Martin was walking down that street at that time was that he had been suspended from school for 10 days for “possession of a pipe and a baggie which may have contained marijuana.” Some conservative pundits have been using this as evidence that Trayvon Martin was a thug and Zimmerman was right to shoot him, but really: A 17 year-old smoking marijuana? Oh My God! The Horror, the Horror! Call the DEA and Interpol, there’s a dangerous criminal on the loose!

No. What’s outrageous is that we believe that kicking a kid out of school is a reasonable form of discipline. Discipline is supposed to be an act of ‘strict training’, according to Foucault’s reading of 18^th century education structures. Suspension teaches a student that misbehavior results in more free time, and upon return to the classroom, a greater degree of confusion. Perhaps the rationale behind suspension is that it is supposed to provide time to reflect on one’s errors, in the manner of the penitentiary (literally a place to be penitent), but this implies an unrealistically optimistic appraisal of teenager’s ability to reflect. The only way in which suspension might be effective is in removing a disruptive student from the population so that others can be educated. But even if that is true, the way that suspension is applied is piecemeal and ineffective.

It’s a undeniable statistical fact that being young, black, and male in America is a very bad idea. Black men are massively over-represented in suspensions, prisons, and ultimately the morgue. A slippery slope leads from a youthful disciplinary violation to lower grades, reduced economic opportunities, and higher crime. Even if Jim Crow is dead and buried, we still absurdly punish people for their skin color rather than their choices. This is morally wrong, and this is a persistent human tragedy, and it is one that we as Americans have accepted and ignored and for far too long. There are no simple solutions here, no easy path to justice.

The death of Trayvon Martin is not the result of a broad cultural problem about which we can wash our hands and say ‘it’s just too big to fix, so sorry.’ Rather, Trayvon Martin is dead and we are angry because of the decisions of smalls group of bureaucrats who have made policy in a way that is easy for them to administer but socially injurious. This is a rightful target for our outrage: the persistent corruption that allows schools to slowly fail ‘problem’ students without consequences, and a police force that protects and serves the interests of the powerful rather than the weak.

Primer Part 2

As promised, part two of my technology in education post. Thanks to John and Cameron for their comments. In this article I’m going to develop the three core life skills that a person has to develop to become a good citizen capable of living a fulfilling life: self-discipline, cooperation, and reflective evaluation, and explain how educational technology can be used to develop them.

Self-discipline is simply the ability to do something which is not much fun in the short term, yet which you know to be good in the long term. It is a key-component of long-term planning and law-abiding behavior. Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow study demonstrated a strong correlation between the ability to delay gratification at the age of four and future academic success and good life outcomes. David Brook’s recent column The Relationship School had an interesting vignette about discipline at the New American Academy: “Even though students move from one open area to the next, they line up single file, walk through an imaginary doorway, and greet the teacher before entering her domain.” The goal here is clearly to get students to treat normative barriers in the same way that they’d treat architectural barriers. While different people have different levels of self-control and discipline, it is clear that these are skills that can be learned. Indeed, character-building is the central premise of the KIPP schools.

Cooperation is the ability to work well with others. Human beings are intrinsically social, most tasks these days take place in a group, and even a ‘lone genius’ acts as part of a tradition of human effort. An MIT study on collective intelligence found that the skill of a group didn’t depend on the abilities of its individual members, but rather on the “the willingness of the group to let all its members take turns and apply their skills to a given challenge,” a quality the researchers deemed social sensitivity (which, as an aside, women have a substantial edge in). In preschool and kindergarten, teachers focus on social tasks like sharing toys, but education soon becomes very structured and individualized. Aside from team sports and group projects, we leave learning how to cooperate to ‘free time’ like lunch and recess, and leave teachers out of it. And then we wonder why kids are horrible to one another.

Finally, reflective evaluation is the ability to look at yourself, look at the world around you, and figure out what it is that you want to do with your life. It is the ability to appreciate aesthetics, to create, to explore, to seek clarity, to behave morally, to be driven by something other than shallow urges towards pleasure and away from pain. This is the fuzziest notion of the three that I have advanced, but it is connected with the Maslow’s idea of self-actualization, or Foucault’s goal of “becoming yourself”. Basically, we are happiest when we are doing something that we love and something that we are good at. The trick is figuring out what it is that you actually want.

