Everything Has Popularizers

Those who can, do; those who can't, construct narrative

Last Friday, after I had used up my allotted Writing Time for the day, Brian Keating came in with a scorching hot Take that I’ll screenshot here and quote below:

He writes:

Why is it that science needs “popularizers”?

Movies don’t

Sports don’t

Social media doesn’t

It’s time we realize actual scientists have an obligation to develop their communication skills.

We’ve been gifted the greatest script imaginable. The only thing holding us back is us.

This got a lot of push-back in the highly predictable form of people noting correctly that public communication is a skillset that’s largely distinct from the skillset needed to succeed as a professional scientist, and that specialization in this circumstance makes a lot of sense. Keating sort of doubles down by citing some Nobel laureates talking up the virtues of communication, but I think that case is somewhat undermined by two of his three being Einstein and Feynman who are renowned in large part for being unusually good at communicating their work. It’s a little like making the flip-side case that scientists are naturally terrible at communication by citing legendary oddballs Henry Cavendish and Paul Dirac: you can’t really prove a sweeping general statement by citing the wildest outliers.

There is definitely a lot of truth to the push-back (of course, as a guy who’s moved from doing physics to mostly writing about it, I would say that…); at the same time, Keating is not wholly inaccurate in pointing out that institutional science is not great at prioritizing communications outside of formal papers and presentations. If talking to a wider audience were more highly regarded and better compensated within the profession, more scientists might cultivate those skills. I suspect there would still be a lot of specialization, but maybe less than there is now.

What I want to take issue with, though, is the other half of his claim, namely that movies, sports, and social media don’t have “popularizers.” It’s true that we don’t have a class of people who are usually called that specific term, but we absolutely have people who fill the analogous role. They’re called critics in the world of movies and pop music, and sportswriters or tech journalists in the other two. Or, as Sean Bartz pithily put it : “That’s The Ringer.”

I mean, think about what it is that “science popularizers” do, in the most general terms: They take news about recent developments in science, and craft a narrative around it for people who are outside the field. Despite the name, this isn’t exclusively a cheerleading role— “popularizer” refers to the “popular audience” of non-experts— a lot of popular-audience science content is in fact very critical of the field (more on the life-science side, but there are definitely examples in physics), and many people who do this for a living will bristle at the suggestion that their work is primarily promotional. Even if you try to restrict the field to just those who are primarily seen as promoting science, they’re not purely rah-rah stuff: Sagan famously wrote books denouncing superstitious thinking and pseudoscience, and Neil deGrasse Tyson has become a walking meme as a “Well, actually…” guy for pointing out science errors in all manner of media.

Science “popularization,” understood with a properly broad definition, is about narrative construction: putting new work in a historical context, projecting current trends into the future, directing the audience’s attention to this rather than that. It’s seining through the endless torrent of Science Stuff that’s happening all the time to pull out particularly choice nuggets of stuff and putting them in a form that makes sense to people who aren’t hip-deep in the flood themselves on a daily basis.

That exact same process of narrative construction is central to the creation of pop culture. Movie, tv, and music writers are likewise filtering a vast stream of #content and looking for bits to highlight: what’s the Song of the Summer? the Best Show on Television? the Best Picture of the year? They put artistic work in historical context— what else has this artist done, who are their obvious influences, who have they influenced— and craft a narrative around the works that directs the audience’s attention to specific places. The best of them (or at least the ones I find most congenial) will delve a bit into the nuts and bolts of how things work: what are the signature innovations that make this band sound different than anyone else, how are the shots in this movie composed to make them most effective, etc.

In sports, you’ve got a similar dynamic with the whole ESPN-Industrial Complex. There’s a multi-billion-dollar business built around assembling highlight packages picking out the best plays from the unwatchably large number of games played on a given night, staging debate shows to power-rank the Top Ten players at any given position, interviewing players in the locker room to collect colorful quotes for a narrative about a team’s “chemistry.” It’s all about constructing narrative: this team has momentum, that one is in disarray, this player is on the rise, that one is overrated. And so on.

Dall-E’s interpretation of “The Charles Barkley of Physics”

Sports and pop-culture media have the same core dynamic as science “popularization,” highlighting particular players and coaches, actors and directors, albums and artists as The Most Important in a way that drives audience attention and shapes the future consensus. They also have the same failure mode of sometimes privileging particular types of work over others that may be equally deserving but don’t lend themselves to as clear a narrative construction. As a result specific works or even whole genres can be relatively absent from the conversation about a field or medium, even though on their own terms, they’re massively successful or impactful: country music is way under-discussed relative to hip-hop, a random episode of an NCIS variant is watched by vastly more people than Succession, and condensed-matter physics has a more important impact on modern life than the most wildly optimistic forecasts for string theory or astrophysics ever will.

(The sports version of this is the “GOAT” discussion, which overrates players whose games and personalities are particularly media-friendly. The Pip is almost 12 and thus at the age where he’s first really getting into sports fandom, and I keep frustrating him when he asks about great players of the past. When he asks about Kobe Bryant I tell him that Tim Duncan was better, but is underrated because he’s a naturally reserved guy and not a relentless self-promoter. When he asks about all-time greats, he wants my take on “MJ or LeBron?” but I always cite Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who are generally left out because they played a long time ago, and were both a little prickly when it came to dealing with the media. It’s all narrative.)

The vast majority of this narrative construction is done by people who specialize in that, rather than practitioners of the field. Most music critics aren’t in bands, Roger Ebert’s one foray into movie-making was trash, and sportswriters mostly weren’t athletes. This happens for the same reason as in science: the skills needed to analyze and write about pop culture or sports are largely distinct from those needed to make an album or hit a curve ball, so you get specialization. There are exceptions— Charles Barkley was a dominant basketball player and has become a spectacular broadcaster, John Madden was a great coach and a transcendent color analyst— but for the most part, they’re different sets of people. Which is fine: everybody does the thing they’re best at, and it all works out in the end.

So why would it be a problem for science to follow the same highly successful model? If we’ve got a Charles Barkley in physics (Sean Carroll?), by all means, let them do both exceptional science and outstanding communication about it. But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with letting people specialize in the ways that best suit their individual skills.

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It probably would’ve been better to get this out Friday, but we were visiting family, so it had to wait. If you like this sort of thing and think you might enjoy more of it, here’s a button:

If you want to argue with my characterization of science or journalism or my rankings of NBA players, the comments will be open: