Communicating Science Past Vertical Lines
I don’t do that anymore – mostly – arguing with friends of friends on social media about political issues. I used to not shy back from such arguments before I realized that it’s unlikely to change the minds of the reason resistant, and that I am simply wasting my time.
Some of these discussions were still teaching me valuable lessons, almost never due to the ranting people mistook for arguments, but I learned some things about the basics of communicating science. A lot of political arguments revolve around the interpretation of data – such as data about mortalities due to an epidemic or due to gun violence. When folks are not very scientifically educated, they often make curious mistakes when interpreting data. There are lessons to be learned from these mistakes.
On one occasion I was arguing with an American guy – from a gun loving country – about the effect restrictions on gun ownership have. For this question, there is a large scale experiment which had happened in Australia, when after a horrible massacre private gun ownership was severely restricted, and gun-related deaths decreased.
To prove that point, I showed the dude I was discussing with this plot:
Image from The Guardian.
In 1996 the Australian parliament decided on the tighter laws, and gun deaths dropped.
His response – and I am almost 100% certain he was not pulling my leg:
“But there is a sharp increase just in 1996! The law did exactly the opposite as intended”. I tried to tell him that there was no such increase. There was a back and forth, and he urged me to look at the graph again – eventually it dawned me: he had mistaken the vertical line indicating the change in laws for a part of the data!
I don’t even want to discuss gun ownership here – the topic of misunderstanding just serves as an example. I also don’t want to pick on the guy, whose name I forgot, several years after our discussion. Still, his misunderstanding stuck with me – how can you get such a basic feature about a simple plot so wrong? This was not a scientific paper, but a newspaper article, meant for a general audience. Still, to someone without any training in comprehending quantitative data the meaning of the vertical line was too much to process.
In turn, the questions I am asking myself is:
– How can I recognize vertical-line-like cases of misunderstanding data in my audience? This problem is trivial when talking to peers or students in my field, people who share at least parts of my educational background. Barely any such crass misunderstandings ever happen. The more I move away from biology, and the more I move into science communication directed at a general audience, the more of a danger of vertical line misinterpretation there is. Also, the less I am facing a sympathetic audience (people who want to learn from me) and the more I am facing people who want to challenge my position, the more I assume such misunderstandings will happen. These folks will be more keen on finding a way to argue against my point than to comprehend it.
– Are there higher level vertical lines which I myself am falling victim to? Are there notations in mathematics which I chronically misunderstand? How do I identify these? How do I ask more knowledgeable peers questions which could resolve such crass misunderstandings? Such a dialogue seems to me an aspect of teaching which needs face-to-face time. I can learn programming techniques from YouTube, but the aforementioned vertical-line-misunderstander would never have his mistake corrected by watching a video.