So how can technology make enable these goals? The key features of the educational technology that I envision are a touchscreen tablet that can easily accept being linked to keyboards, mice, and things like microscopes and sensors for special assignments, a front-mounted camera that can identify the user, a microphone with voice recognition, GPS for locational data, and a system that monitors user activity. Expect it to be loaded with apps that are directly educational, like classic books, history lessons, and math and science worksheets, along with creative apps for art and music and programming, and the usual social networking and games.

Today, the majority of teacher's energy is spent making lesson plans, delivering lectures, and grading assignments. These core educational tasks are about transmitting information and checking that it is received. As they are currently performed, involve a massive duplication of effort, a waste of trained expert's time on menial tasks, and make it impossible to actually develop best practices.

Rather than the lecture, homework, and test model, a textbook app provides multimedia (text + video + extra clarifications) tutorials on the subject, followed by a series of practice problems. Rather than having to demonstrate lessons and maintain order in the classroom, the teacher has time to work with students individually, along with a wealth of data about exactly what in the lesson their students don’t understand. The class doesn’t have to run at the pace of the slowest student, each student can work through the lesson at their own pace and style: alone, in a group, outdoors, or late at night.

Completing a lesson gives you ‘credit’ that you can use to unlock the next lesson, games, and in some cases a useful tool. For example reading a book and writing about it lets you check out more ebooks from the school’s library, or audition for the play. Mastering addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division gives you a four function calculator. Trig and algebra give you a graphing calculator, and completing calculus gives you something like Wolfram Alpha. Completing a unit in science might allow you to sign up for a field-trip or experiment. Participating in a gallery show might upgrade your available art apps from Paint to Photoshop to Maya. Rewarding people for doing good work by giving them more of the same keys both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.

Finally, I do believe that testing is important, but as it stands, we spend too much time testing students, and students spend too much time worrying about tests. Why not the student review the material as much as they want, and then when they’re ready, they go to a “Quiet Room” where talking is discouraged, put their tablets in test mode, and complete a worksheet just like the ones they’ve practiced with by their selves. In test mode, communication applications are locked down and the face-recognition camera makes sure that the right person is using it. If the student didn’t bother to prepare or scored poorly compared to their previous work, their teacher is automatically alerted.

Entire curriculums can be built out of a series of lessons of increasing complexity. Students and teachers can work together to develop an individualized lesson plan that meets state mandated minimum requirements for a certain number of hours of math and English and what have you, as well as a time-line of how the student should be progressing. A student that is behind on their lessons can be instantly located and given extra support. The goal is a total assessment environment that is both accurate and effortless, rather than the artificial hoops of the current system.

This model is based on the most addictive video games, which combine token economies with collecting activities and increasing difficulty. Make the lessons just hard enough to induce ‘flow’, and students will spend hours in the zone as they burrow through math lessons, scientific theories, and novels and histories. Because “textbooks” are all electronic and monitor how they are used, publishers can continually modify lessons at no cost to clarify issues that lots of students find confusing. And teachers have more time to work with students one-on-one or in small groups.

The conventional wisdom is that electronics, and particularly the internet, are making us perennially distracted and unable to focus. Won’t putting more computers in school make this worse, and lead to the opposite of self-discipline? Well, the internet is only distracting because there’s no reward for not making it distracting. When your email pings, you check it because checking it is rewarding and there’s no reason not to. Imagine that a student is using an educational app and gets a text from a friend (we might as well surrender to the fact that kids are going to text and use social media in school, because that genie is not going back in the bottle). Rather than look at the message, the student chooses to finish his or her lesson and respond in 15 minutes. Their tablet gives them a little smiley face and a ‘good job on good decisions’ message. Only small changes are necessary to make technology useful for concentration rather than distraction.

