Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Sources – Behind the Lies
- What we mean by lying is the concept of “lies to children”. The idea that on the path to explaining something complicated you start off with a little lie, a useful oversimplification, that makes it easier to grasp a concept.
The concept of “lies to children” was coined by the scientist Jack Cohen and the mathematician Ian Stewart. It describes a simplified explanation of a very complex concept that can be used as a stepping stone for teaching ideas to children or non-experts. The concept became popular through Cohens and Stewars collaboration with the fantasy author Terry Pratchett for a series of books, starting “The Science of Discworld” from 1999.
#T. Pratchett, I. Stewart, J. Cohen: The Science of Discworld. Ebury Press, revised edition, p. 43, 2013
Quote: “A lie-to-children is a statement that is false, but which nevertheless leads the child’s mind towards a more accurate explanation, one that the child will only be able to appreciate if it has been primed with the lie”.
- Our brains are comically ill prepared to navigate the fast moving world we happen to live in today – a world ironically created by science. A few hundred years ago it was possible to be knowledgeable at an expert level in pretty much every field of study.
Neuroscientist Dr. Adam Gazzaley and psychologist Dr. Larry Rosen show how our “ancient” brain, the brain of an “information-seeking creature” as they say, is dealing, struggling and coping with the flood of information and distraction in nowadays information age.
#A. Gazzaley & L.D. Rosen: The Distracted Mind - Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. MIT Press, 2016
Quote: “In Part I, we will take you on a tour through new insights into why our “interference dilemma” exists in the first place and why it has become so relevant to us now. We describe how the very essence of what has evolved furthest in our brains to make us human - our ability to set high-level goals for ourselves - collides headfirst with our brain’s fundamental limitations in cognitive control: attention, working memory, and goal management. This collision results in our extreme sensitivity to goal interference from both distractions by irrelevant information and interruptions by attempted multitasking. (...) We further discuss why we engage in high-interference-inducing behaviors from an evolutionary perspective, such that we are merely action in an optimal manner to satisfy our innate drive as information-seeking creatures.”
- Quarks are often depicted as blue, red and green, with different spins. But just saying spin and using colors forces our brain to imagine colorful spinning balls. Which is great to visualize the different types and relationships between quarks, but also creates a very wrong image of reality in our heads.
Here you can find an example from the Brookhaven National Laboratory for using a quark model for an educational purpose. They use the green, red and blue quarks with their spins (in a grey proton) to visualize their research on a theoretical physics puzzle, called “The Proton Spin Puzzle”.
#McNulty Walsh K.: Physicists Narrow Search for Solution to Proton Spin Puzzle.Brookhaven National Laboratory. 2014
https://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=25112
Quote: “How the spins of the building blocks of matter add up: Measurements from RHIC's STAR and PHENIX experiments reveal that gluons (yellow corkscrews) contribute about as much as quarks (red, green, and blue) to the overall spin of a proton. But there is still a mystery to explain what accounts for the rest of the "missing" spin.”
- Molecules are nothing like the neat diagrams that we're taught in school but buzzing and vibrating entities held together by something we call “charge” that describes that certain things want to be close or escape each other for some unknown reason. We are describing phenomena that we are pretty sure exist in some form or another because the math works out and we can do real world experiments and predict their results before we do them. In reality these are models, tricks to summarize what we know and make up a coherent story and prepare the ground for more in depth explanations. Don’t confuse the description of a thing for the thing itself.
For an in-depth discussion on models like an epistemological view or the semantics of models, take a look at this source:
#Frigg R. & Hartmann S.: "Models in Science", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/models-science/#EpisCognFuncMode
Quote: “One of the main reasons why models play such an important role in science is that they perform a number of cognitive functions. For example, models are vehicles for learning about the world. Significant parts of scientific investigation are carried out on models rather than on reality itself because by studying a model we can discover features of, and ascertain facts about, the system the model stands for: models allow for “surrogative reasoning” (Swoyer 1991).”
- For example chemists who use “wrong” electron shell models to work out chemical bonds or scientists using simplified models as the basis for discussion with colleagues across different scientific fields.
Even when discussing with colleagues from the same field, you have to use the same “language”. For example, the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry published a recommendation for drawing chemical structure diagrams.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1351/pac200880020277/html
Quote: “The purpose of a chemical structure diagram is to convey information— typically the identity of a molecule—to another human reader or as input to a computer program. Any form of communication, however, requires that all participants understand each other. Recommendations are provided for the display of two-dimensional chemical structure diagrams in ways that avoid ambiguity and are likely
to be understood correctly by all viewers.”
