[00:00:00] Michael Hawk: From the intricate dance of an ecosystem to the ripple effects of a warming planet. Nature's stories are rarely simple, but in a world that craves quick and easy answers, how do we get people to lean in and listen to the full story? And how do we do that without glossing over the complexity and nuance of the situation?

Today we're getting a masterclass in just that with Jocelyn Bosley, a Science Communicator and Research impact coordinator at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. She'll walk us through how to move beyond simple explanations and get people excited about the deeper stories in the natural world.

We will dig into specific examples like how a warming Indian ocean can affect asthma rates in the Caribbean, and we'll even challenge the idea that scientists must be objective and emotionless. This is an episode for anyone who wants to share their passion for nature and science with anyone.

So without further delay, Jocelyn Bosley.

All right, Jocelyn, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:00:56] Jocelyn Bosley: My pleasure. Thank you for having me, Michael.

[00:00:59] Michael Hawk: So I always [00:01:00] like to mention a little bit of the backstory before an interview. And you and I have a mutual friend that introduced us just recently and it seems like we probably met way back years ago as well through this mutual friend, but just we didn't know how our life paths were going to progress.

and here we are again today.

[00:01:16] Jocelyn Bosley: I congratulate myself on having such great taste in friends who in turn have such great taste in friends that not only do I continue to, stay in contact with our mutual friend, but then he introduces me to wonderful people like you.

[00:01:28] Michael Hawk: And it's great. And we were talking a little bit before this interview andyou told me a bit about a story relating to the Indian Ocean and I think really typifies a lot of what we're gonna talk about today. So I'm gonna just ask you to jump straight in and let's start talking about complexity in science through the Indian Ocean.

[00:01:50] Jocelyn Bosley: Absolutely. So when I think typifies is a great word, when I think about, Complex systems and, the way that science tries [00:02:00] to grapple with them. This anecdote always comes to mind, and it's a story that I learned about from a PBS special called Strange Days on Planet Earth. That came out, I think in 2005.

I'm sure we can find the link and put it in the show notes, but the story goes that over the last a hundred years, the temperature of the Indian Ocean has increased by one degree centigrade. my mind is a little bit boggled because one degree, it doesn't sound like a whole lot, but when you think about how difficult it is, how long you have to put a cup of water in the microwave in order to heat it by a little bit, water is really hard to heat up.

It takes a lot of energy to heat even a little bit of water, even a little bit, and there's lots of water in the Indian Ocean, obviously. so that's this huge amount of energy that's being added to the system, even though it only sounds like a really minor temperature change,

one degree over a hundred

years.

[00:02:49] Michael Hawk: remember seeing estimates that like for every degree centigrade that the oceans warm up. It's some huge multiple of equivalencies to nuclear bombs that [00:03:00] you know of, of energy. And I, it is, it's just, it's mind blowing.

But sorry to interrupt.

[00:03:04] Jocelyn Bosley: No, no, no interrupt always. That's totally great. That, yeah, I would love to know that, that figure estimate as well. 

[00:03:10] Michael Hawk: Okay, just interrupting. I looked it up and I found that there's a professor from the University of New South Wales who did the calculation and in just the last 10 years, he estimates the amount of warming in the oceans is an equivalent energy to 1.7 billion atomic bomb explosions.

Incredible. 

[00:03:32] Jocelyn Bosley: So as a result, a direct result of this increase in temperature of one degree over 100 years in the Indian Ocean, asthma rates in the Caribbean in children skyrocketed. So that initially doesn't set how could one cause the other?