Through little nudges like this, discipline is taught as an incremental process. Early apps are very structured, and as a student advances they are required to learn how to structure their own education. For example, a ‘learn-to-read’ book might highlight each word in turn and ask the student to follow along out-loud, using voice recognition to demonstrate proficiency. A book for 4^th graders might have multiple choice questions about the content at the end of every chapter. A book for middle-school students would ask for a series of short answers about specific elements of the book. And a book for high school students might not have any work attached until the end, where the student has to synthesize an essay about the major themes. At each level, the student is provided the tools to make a smooth transition to the next level.

And finally, we can encourage discipline by making providing a clear reward for success: Freedom! A straight-A student maintaining an ambitious course-load can be expected to have the tools to succeed on their own. A C student struggling with the concepts needs more support. So give the C student a lot of structure and a lot of supervision, and let them graduate to making their own decisions. With constant monitoring of activity, teachers can see instantly if a student is slacking off or excelling.

Teaching cooperation is hard, but my first premise is that since learning core skills will take less time and can be done in groups, students will inherently learn to work together. Students can learn to manage common resources like playground equipment, teaching them about sharing resources. Finally, virtual spaces offer a great way to learn the norms of collaboration. Minecraft has become a platform for monumental shared world building, including a recreation of The Lord of the Rings as a spiritual pilgrimage. Imagine using similar techniques to integrate students into a scientific and political study of local water quality issues, or an international sharing of cultures. And rather than just being seen by the teacher, student’s work could be presented to the entire class, and participating in constructive criticism part of an student’s job. Several of my colleagues have reflected that their students (ASU undergrads) write better for class blogs than they do on traditional papers because they know their audience and want to leave a good impression.

More formally, the MIT study linked above used electronic badges designed by the Media Lab to record the pattern of interactions in groups. Tablets with the right software could do the same, recording when everybody is talking. But this is overkill, and we need to encourage students to cooperate of their own free will with people nearby and over the net because it’s fun and useful.

On the final key skill, reflective evaluation is something that can’t be taught by a machine, a person has to find it on their own. But the process can be made easier by providing many different types of opportunities, and by continually probing with that most important question, “Why?” I hope that under this system, students will spend less time on basic skills, and more time doing in the real world working on interesting problems or pursing their passions in the creative arts. I hope that education can become more relaxed, rather than rushing from kindergarten to college without pausing to take stock. And I hope that it is a process that never ends: that even after passing their High School Certification Exam, people continue to access educational materials.

This model might be optimistic, but I don’t think it’s utopian. The technology is almost ready, requiring just a little more integration. The major problems are now political, with teacher's unions, national testing standards, and a belief in the intrinsic value of a high school diploma. The money for reform can be found: in 2008, according to Department of Education statistics, public schools spent an average of $10,441 per student for results which are at best average and are truly failing disadvantaged communities. We must do better. And the first step towards doing better is replacing 19^th century information technologies with 21^st century ones, and freeing our skilled and education professionals to do what they do best: inspire and mentor!

---

I’d also like to preemptively address two major concerns: surveillance and cyber-bullying.

Surveillance and privacy is a hard nut to crack. You should really see Bruce Sterling’s 2006 story “I Have Seen the Best Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Google” for a vision of a dystopia where “All our social relations have been reified with a clunky intensity. They're digitized! And the networking hardware and software that pervasively surround us are built and owned by evil, old, rich corporate people!” (because Chairman Bruce does it better than I can). But on the other hand, read your Foucault: schools are disciplinary environments that run on surveillance, and that can’t be stripped out of the educational system. If you want to educate the masses, you have to monitor and evaluate them.

But we can set up the surveillance humanely. Make only the highest level data available to end-users, like grades and time to completion. A full data review should be reserved for major correctional interventions. Anonymized usage statistics can be sent to publishers to improve software without major issues, as is already standard tech practice.

We’re operating in a world that ranges from fully public, like what Google knows about you, to semi-private (Facebook profiles), to absolutely secret (an encrypted file on a disk in a bank vault). Make an environment that supports varying degrees of privacy, and teach students how to use it from the beginning, from maintain a public profile, to a place for their friends, to a private site for their best friends, to their personal secrets, and then respect their privacy. Teenagers are finding themselves, and a desire for privacy is not a crime in and of itself. It should not be treated like one.

