“How Does The Public’s View Of Science Go So Wrong?”

Sardines and tourists in Monterey — Several admitted scientists have been sighted in the vicinity of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where the Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph shown here was taken by Burkhard Mücke. The organisms in the background, however, are not scientists. They’re sardines.

Why do so many members of the public seem to hate and/or fear scientists?

Here’s one suggested answer:

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/how-does-the-public-rsquo-s-view-of-science-go-so-wrong/

I’m not sure that I agree completely. But I think he may be partially right.

I know, though, that I dislike this sentence:

“Experts must continue, as citizens, to advocate for those things they believe to be in the public interest . . .”

Sometime within roughly the past ten years, the weird verb form to advocate for began to infest the English language, much the way a parasite takes over a biological host. It’s one of my peeves. The for is utterly redundant and quite unnecessary. Unneeded. Not required. In the sentence cited above, it would have been quite enough to have written “Experts must continue, as citizens, to advocate those things they believe to be in the public interest . . .”

Posted from Monterey, California

“How Does the Public’s View of Science Go So Wrong?”