Popularizing science once seemed like a wonderful idea. Knowledge that would otherwise be privilege of a handful few, would become a collective asset, enriching our intellect, and giving the people new ways of understanding the world.
Yet the attempt to actually popularizing science has failed. Instead of enlightening the people, popular science has just given us a misinformed audience with high confidence, not to mention the numerous science bros that defend misogyny and racism with "scientific" arguments.
A major reason is that we are constantly bombarded with information we barely have time to process, let alone getting a deeper understanding of. Hence, popularizing science is mainly about giving articles (often misleading) titles and pics that will attract the most clicks, while the content is either too short to be accurate, or too long to be actually read by most viewers.
Another reason is that most people don't like science; they just like "cool" images. Hence, a popular biologist's post about genetic influences on IQ can just have an image of the double helix and attract readers, whereas a sociologist's post about the Flynn effect or the statistics indicating that having elder siblings can negatively affect your IQ, are barely noticed. There are simply no "cool" images for such posts.
But the main reason is, or could be, that some information can only be really understood by experts, and often not even by them.
It may sound elitistic, but it is not. You can't really grasp General Relativity without a hard background in Differential Geometry. This is by itself not a big deal, since the gist of General Relativity can be somewhat understood when conveyed by non-mathematical means, without in the least influencing how you perceive your everyday life. This doesn't seem to hold for popular biology, neuroscience, sociology, and economics (if we accept it as a science too).
Perhaps the most eye-gauging example of how popular science has failed, and has actually led to fundamental misunderstandings, is how much are biological/neuroscientific explanations over-abused the last decades. Biological explanations are used even for the time we spent on our screens (!), even though no screens existed in our evolutionary history.
It is genuinely sad to see even respected professionals like the Swedish psychiatrist Anders Hansen, explain our addiction to smartphones in terms of dopamine in the brain and how our ancestors were excited in the savannah, when one can just make the observation that we use smartphones because everyone else does and we are expected to be available, or because urban environments are dull and smartphones are often more interesting than one's surroundings. Why would we have to invoke neuroscientific and evolutionary explanations for smartphone addiction?
If even experts are distracted and misunderstand things, one can only begin to imagine what happens with non experts. Pop science barely has changed anyone's views, and only makes them more bold in believing that their opinion is "backed by research".
It could be that all this bombardment with light pop science causes more distraction and misinformation than enlightening. Perhaps we need fewer online articles and youtube videos (i.e. less pop science), and more in-depth books and documentaries, while finally accepting that some knowledge is for experts only, and could be misunderstood even by them.
A more enlightened populace will most likely not come with more popular science, but with more reading in general, as well as humbleness. The humbleness to admit that your understanding of something you heard or read may be crude, or wrong.
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