While the Cory Doctorow story Knights of the Rainbow Table is a bit of an exaggeration, in this age of Wikileaks and Anonymous, technological architectures cannot protect us. Only strong norms can.

As for cyber-bullying, it’s a real issue, but I see it more of an extension of normal bullying than as a wholly new phenomenon. Right now, cyberbullying can be hard to prosecute since schools (rightfully) don’t have jurisdiction over what happens outside their walls. But if platforms are substantially used for education, schools can intervene. While I am not an expert on bullying, my sense is that bullying is aggravated by the fact that we force children to spend their time packed together in small rooms with no exit. In a more tech enabled school, a bullied child could simply leave and find an environment that is more protective and conducive to learning. And on the internet, there’s a subculture for everybody, as Juggalos and Bronies so evidently prove.

A Primer on the Future of Education

In the Diamond Age, a novel full of astounding technologies, the clear star is the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. Sure, nanobots and cyborg implants and geological engineering and kitchen 3D printers and--well, you get the point--are cool, but the Primer--the talking, moving, intelligent and empathetic book that educates Nell--is at the heart of the novel. More than a McGuffin, the Primer links all the characters together, and plays a pivotal role in the explosive conclusion.

Primer technology is so awesome that it one of the moonshots for the SOOPER SEKRIT PROJEKT, which is why I’d like to take a closer look at it. I know two things for sure: 1) computing technology is getting better all the time, and 2) our model for education is broken.

Let’s start with the technology side. Cellphones have achieved basically universal penetration. A decently powerful computer is within the budget of the global middle class, and there are many people trying to make it more accessible all the time, from the One Laptop Per Child computer, to the $50 Indian Education Ministry sponsored Aakash Ubislate, or about $300 for an Acer or Asus netbook. These aren’t particularly great computers, but they’ll let you do access the internet, watch videos, create and edit documents, and learn to code. Not that there aren’t very real problems with getting electricity and bandwidth to the poorest billion, but there are also lots of very dedicated people and organizations pushing on the technology. It won’t be as slick and indestructible as the Primer, but the hardware is definitely getting there.

The second side is education. According to Bruce Mau, higher education is accessible to only 1% of the world’s population. Schools are underfunded and overcrowded pretty much everywhere outside of a small group of wealthy post-industrial countries, and then you get ridiculous soul-crushing South Korean study mills. If you believe that education is a pre-requisite to living a good life (and I do, by and large), then we have problems. Big problems.

I’m not alone in this assessment, and there is a tidal wave of innovation directed towards applying the power and scale of information technology to education. Khan Academy, MITx, and ShowMe are some of the bigger names, but probably the most innovative players are Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, the Stanford professors behind the 160,000 student open access graduate level course, CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. You should really just read the whole article about it at Wired Science, but I’m going to pull out the crunchy philosophical bits.

After seeing Khan at TED, Thrun dusted off a PowerPoint presentation he’d put together in 2007. Back then he had begun envisioning a YouTube for education, a for-profit startup that would allow students to discover and take courses from top professors. In a few slides, he’d spelled out the nine essential components of a university education: admissions, lectures, peer interaction, professor interaction, problem-solving, assignments, exams, deadlines, and certification. While Thrun admired MIT’s OpenCourseWare—the university’s decade-old initiative to publish online all of its lectures, syllabi, and homework from 2,100 courses—he thought it relied too heavily on videos of actual classroom lectures. That was tapping just one-ninth of the equation, with a bit of course material thrown in as a bonus.

Thrun knew firsthand what it was like to crave superior instruction. When he was a master’s-degree student at the University of Bonn in Germany in the late 1980s, he found his AI professors to be clueless. He spent a lot of time filling in the gaps at the library, but he longed for a more direct connection to experts. Thrun created his PowerPoint presentation because he understood that university education was a system in need of disruption. But it wasn’t until he heard Khan’s talk that he appreciated he could do something about it. He spoke with Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research and his CS221 coprofessor, and they agreed to open up their next class to the entire world. Yes, it was an educational experiment, but Thrun realized that it could also be the first step in turning that old PowerPoint into an actual business…

He’s envisioning his own digital university, with a less conventional curriculum, one based on solving problems, not simply lectures on abstract topics. It would offer a viable alternative for students of the global one-world classroom—particularly those who lack the resources to move to the US and attend college.

