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English notes, Metaphors in Science Communication, Story telling and…
English notes
Metaphors in Science Communication
Metaphors can be harmful
Can influence risk, urgency perceptions and legitimacy or support for a preexisting ideas or beliefs
Are not really precise and don't give you the full understanding
Metaphorical explanations can become outdated when we get a better picture or understanding of concepts
Can have underlying ideologies that someone might not agree with
Some groups might even find depending on the metaphor, to be offensive or alieanting
underrepresented groups might find science subjects using certain metaphors to describe themselves to be less a
metaphors can be useful
Easier for non-experts to process
Help us to make concrete connections to hard to understand subjects
This essentially helps bridge gaps from understanding one concept to the other provided the concepts are similar in some way
Lakoff and Johnson theorize that our mind runs on metaphors
This helps especially if what we are trying to explain is something that would be for our mind to scale, such as galaxies or atoms, so we can bring them to a scale that we can understand
Terms I dont know
Heuristic: going to a solution with a trial and error method
What is a metaphor
Using a word outside of it's normal use
Example of metaphors
time is money
genetic blueprint
Revised to genetic recipe, since recipes also depend on the environment where they are orchestrated
militaristic or technology driven metaphors in biology
Being High jacked by a virus
Story telling and science
Stories
Mass media and stories
Most people nowadays get info from mass media, which use stories because of how common and frequent and easy it is to access
The mass media often chooses the reality that would attract common audiences
An important trait of mass media that makes it similar to Story telling is personalization
This means that the media often brings down things to a personnal individual scale to better engage their audience, and gaining a sense of empathy from their listener
This is why Health and Biology are most covered in mass media, contrasting with "colder" non human science topics
Another important trait is that a lot more people consume entertainment media, which focuses on profit, not a realistic representation of the world
This affects science as well
Writers often use science to make their narratives realistic, but often in mass media, they focus more on what is possible instead of what is likely to happen, which is imo kinda misleading
What are stories?
Communcation that follows a character or set of characters through time, where cause and effects affect these characters in sime way
They are not statistical, argumentative neither do they draw conclusions from evidence
How are they different from Logical/Scientific communications?
stories are often less applicable in a broad way
To get general truths from a story, you have to imagine what could've led to the specific case in the story
They rely more on context and have lower standards for being legitimate
The legitimacy of a story is judged on how realistic the situation presented in the story is, rather than the accuracy of its claims
Stories are easier to process
Often read twice as fast
Even when stories are complex, psychologically they are easier to process
Science can benefit from the inherent ease of understanding that stories have
This has been tested with factors of narrative including dramatization, emotionalization , personalization and fictionalization
catppuccin
Healthcare especially
Unknown terms
Colloquial
Used in regular or familiar conversations
denigrated
Criticize unfairly
Triumvirate
Rule of three people or in this context three concepts
Paradigmatic
The more scientific, general way of thinking to get to a conclusion
Emperical
based on observation
Ubiquity
Being common or appearing like being everywhere
Moot
Irrelevant
Ethics of story telling in science
narratives are harder to counter argue agaisnt because of the emotional elements of a story and the concealment of the factual assumptions that the story makes
Narratives don't have to prove their claims, the story itself, which is "real" is the proof of whatever it is saying
Even fictional stories are assumed to have some truth in them, and therefore individuals will use certain parts of fiction to answer questions about the world
should Story telling be used to persuade of make science known?
The answer to this is usually to make known, in order for individuals to make their own choices
However, when the societal benefits are shown to be big enough, such as preserving life, persuasion is accepted
Do naratives need to be perfectly accurate?
The elements of the world surrounding the fictional world should be accurate but we can relax on some of the techical details
Eg.: converting grain to ethanol
may personify yeast as a picky character that refuses to eat its lunch
of sugar until it is comfortable at the right temperature
Should narratives be used at all? Real scientists don't use them when communicating.
It would be unethical to withold a powerfull tool for nonexperts on the ground that experts don't do that, as not every non experts aims to become an expert
Open concerns for future studies
Will stories used in Science communication degrade or enhance public trust of scientists
With newer media environment like facebook tiktok and YT shorts, will science informational story telling have to compete for attention to be effective? some studies suggest yes.
How will narrative help with the studies of science at scales larger or smaller than human cognition can take