This is, such a complex problem and question, but they were able to figure out, scientists were able to kind of piece together how this was happening. And so part of it was a [00:04:00] meteorological effect, a climatological effect, which was that all this extra energy that was added to the system caused two of the major air masses to kind of stay stuck in this really violent phase of their, of their interaction that normally they only would go through every, I don't know how many years, but only, only rarely did they go through this really violent phase in their interaction, but all this extra energy was keeping them stuck in that mode and this resulted in really strong winds blowing from the Sahara across the Atlantic Ocean. That wind carried with it grains of sand, not surprisingly, since it's coming from the Sahara and on those grains of sand was riding spores of a fungus that then when children in the Caribbean were inhaling them, that those fungal spores were a risk factor for developing asthma. mind blown, and I would love to share this anecdote with kids when I mentored, highly gifted students in math and science, everywhere from, you know, second to eighth grade. And, I would share this with them and oftentimes I have to break out the globe and say, okay, here's the [00:05:00] Indian Ocean. the Caribbean. Think about that. That's how complex and interconnected this entire system of Earth and its inhabitants, is. And so me, that's really exciting. That's not exciting, obviously, that children are getting asthma at higher rates, but it makes me feel like a part of something bigger.

It's sort of this quasi-religious sense of being, you know, really one with the earth and the universe. And so for me that's a really gratifying kind of thing to know and a responsibility as well.

[00:05:30] Michael Hawk: Yeah, and I, I'm just visualizing the globe and it's almost like on the opposite side, almost completely on the opposite side to consider that. And it also reminded me of, I saw on a different documentary that those same grains of sand play a particularly important role in supporting biodiversity in the Amazon as well. Had you, had you heard about that?

[00:05:53] Jocelyn Bosley: no, I haven't. And I think that, so another of the themes that you and I sort of riffed on when we were just deciding where we wanted [00:06:00] to focus this podcast episode was about how particularly in nature, there are no clear heroes and villains, right? There's no, like, this is good, this is bad, this is a solution, this is a problem.

But everything has complex effects, and some of them are gonna be according to us, positive and others not so much. So the idea that these grains of sand are simultaneously causing a health risk, but also promoting biodiversity that could ultimately support the health of an ecosystem is really awesome.

And mind blowing too.

[00:06:26] Michael Hawk: I think there's, some. nutrient that's getting carried in. The winds that just over, hundreds and hundreds of years of these prevailing winds, accumulates over time.

So you kind of have this like, deposition or depositing, you know, they just, over the eons adds up to something important.

[00:06:43] Jocelyn Bosley: oh. Love it.

[00:06:44] Michael Hawk: And actually, so now listeners might be wondering, like, okay, what does this have to do with what we're talking about today? What, what's happening here? But it shows the complexity of these systems that exist. And one of the challenges I think that we have in. Science communication in [00:07:00] general is so much of what we deal with is actually pretty complex at the core, but we're living now in an era where people want sound bites and simple answers.

And how do we find the balance? How do we help demonstrate that, there there's more here without boring people to death

[00:07:18] Jocelyn Bosley: All

[00:07:18] Michael Hawk: and also without overly simplifying. So then, someone might come back later and be like, well, you were wrong, you, you were telling me lies. So does that about summarizewhat we were thinking of talking about today?

[00:07:33] Jocelyn Bosley: Absolutely. So I have been thinking about this, I might say obsessing about it, a lot in recent years, particularly since the pandemic, but more generally as well. And I think that yes, the way you set it up just now, you said people want to demand these kind of simple, straightforward answers that scientists just aren't able to provide and.

That is probably true in some contexts and in some situations, but I also think scientists may [00:08:00] anticipate that's what people want and then try to fit their research into a narrative. And maybe it was a supply issue more than a demand issue. Maybe people are demanding simplicity because that's kind of how we've set up the dynamic.

I feel similarly about like practical utilitarian applications and justifying all science in terms of these utilitarian applications that I think you know, people ask that because we tend to make the conversation about that and feel like that's the only value that science has to add or these like, you know, economic and material kind of advances, which are definitely part of it.

But I think one thing that is a bit of, I guess, a truism in science communication is that don't assume other people are going to be as intrinsically interested in your research as you are, which fair. You shouldn't assume that, but also, like, don't assume they're not because you care about it for a reason.

and if you really push yourself on that to think about why do I think this is cool? Not in terms of like what you've put in a grant proposal, because then you're justifying it to other people who are in your field. But in terms of like, really, like, how does this make me feel? Why is this [00:09:00] exciting? Other people are gonna share that excitement too.

[00:09:03] Michael Hawk: I think a lot of what we're gonna touch on today is how we collectively can be more effective in talking about things of this nature. AndYou know, my focus on the podcast is largely ecology. And you know, I like to say that biology and ecology is the, most complex system ever devised.

some ecologists like James Estes have tried to quantify this in terms of a simple ecosystem and the number of relationships that exist between the organisms and the abiotic factors like the rocks and the slope face and you quickly get into astronomical numbers that,

[00:09:34] Jocelyn Bosley: yeah.

[00:09:35] Michael Hawk: You can't even, you know, it's, it's like 72 with a thousand zeros after it in terms of the number of relationships that exist.

I think that is also, a way of thinking that typifies how we, in sort of western science tend to think about complexity as like the sum total of all of these elements.

[00:09:54] Jocelyn Bosley: And so here's where my history of science background comes in. so my graduate degrees are in the history of science [00:10:00] and I recognize that to be a very kind of materialist, mechanistic way of viewing the world that is not true across all times and cultures. And so when we think of complexity as the sum total of all of the elements and relationships in a system, and think that in order to convey the complexity of a problem or a phenomenon, we need to list all of those 

Explain all of those, then yes, understandably that is kind of an obstacle to effective science communication. But I think if you think about my Indian Ocean story, like I, there's so many details left out of that because I don't remember what the names of the air masses are. I don't remember what like names of their interaction is.

I don't remember the name of the fungus. I don't even remember the name of the Caribbean nation that, that they were studying the children in. I remember that Ed Norton narrated the documentary, but I do not remember these scientific details. And yet I don't think you would say that the story that I told, the way I told it was lacking complexity.

I think it was just foregrounding those relationships rather than all of the kind of [00:11:00] technical detail. And so I think complexity and thinking about ecology and biology, I think are a perfect kind of, you know, case study for this because you see emergent properties all over the place. Life itself is an emergent property.

And so that relationship of parts to wholes and the fact that there can be ways of studying the whole that don't necessarily amount to, understanding and explaining all of the parts. So a less reductionistic way maybe of thinking about the world can also help us to understand complexity and communicate complexity more effectively.

[00:11:30] Michael Hawk: , I think we're gonna get into that a little bit more. that's sort of the goal today, as I said, the question is, you know, how do we meet the needs of our audiences over time? And that'll come out as we talk. but before we get further into it, you've already hinted at a few elements of your own background that have led you to where you're at today. So science communication, have you always sort of had this crossover of being a communicator and being a scientific and mathematically [00:12:00] focused person? Is this something you identified as a kid that you were gonna get into a field somewhere in this realm? Or is it a discovery later in life?

[00:12:07] Jocelyn Bosley: That's a really interesting question. I would say I have always had broad interests, broad and diverse interests. And I was lucky to, be in a family where there was not a lot of pressure to define myself as I do this, not that, or this is what I wanna be when I grow up. I was very much like, I currently want to be a music teacher.

Well now I wanna be a ballet lay dancer. I threw myself wholeheartedly into all of these things and, they're still part of what I carry with me now. And I think being able to maintain diverse interests and not put myself in a pigeonhole is now a strength, but it was a struggle at one point.

And so landing on science communication was really. the short version, I guess, is a product of gradually realizing that the part that I loved most about science was communicating about it and sharing it with other people. So I am not a gifted experimentalist. I will say that I tend to break things, in the lab and which wouldn't [00:13:00] preclude field sciences, but I always assumed that I was gonna end up somewhere in science.

I think that I was gonna have a career in science. And when I was an undergrad, I did research in a physics lab, with a big laser, which I did not break, although I forgot to turn it off one day and, had to scurry back to campus in the middle of the night to turn off the laser that I left running. I worked in a genetics lab where I sorted fruit flies by eye color, you know, with a little paintbrush. And what I found my undergraduate career could probably be summarized as like that meme, with the guy and his girlfriend and he's looking back at, some other girl and his girlfriend looks incensed and people label, different labels on each of the people.

I would say I'm the guy, the girlfriend is whatever major I just declared on paper. And then the girl walking by is some new field of study that I like, have just gotten interested in.

