Two emigrants from ScienceBlogs to Discover Blogs, Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer, are on Bloggingheads.tv. The focus is the new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future, coauthored by Chris & Sheril Kirshenbaum. A comment from below seems appropriate:
I remember an interesting (if apocryphal statistic) about radiation levels in the UK – you could get a higher radiation dose from living in the relatively undeveloped and unspoilt Cornwall than from living next to Sellafield (the UK’s nuclear processing plant, aka Windscale) simply because the granite rocks underlying Cornwall naturally lead to high levels of Radon and hence higher radiation doses than you;d get from the discharges from a controversial nuclear reactor site.
Yet try convincing a non-scientist that they’re safer (radiation-wise) living next to a nuclear power plant than their nice house in the wilds and you’d fail – that kind of quantitative appreciation of risk is simply not part of the way the public is presented complex (scientific) issues.
I’m a little less generous to the public than the commenter. Probability is just not the mind’s forte, or at least scientific probabilities (Gerd Gigerenzer points out that humans are rather good with probabilities which they might have had to compute in a natural ecology).
Carl & Chris below the fold….
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