My favourite science communicators - III

This amazing science communicator from Sweden had a deep Bengaluru connection!

From Hans Christian Anderson's stories in my childhood, Hans Krebs's Cycle in biochemistry class, and Hans Zimmer's soundtracks in college years, the Hans I knew were from different nationalities and contributed to varied fields. Another distinguished Hans to join my personal list is Professor Hans Rosling.

He was not exactly communicating science, which one normally associates with what science communicators do. He was a physician, academic, and public speaker. He was a professor of international health at Karolinska Institute.

If Alan Alda (read my previous post) was all about science conversations, Rosling gave evidence-based perspectival storytelling like no other. His lectures on public health offer deep insights for new science communicators, teachers, and parents. On the TED Talks platform, what Sir Ken Robinson was for education, Professor Hans takes that honour for statistics. Engaging, entertaining, and enchanting. No matter how concerning a set of data is, its power is hit hard only when it is made easy to understand and engaging to the public. He has made it appear simple talk after talk. The BBC's 4-minute clip The Joy of Stats or this TED talk The Global Population Growth, Box by Box is a masterclass on the powers of data visualization.

His website GapMinder has a simple mission statement.

To fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview everyone can understand.

How is it done?

1. ASK QUESTIONS. GapMinder asks thousands of fact questions to the public in many countries to see what people think the world looks like based on the news stories they see.
2. VERIFY DATA. It checks the data from the UN and other reliable sources to identify the most common misconceptions.
3. PRODUCE DATASETS. It produces unique datasets by combining numbers from multiple sources into long consistent time-series.
4. FILL THE GAPS. It fills in gaps whenever they believe they know roughly what the numbers would have been, had they existed.
5. SEEK FEEDBACK, AND IMPROVE DATA. It constantly improves its data by feedback in its data forum from users finding mistakes.

Genuine curiosity to ask questions, honesty to acknowledge the existing gaps, and humbleness to seek feedback keep exploratory and explaining tools sharper.

The Indian Constitution's Article 51 A (h) states, “It shall be the duty of every citizen of India to develop the scientific temper, humanism and spirit of inquiry and reform”. Almost every other textbook has this sentence in its initial pages and it ends there. Scientific temper (not necessarily only a science teacher's concern) is a long way forward, particularly in a post-truth world where social media content is consumed without batting a critical eye. Unfortunately, in our 75th year of existence as an independent nation, we need to start with scientific literacy. A healthy dose of skepticism for every 'fact' or 'forward' from one's favourite person could be (tending towards) the last nail to our thinking and thriving mindset. At GapMinder, the tools are freely available for any interested teacher to try out helping their learners pick the basics of science literacy.

Rosling's early experiences as a physician in Mozambique and other developing countries opened his eyes to the realities of poverty and disease and inspired him to work towards improving global health. His work as a researcher and educator focused on challenging common misconceptions about the world and promoting a fact-based worldview. His message of factfulness inspired others to adopt a more evidence-based approach to understanding the world.

"Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will". ~ Carl Sagan

His best-seller Factfulness, a text form of the research from GapMinder if I may say, came after his passing away. Entertaining, eye-opening, and ever-questioning our prejudices, stereotypes, and misconceptions.

Sample this frugal page that highlights the instincts that hamper our critical thinking.

How may the 10 instincts play out in the school ecosystem and why do science communicators, teachers, and parents need to guard against them?

The Gap Instinct: The tendency to divide things into distinct and often opposing groups and imagine/project some sort of gap between them (e.g. us and them).

• The silos-making often stems from innocuous passion towards one's subject. Science communicators and parents need to be generalists, and science teachers more cognizant of the words they use. A rose will not smell any different if it has a different name. But, science teaching is a different beast! A cell in biology is not the same as a cell in physics. Plasma in the three broad domains of science has different meanings. "A bread raises in the yeast and sets in the waist'! You may say it is a play of words. What about the next one? "In biology, cells divide to multiply". You got the drift. We need to help our learners/visitors here.
• The gap instinct is stark when we take stock of global themes. Developed countries, developing countries. The First World countries, the Third World countries. At the local scale the groups prevalent in classrooms, which are usually formed out of convenience, solidify and embolden the othering process.

The Negativity Instinct: The tendency to notice the bad more than the good.

• In every child's academic report, usually the quantitative one, teachers and parents are obsessively compulsively fixated on the lesser score. Not because they have a solution to offer (now or in a few weeks' time), but rather because they found something to whip the frenzy about.
• The same noise can be heard in the so-called insights-sharing exercises by impact evaluators after a report on any Large Scale Assessment is presented to the client. The organizations that are working at the ground level with the teachers tend to bargain with impact evaluators for a smaller number of competencies to be tested. The impact evaluating agencies tend to pick (or are bound to pick) only those competencies that are standardized-test-friendly. The loser is the school and the child as they are gamed/primed only for such formats rather than learning as a whole.

The Straight Line Instinct: The tendency to assume that things will continue in a straight line, without considering the possibility of random fluctuations.

• The assumed linearity of data or trends in personal learning builds a false assumption that it is not within their capabilities. If only teachers could speak about contributing factors of true learning. A change in the teacher's pedagogic approach, an inspiring project, and a tete-a-tete with passionate lifelong learners from diverse fields can make all the difference.

The Fear Instinct: The tendency to be more afraid of things that are new or unfamiliar.