Thrun decides that KnowLabs will build something called Udacity. The name, a mashup of audacity and university, is intended to convey the boldness of both Thrun’s and his students’ ambitions. His goal is for Udacity to offer free eight-week online courses. For the next six months or more, the curriculum will focus on computer science. Eventually it will expand into other quantitative disciplines including engineering, physics, and chemistry. The idea is to create a menu of high-quality courses that can be rerun and improved with minimal involvement from the original instructor. KnowLabs will work only with top professors who are willing to put in the effort to create dynamic, interactive videos. Just as Hollywood cinematography revolutionized the way we tell stories, Thrun sees a new grammar of instruction and learning starting to emerge as he and his team create the videos and other class materials. Behind every Udacity class will be a production team, not unlike a film crew. The professor will become an actor-producer. Which makes Thrun the studio head.

He’s thinking big now. He imagines that in 10 years, job applicants will tout their Udacity degrees. In 50 years, he says, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them. Thrun just has to plot the right course.

Yikes! If education is about transferring knowledge from teachers to students, i.e. information transmission via some sort of web app, then we know from observation how that process plays out. With Google, Amazon, Youtube, Facebook, and so on, one firm establishes technological superiority, gains a larger market share, and then just eats everybody else. Education is actually a fairly conservative business, (the oldest continually operating institutions on the planet go: the Catholic Church (~2000 years), Medieval Universities (~1000 years), and the a bunch of Johnny-come-lately corporations and governments), and it’s based a lot of prestige and momentum, but web apps are very cheap to develop and operate compared to a traditional university, and they are much more scalable. The only real barrier is credentialing, the process of giving somebody a piece of paper that says that they’re qualified to do something, and as soon as the education app developers figure out the politics of their credentialing system, the whole edifice of higher education is just going to blow away.

Universities are increasingly expensive, lousy at teaching useful skills, and produce a worthless credential. And all this is doubly true for American primary and secondary education. It won’t take much innovation to make something that is a lot cheaper, and has comparable or even better educational outcomes.

The stage is set for something like the Primer to actually come about. It won’t be slick and seamless like in the novel, but the continuously improving combination of hardware and software that we see in real gadgets can make an educational platform that is cheap, accessible, and able to a take a student from kindergarten to a bachelor’s degree. The technological problems are essentially solved.

But wait, education isn’t just about information transmission. Schools do more than teach facts and theories, they are factories of socialization. They produce citizens. What kind of people will tablet educated students grow up to be? There’s an echo of this in the Diamond Age, where the most impressive feat of the Primer is not that Nell knows kung fu, or computer programming, or nanoscale engineering, or even how to get along in NeoVictorian society, but that the Primer creates a Mouse Army of 100,000 Chinese orphans who are capable of acting as a perfectly coordinated network. We spend only a little time with the Mouse Army girls, but on reflection, they are a profoundly strange society.

Now, I’m not going to defend the kind of socialization that happens in the American school systems that I’m familiar with. I think it’s often dominated by the most pathological personalities, both students and teachers, and results in trauma rather than personal growth. Much of what made me who I am today happened far away from the classroom, and from the structured process of education ((And I had, objectively, one of the best educational trajectories possible, from pre-school to Oakwood to Caltech, Vassar, and ASU)). But socialization has to happen, in fact, students are going to be socialized in some way whether we want it or not.

The question that I therefore pose to you, my loyal readers, is what kind of citizens do we want our schools to produce? How can we best socialize students for the future? And how can new educational technologies and our legacy systems work together to maximize opportunity for all?

I have my own theories, which I’ll try and explain later in the week, but I want to hear from you guys first.