[00:13:50] Michael Hawk: Shiny object syndrome. Yeah.

[00:13:52] Jocelyn Bosley: So there, well, so I kept thinking there's a way there, I just need to find my niche in science. Like there's a scientific career for me, but every time I got more and more sort of narrowly [00:14:00] focused in one area, it was exactly that.

Like, oh, but all these things over here that I'm also still interested in. And eventually I realized that the problem for me was the nature of scientific research itself, which is that you do tend to get, well the standard joke about grad school right? Is that you get, more and more about less and less until eventually you know everything about nothing. But even leaving that aside, you do become, you know, sort of, more narrowly focused as you go along. And what really always interested me most about everything I was learning was its connections to other fields. And the more unexpected the connections were, the better. 

I realized that the way scientific research is structured doesn't allow for as much of that, some of it, but it doesn't allow for as much of that kind of big picture drawing connections as I would like. And I ended up with a major in math and minors in physics, chemistry, biology, English, and gender studies. Thought I might go on to a degree, advanced degree in biophysics, which would at least be a way to kind of bridge some of my different scientific interests. But then discovered that the history of science is a thing you can study. And it was a way [00:15:00] to continue avoiding commitment really integrate all of my different science interests with my humanities and arts interests as well.

And so, I think that perspective definitely informs, how I think about science. Communication. the further along I got in grad school, the more I realized, these barriers between different fields of study and different approaches are kind of artificial.

in some ways the barrier between history and the present is a little artificial too. all these things that I was learning about how science interacted with society historically in different cultures and contexts could really be useful for people in terms of how we think about and practice and do science now.

And so that's kind of what got me into the science communication space.

[00:15:38] Michael Hawk: What's interesting, I see parallels too between taking on multidisciplinary. Career and the complexity that is inherent and then communicating that to people and, you know, labeling what you do so that they understand it with the topic we're talking about today. It's very similar and I think this is why we kind of hit it off when we spoke.

This is very much [00:16:00] me as well. You know, so I, I've struggled with, how do I label myself when I have these diverse interests that then intersect in various interesting ways. And that takes me to this concept from EO Wilson of, consilience. You know, he wrote a book called Consilience where it draws together, a multidisciplinary approach and he really thought that was the future.

You know, that's what, where we needed to go next after all these decades of kind of reductionist science that had occurred. I'm curious what your take on that concept is.

[00:16:33] Jocelyn Bosley: There's actually a, I'll put in a plug for a journal that is also named Consilience after Yale Wilson's book and inspired by this, and it's a journal of science themed poetry, and so it's a good name for a science poetry journal. I science poetry, like as an undergrad, I took a poetry class.

And to me that was a really natural topic for writing poetry about. I was learning all about the basic units of matter and relativity and [00:17:00] how, like what even is time And like it inspired all of this really awe and wonder. And for me, poetry was a great, form for that to express that. But what was interesting to me was that people were so surprised by it. Like in my poetry class, they were like, I think it's so, I mean, they were excited about it. They were like, I think it's so cool how you like incorporate your science into your poetry. But to me it was such an obvious.

Conjunction later I met a community of like-minded folks, Twitter, back when it was still Twitter. And we actually came out with a book called Entangled. my poems are included in that collection. But I mentioned this because I think that a lot of, and I need a social scientist to investigate this really.

So any social scientists listening to this is, you know, this is a challenge that I poses to you, but my sense just from doing a lot of science communication work with a lot of different audiences is that you could predict how science engaged or disengaged someone is based on kind of how they respond emotionally to a complex topic.

And for me, the Indian Ocean story, I said in the beginning it really inspires awe and wonder and [00:18:00] a sense of belonging to something greater. I think there are others based on, personality predilections, but also probably a lot of their experiences going through school and how they've been introduced to scientific.

Concepts and complexity in particular who encounter something complex and wanna run, screaming away from it. I wanna run screaming toward it. I wanna like run into that burning building and find out why it's burning and what's going on in there. But I think there are others who they're like this is too complex.