• Ignorance and superstition, are the two tenets science aims to dispel (Teaching Science Position Paper, 2005). The best way forward to do that is the default habit of evidence-based conversations.

The Size Instinct: The tendency to be impressed by big numbers and to ignore the context in which they occur.

• The ability to demand and read the fine print or decode the asterisk of any label is the first thing to help our audience/visitors/students bust the hegemony of size and build a better context.

The Generalization Instinct: The tendency to assume that all members of a group are the same.

• I was having a very interesting conversation with a child in a resource-crunched school in a remote district in Western India. His teacher almost prevented me from interacting, not because the teacher had a genuine logical reason for it but rather a stereotypical assumption stemming from caste-based generalization that the child is incapable of responding. Conscious exclusion in classrooms and community, regretfully, is not shocking.
• Post large-scale assessment exercise, the conversations among the data analytics team, test item makers, and even psychometricians are not tempered with expected sensitivity when the sample size spreads government and private schools, urban and rural children, and remedial and regular batches. It is not explicit, but the air is filled with such generalizations that feed the gap and blame instinct.

The Destiny Instinct: The tendency to believe that outcomes are predetermined by some higher power or fate.

• Out of 1.4 million visitors, I was fortunate to engage in Science Express the best but anticlimactic conversations were either with school children from rural India or with girl children irrespective of geography. Anticlimactic because their parents cut it abruptly pre-concluding that education is beyond their reach. Mind you, the conversations were just a decade older.

The Single Perspective Instinct: The tendency to rely on a single explanation or viewpoint.

• Barring the lucky social science practitioners, multivocality is not a default approach for many subject teachers, particularly mathematics and science teachers while discussing the history of it. Perspective building may not be the primary aim of a mathematics or science teacher, nonetheless, this approach keeps the learner grounded and helps her look at learning and its application in a more humane way. Science communicators need to be more ambitious in helping their audiences see the larger picture from multiple contexts. Steam engines running on coals fueled the Industrial Revolution is what science textbooks say. The missed part is how coal mining thrived on slavery and how raw materials were exploited from the colonies.

The Blame Instinct: The tendency to find a scapegoat or someone to blame for problems.

• We are as bad as our hidden/implicit/explicit biases make us. In pedagogic transactions, informal interactions, in conflict containment our blame instincts hinder what is true.
• Take a test from The Project Implicit from Harvard that highlights and holds a mirror to one's biases.

The Urgency Instinct: The tendency to act quickly without considering all the facts.

• If you are not doing 'X' (making prompts for an LLM, controlling teacher's pedagogic and assessment tasks through an app, centrally force-feeding lesson plans, you name it) you are missing something big.
• If your child is not doing X (you fill it!), s/he is missing something big.
• If your classrooms are not doing X (hogwash app-ed, balderdash-enabled, poppycock-certified) you are missing something big.

He may not have consciously communicated science but offered many distilled tools for doing science communication.

In his own words:

"People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious "possibilist". That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible". ~ Hans Rosling

Here is a snippet from his memoir.

On my first day, I was asked to join a group of students for an instructive run-through of yesterday’s X-rays from the medical ward. The first film was a so-called angiogram—an image of contrast-injected blood vessels in a particular organ. This one showed the blood vessels in the kidney. The investigation had been made because the patient had presented with blood in his urine. I remember my feeling of shock that an Indian hospital was able to do angiograms. [...] Even so, in 1972, I arrogantly believed that an Indian university hospital surely wouldn’t be ready to handle it. I stared at the beautiful pattern of branching blood vessels on the screen in front of us. The image quality was as good as anything I had seen in my Swedish university hospital. While I pondered the amazingly high standard of care in the Indian hospital, I suddenly realized that the blood vessels in the upper part of the kidney looked unusual—thinner than normal and clustered into a ball shape. It surely signified a tumor, possibly cancerous. The Indian doctor asked the group: “Why would this patient pass blood in their urine?” It would be polite, I told myself, to let the Indian students have a go before I told them what was what. In retrospect, I recognize of course that this was just another symptom of my superiority fantasy.

[...]

One after the other, the students answered the follow-up questions concerning other possible early symptoms of kidney cancer. I stopped trying to answer the instructor’s questions and instead tried to work out how the others knew so much more than me. Walking out into the corridor afterward, I turned to some of the other students and asked why I had ended up in a training session for specialists. I added by way of explanation that I should really have been with the fourth-year students. “We’re all fourth-years,” they said. “What’s the problem?” I told them how impressed I had been by their knowledge about all the likely symptoms of kidney cancer and also about other illnesses that had been discussed. “Which textbook do you use?” I asked. “Most of us go for Harrison,” one of them said. Harrison is the abbreviated name of the biggest existing textbook in clinical medicine: at the time, 1,120 tightly printed pages. I was an ambitious student and had bought this tome the year before, in 1971. Still, unread many years later, it sits on the bookshelf behind me as I write this sentence.

[...]

The world view that I had grown up to accept unthinkingly—that West was best and the rest would never catch up—had for the first time been challenged and changed. We had expected to encounter poverty in India and we certainly did. But we had been ignorant of the region’s great, ancient civilizations and also of how advanced the talented young Indians were in the areas of modern academic learning and skills.

The seeds for his 2017 bestseller speaking about the 10 instincts were sowed in 1972 when he was a visiting student at St. John's Medical College, (then) Bangalore.

Links to part 1 and part 2.