When I decided the theme for this issue, I had one particular article in mind. I've tried to commission it many times over the past six months, but I never did get anyone to bite. In retrospect, I realize that the question I really wanted to ask isn't answerable, at least not in a form that would be interesting to any of you.
I wanted to know: how far should I — not someone, or the American public, but me, myself — trust science?
A few facts: I am relatively bright, well-educated but not technical, willing and able to read scientific papers as long as I skim over most of the math. In other words, I'm just smart enough to be dangerous. I have friends whose personal COVID modeling yielded more accurate advice than public health authorities in the crucial first few months of the pandemic. A few steps away on the social graph, you'll find anti-vaxxers. Like all of us, I live in a world where participation in public life requires navigating contested scientific questions; like all of us should, I nurture a healthy fear of doing my own research.
One might reasonably argue that my epistemic hygiene isn't the most important angle on this story. Americans on the whole trust science less than we used to (though the extent of the decline is often exaggerated). More importantly, our institutions for producing and organizing scientific knowledge are facing a concentrated political attack from which they may never recover. This frightens me. Our scientific system is among the great civilizational achievements of human history; in the end, it is nearly always right.
Unfortunately, we live in the middle. We need to make decisions about issues on which there is no consensus, and live with the knowledge that sometimes the consensus is wrong. We need to protect our scientific institutions — which sometimes means holding them to account. And this means that all of us, not just scientists, need to do our best to try to understand the world we live in a bit more clearly. Which is — and always has been — the mission of Asterisk.
As federal funding for scientific research declines, scientists are looking for other sources of support. Jolie Gan makes the case that better science communication is key to navigating this new reality. Meanwhile, Alex Trembath explains how the climate movement became a case of science communication gone wrong.
Matthew Jordan walks us through the history of his own discipline: the history of science. Leah Libresco Sargeant lays out the past and future of competitive science fairs. Meghan Boilard looks to The Telepathy Tapes to understand what makes pseudoscience so appealing to so many, and Karson Elmgren questions if linguistic diversity is really in decline (linguistics is a science, right?). Abhishaike Mahajan shares his thoughts machine learning can really help cure disease (it's not just drug development), while Adam Marblestone argues that a research paradigm which started in AI safety can help us understand the human brain.
At the intersection of science and industry, Karthik Tadepalli tells us all about ITRI: the Taiwanese government research institute that spun out TSMC. Andrew Miller explains the very different sensor technologies in Teslas and Waymos. Finally, Afra Wang sits down for a conversation with documentarian Xinyan Yu about industrialization in China, Ethiopia, and the world.
I don't think any of these essays fully resolve the challenge of informed citizenship in a modern scientific democracy (sorry). But in their own ways, I hope that each of them moves us a little bit closer.
As always, thank you for reading.
— Clara