I am out. And I think there's a real correlation there between that. I need a social scientist to verify between how people respond to complexity emotionally and how they then respond to science and take in science information or don't. if we could incorporate more of the skills of the arts and the humanities, take more of a multidisciplinary approach to talking about science, that lets us bring in some of the emotional vales that I think can really help to engage people and connect with people and hopefully kind of show complexity as a source of awe and wonder. rather than as a [00:19:00] source of confusion and fear.

[00:19:01] Michael Hawk: Why is it that a lot of, and I, I'm painting with a broad brush here, but a lot of scientists are seemingly dissuaded from bringing emotion into their discussions.

[00:19:14] Jocelyn Bosley: Oh yeah, that's a great question. one of the. Things I love to talk about and I'm an advocate, of exclamation points in academic communication. So this is my small little act of resistance, the way I change the world every day. If you get an email from me, it's gonna have exclamation points in it, because if I'm excited about something, I see no reason to pretend I'm not, and so I'm done with that whole self-censoring, like, oh, I should have that with an exclamation or with a period instead. But I recognize that that is, is atypical and especially, I mean, academia in general and professional life in general, maybe, but especially in science. And I think we can conflate several different ideas about what objectivity means.

Objectivity is obviously a cherished ideal in science. And in some ways it should be because we should try to make our scientific investigations as free [00:20:00] from bias as possible. We're recognizing that that is not a hundred percent possible, that we're always, you know, seeing, the world through, our own veil and we have a partial experience of things. one of my favorite quotes, and How I explain the history of science to people who don't know that as a field comes from, Sally Slocum, who is an anthropologist and said, we choose to ask certain questions and not others. for me, the history of science is figuring out why did we ask the questions that we did, and why didn't we ask, any of the infinite number of other potential questions that we could have asked. So yes, we should try to make our science as free from bias as possible. However, I think there are. Alternate meanings of objectivity that get kind of conflated with that sometimes, that not only are maybe not necessary, but aren't even desirable. So in my role as research impact coordinator, I work with faculty across disciplines, but a lot in STEM fields to really think through and develop the broader societal impacts of their research.

And this is actually something that's required by the National Science Foundation and other funding agencies too. And it should be [00:21:00] because, you know, particularly publicly funded research and maybe particularly now it matters a lot that research is going to have benefit to the broader society.

And that could look a lot of different ways. It doesn't have to be a utilitarian material application, but that, something about what you're doing is going to benefit society at large. And so I think one idea of objectivity holds that science is separate from the rest of society, that it's insulated from the rest of society.

And not only is that not necessary, but I don't think it's good for science to be insulated from society altogether. if it were, for example, we wouldn't have, uh, been able to develop the COVID vaccines as quickly as we could. The reason why we were able to do that is because we'd prioritized research on coronaviruses and other potential pathogens that had the potential to impact human health.

Because human health is a value that we share. That's a, you know, that's a social value that helps to set the direction of science, that helps to decide which questions we ask and which questions we research. And they should, we should prioritize human health. And so we should [00:22:00] let those human values, weigh in on how we do science and what.

What we focus on as long again as we're making sure that we think about whose values are these? Is it just a certain subgroups values or is it, you know, really shared human values that we all support? So I think yes, objectivity should be freedom from bias, but it should not mean freedom from any kind of influence, from social systems and values. And that's then where we make the case as well that it doesn't need to be free from emotion. I think that's another, this sort of dispassionate inquiry is a way of demonstrating I am being objective, I am being a scientist and not a human as though you could check your humanity at the door or should check your humanity at the door when you become a scientist. So in a way, the reason why scientists are often viewed as being separate from the rest of the world is because they've been taught to portray themselves that way. And if we're gonna have meaningful conversations with non-scientists and expect them to care about the work that we're doing, then we need to let our humanity show a little bit more.

And emotions are part of that.

[00:22:57] Michael Hawk: Yeah. you don't want to [00:23:00] necessarily speak with a robot when you're learning about something, so. Absolutely. 