- Science is a process to work towards gaining knowledge and not an absolute truth generator. The answers it provides are multi-layered and nuanced and that complexity can get lost when it is simplified. Especially when it is done so for headlines. An interesting cancer study turns into a potential cure, a healthy food becomes the basis for a new diet.
For example, a study from 2019 in which the scientists took a look at a potential connection between hair dye / chemical straightener use and breast cancer risk, found out that those products “could play a role in breast carcinogenesis” and that “The association with permanent hair dye was particularly evident in black women (...)”.
While the scientist used a specific wording to qualify their findings (like “could” or “relevant”), there was coverage that has exaggerated the findings in using claims like “heavily” in the headline.
#Eberle C. E. et al.: Hair dye and chemical straightener use and breast cancer risk in a large US population of black and white women. Cancer Epidemiology 147 (2), 2019
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.32738
Quote: “The association with permanent hair dye was particularly evident in black women, for whom we observed a 45% higher breast cancer risk. Overall, these results support the hypothesis that hair dye and straightener use, which are highly prevalent exposures, could play a role in breast carcinogenesis.”
Quote: “Many hair products contain endocrine-disrupting compounds and carcinogens potentially relevant to breast cancer. Products used predominately by black women may contain more hormonally-active compounds.”
#Fast Company: A harrowing study of 46,000 women shows hair dyes are heavily associated with cancer, 2019
- Then there is the opposite effect: If a simplification is too engaging, if the story it tells is too good, it can distort the true complexity of a subject and give you a false sense of security and an illusion of deep knowledge. A gut feeling that you understand the science better than you actually do, which can lead people to ignore actual experts over their dangerous superficial knowledge and gut feeling.
And this can have negative consequences for all of us because in the worst case overconfidence in your own understanding of science can lead to bad decisions made with confidence. Just think of the surge of people that confidently disavow vaccines or climate change without truly understanding the subject matter.
You will find this topic in debates on the pros and cons of direct democracy. Some critics say that some things are just too complex to be judged by the general population which might lead to bad decisions.
#Direct Democracy - The International IDEA Handbook. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2008
https://www.eods.eu/library/IDEA.Direct-DemocracyEN.pdf
Quote: “Direct democracy demands from citizens a relatively high level of knowledge of issues that are sometimes complex. Concerns are often expressed that voters may not always have the capacity or information to make well-informed decisions about the issue at stake, and instead could make ill-considered decisions based on partial knowledge of an issue or the emotion of a campaign, or on the basis or unrelated factors such as feelings about a particular political party or personalities.”
- Well, it has been a journey, especially the research. When we started we just read articles, then moved on to books, peer reviewed papers, then to conversations with experts. We began to collect our sources. With every step we only realised that we were still not doing enough. Nowadays we try to read as many primary sources as possible, talk to multiple experts and document our simplifications and give further reading in our sources doc. But this doesn’t make our process flawless.
For more insight into our work, take a look behind the scenes at this video:
#Can you Trust Kurzgesagt, Kurzgesagt, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtUAAXe_0VI
- How do you deal with the reality that many scientific results have huge error bars or “maybes” attached to them?
How Kurzgesagt deals with error bars and “maybes”, you will learn in the last minutes of this video:
#The Largest Black Hole in the Universe - Size Comparison. Kurzgesagt, 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FH9cgRhQ-k
- For example we are partaking in the TRESCA project about science communication to learn more.
“TRESCA” stands for “Trustworthy, Reliable and Engaging Scientific Communication Approaches, is coordinated by the Erasmus University Rotterdam and received fundings by the EU. As they say, they “dive into the question: what drives public trust?”
The aim is to develop trust in science and fight the raising suspicion of credibility and reliability of information in general and scientific information in particular.
#TRESCA. About the TRESCA project.
https://trescaproject.eu/about/
Quote: “Post-truth, fake news and misinformation are internet-age phenomena that raise suspicion of the credibility and reliability of (scientific) information. While news media have been suffering from a decline of trust in general, the negative consequences for scientific communication are particularly severe, because these can be abused to promote propaganda and conspiracies. In Europe, the media is one of the least trusted democratic institutions (Edelman Trust Barometer, 2018). At the same time, the media is also the most important or common communication channel translating and disseminating scientific information from researchers to the general public.”
Quote: “The TRESCA project aims to develop trust in science through the innovation of communication practices of scientific researchers, journalists and policy makers. By drawing on the expertise of scholars and practitioners from multidisciplinary backgrounds, TRESCA dives into the question: what drives public trust?”