College, Jobs, and the Machine

Race Against the Machine, a recent report from two MIT professors, has gathered media attention by laying the blame for the Great Recession and weak recovery on advancing technology, particularly computers, which are replacing human beings. As the New York Times writes:

"Faster, cheaper computers and increasingly clever software, the authors say, are giving machines capabilities that were once thought to be distinctively human, like understanding speech, translating from one language to another and recognizing patterns. So automation is rapidly moving beyond factories to jobs in call centers, marketing and sales — parts of the services sector, which provides most jobs in the economy.

During the last recession, the authors write, one in 12 people in sales lost their jobs, for example. And the downturn prompted many businesses to look harder at substituting technology for people, if possible. Since the end of the recession in June 2009, they note, corporate spending on equipment and software has increased by 26 percent, while payrolls have been flat."

Digital technologies enables a "super-star" effect, concentrating wealth in the hands of the very best. Thanks to computers, "the best" can be replicated and sold, leading to highly concentrated markets like those for pop stars, major league athletes, or CEO salaries. This argument is more subtle and more powerful than the idea of ever more capable machines replacing humans, a trend which has been with us since the 1800s. It appears that intrinsically, computers might be associated with the immense concentration of wealth we've witnessed over the past 20th century. While everybody is better off now, the top 1% is much better off. The top 0.1% is unimaginably more well off.

What hasn't garnered as much attention are the report's recommendations to resolve this problem, starting with education, entrepreneurship, and regulations. There's something here to irritate everybody: the end of tenure for teachers, removing the mortage tax credit, public healthcare not tied to employment. But the goal is simple, reduce barriers to innovation, allow people to lead flexible yet secure lives, and help people race with machines, not against them.

Education is the first tier of reform, because without an educated population capable of taking advantage of opportunities, everything else is moot. Yet education, and in particular, higher education, appears to be failing. We still teach people with an antiquated lecture style that wastes students' and professors' time, and doesn't impart skills. Recent college graduates feel betrayed by a job market that doesn't need their skills, as this NYMag article illuminates. STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) degrees are more valuable than ever, but aren't attracting sufficient students for a variety of reasons, including poor introductory courses, lower GPAs, and (apparently) tedious careers. Korea is requesting that fewer people go to college, a point which PayPal founder Peter Thiel has been making again and again, most recently in a debate in Chicago.

To quote Thiel opponent in the debate, Vivek Wadhwa:

"Your key issue was that education has become far too expensive — that, in the past, the cost may have been justified but is no longer. You compare this to the most recent housing market bubble, which was a leading contributor to the recession. Bienen didn’t agree. He argued that universities greatly subsidize education, offer significant discounts and subsidies for needy students, and provide far more value than what they charge. But I am willing to concede part of this point to you: We do need to improve the cost-effectiveness and productivity of education."

Wadhwa calls on Thiel to help revolutionize education, using the power of the interent to connect students to the best teachers and the best sources of knowledge. This is a worthy, necessary task is human beings are to prevail over the efficiency of ever better machines. With that, let me ask:

What kind of jobs will exist in the 21st century? What kind of skills are necessary for those jobs? How can people learn those skills? How can access to the opportunities of the future be spread as widely as possible?

Trust the Man in the White Lab Coat, He is Your Friend: or, Restoring Public Faith in Science

Science in the 20th century produced miracles. Physicists discovered the fundamental building blocks of the universe, chemists invented almost every modern object with plastics, biologists cracked the genetic code, and engineers literally flew to the moon. But at some point, the relationship between science and society went off the rails. Maybe it was a variety of food scares in the European Union, or perhaps the mandatory climate change denial for American conservatives. But whatever the cause, scientists lost the public trust. Those of us who account ourselves policy realists believe that accurate science is vital to proper policy formation. How then, can the public trust in science be restored?

In “See-Through-Science”, James Wilson and Rebecca Willis of Demos argue that public engagement with science has to move upstream. Rather than scientific knowledge flowing from the technical elite to an accepting public, scientists and ordinary people should be talking about the values, visions, and vested interests of emerging fields of research as early as possible. The goal is to create better, more socially robust, science that doesn’t clash with public values at a later date, such as occurred with embryonic stem cell research. The idea is to re-engage people with the scientific ideas that will drive the future.

“Taking European Knowledge Society Serious” is a similar effort by a star-studded EU academic panel to diagnose how European science can be both socially responsive and a driver of innovation in the 21st century. Their recommendations are far reaching, but center around the idea that ‘risk assessment’ has to incorporate broader values, and that political elites should be careful that they don’t predetermine the framings of scientific controversy.

Personally, I’m doubtful of the ability of citizens’ juries, value mapping, or the other kinds of participatory efforts to positively alter the course of science, or the relationship between science and society. The day to day activities of science are fairly dull for those who are not already invested in them. Public participation would pick from the same select pool as criminal juries; the retired, the unemployed, and the flakey, and the effects of participation would not extend beyond their immediate social network. Science is driven by foremost, the immutable facts of nature, and their discovery and use. Secondly, it is driven by priority of novel results and the internal advancement of scientists within the community, and finally, it is driven by money, and the decisions by which grant panels, venture capitalists, and corporate executive allocate money. According to liberal political and economic theory, democracy and the free market already serve as adequate proxies for ‘public participation’ in deciding the direction of research.

But the weaknesses in these European STS policy pieces go deeper than an inability to alter the course of research. Rather, they don’t even attempt to figure out why the public distrusts science. This is a core issue, because without diagnosing the disease, there can be no purposeful attempt at a cure. And finding a cure is important, because the opposite of science is not apathy, but rather a particularly subversive and dangerous form of magical thinking.

People distrust science because science is inherently fallible. Every reversion of a theory, every recall of a new drug or product, every breakdown in a complex socio-technical system demonstrates that science is weaker than the magic thinking associated with religion, dark green ecocentrism, climate change denial, and neo-classical economics. The incomplete, esoteric, and contradictory nature of these beliefs systems is in fact their strength, since any failure in their magic can be explained away. Science, without these ambiguities, must suffer until a paradigm shift.

A second aspect is the persistent disintegration of trust in our society. During the Cold War, political leaders (in alliance with scientists) were able to use the threat on immanent nuclear annihilation to create obedience. It is no surprise that the decline in the credibility of science happened at the same time as defense intellectuals were rendered irrelevant by the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. People began to look for new theories that matched their own personal beliefs, that weren’t as hard to understand and didn’t change as rapidly as science. A few canny politicos realized that by destroying civic trust and the belief in an empirical, historical past, they could craft the past anew each election cycle, avoiding all responsibility for their mistakes. And so far, we’ve been rich enough and robust enough not to suffer any existential disasters from thinking magically, despite the purposeless wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan, the flooding of New Orleans, the financial collapse, the BP oil spill, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, etc etc.

The problem with directly attacking false beliefs and magical thinking is this tends to alienate the audience you are trying to court, and may even entrench their status as an oppressed minority. However, changing minds is very, very hard, and the first priority must be stopping the spread of the infection. We can’t censor, but we can ridicule, and demand to see the credentials of these peddlers of false beliefs. The ideals of equality and neutrality espoused by the mainstream media are fictions which have stopped being strictly useful. Bullshit must be publically exposed as such. Perhaps we need a new journalism award, the Golden Shovel, for the best demolition of bullshit and lies.

At the same time, we need to recast public education towards a realistic understanding of the limits of science, technology, and state power. People have impossible expectations for science, they demand that it solve ill-formed problems, such as those dealing with the regulation of potentially toxic chemicals, in the absence of useful models. Or they want their drugs safe, effective, and now. Or they believe the Federal government has the power to plug a hole thousands of feet beneath the sea. At the same times as people learn about the limits of science, they should also be taught about the line between falsifiable science, and unfalsifiable magical thinking. Of course, this will not be easy, especially at a high school level. I am barely coming to grips with these issues, and I’ve spent several years studying them. But more important than any factual knowledge, is the ability to reason, to think critically, and to distinguish valid arguments from invalid one. Until every member of the public can articulate their values, and the supporting evidence for them, efforts to input public values into science will be useless at best.