Adding a little bit of, of emotion, a little bit of passion is maybe one part of a recipe to connect with people. How do we find this sweet spot between, conveying these complex things that happen in nature and in science?

In a way that does connect with people. And one part of that recipe is, yeah, you can bring a little bit of emotion and consilience to that discussion. What other sorts of maybe missteps do you see science communicators making in that space?

[00:23:38] Jocelyn Bosley: I think maybe not people who self-identify as science communicators, but scientists who are working on. Communicating their science.

[00:23:47] Michael Hawk: point.

[00:23:48] Jocelyn Bosley: enthusiasm is great, but I think it's also important. And I said, don't assume that your audience isn't going to be as intrinsically interested as you are. But I think figuring out why you care about what you're [00:24:00] doing and also why you think somebody else should care about what you're doing is really critical.

a distinction that I like to make is between accuracy and precision. And so that is a. Balance. Well, I think the balance may be more actually between precision and meaning. I think accuracy is something that we can strive for across the board, no matter who we're communicating with.

and no matter how, but I've moved away from talking about making concepts accessible. I mean, accessibility is a different thing and it should be a part of our science communication efforts as well. But, a lot of times when we talk about communicating to non-experts, we talk about making the concepts accessible.

And I think scientists hear that and they think dumbing down, they think we're subtracting something from their research which makes them uncomfortable. I think that instead, if we talk about making it meaningful to a broad audience or making it meaningful to non-experts, that's a more accurate way of capturing what you're actually doing, which is adding value to your research.

It's. Connecting it to things that people already know and are already doing. So analogies and metaphors, I'm a big [00:25:00] fan and use them a lot. And I think that's a powerful way to communicate, complexity that isn't listing all of the details. But I think accuracy is something we can do across the board.

And when I think about the distinction between accuracy and precision, I think about like, you know, swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So, precision is telling the whole truth. Accuracy is telling nothing but the truth. And. it's complex, right? 'cause everything is, it's not always a clear line like, oh, this is just a matter of accuracy, or this is just a matter of being more or less precise.

It really depends on what your goals are. So I had an experience where I really realized this when I was taking human physiology in undergrad with Dr. Gerald Tharp. But he was an amazing teacher who did a great job of communicating complexity. And he introduced us to the structure of a muscle fiber and how the muscle fiber and what was going on at the sarcomere level actually resulted in the shortening of the muscle as a whole.

And so he, drew this little schematic of like the actin and the myosin fibers and the little cross bridges, and showed how the cross bridges connected [00:26:00] and then changed shape and how that brought the actin. togetherand shortened the sarcomere to make the muscle contract.

And then from there he introduced another graphic that showed the structure of the actin of the myosin and the cross bridges in much more detail. this was a really great way to go about learning it, where you say, okay, here is in really simple, detail what's happening and why it works the way it does. And then let's look at it a little bit more fine grained. It's almost like zooming in, you know, you start out zoomed out and then you zoom in and see more detail afterward. I was talking to my friend who's a biochemistry major, which is a relevant fact here. And he was disgruntled about this way of presenting it.

'cause he was like, why would you just like, present it some whole way and then say, oh, that's not actually true, it's this other way. And I thought, well, that's not what he did. He just described it like in broad strokes and then in more details he went along. But I realized my friend being a biochemistry major. him, the truth was the structure of the molecules. [00:27:00] That was what he was interested in. What I was interested in and what the course was really more focused on and why Dr. Tharp did this the way he did it was in thinking about the process. And so to understand the process, you don't necessarily need to have all of the details of the structure of the molecule.

So I mentioned this because it happens to me in my, in my. Role. one of my side projects is that I'm the curator for a website called Fun Sized Physics. And we sometimes have lots of interesting conversations about accuracy versus precision as we're developing and editing the posts. And sometimes I'll say, well, this isn't inaccurate.

It's just not fully precise. You haven't told, you know, you haven't told any lies. you haven't, you know, said anything that's misleading. You've just left out some details, which is fine. Butoftentimes we can agree about that. But there are other times that, the post author or one of my collaborators on the site will come back and say, well, no, you're not telling the whole truth.

And it is misleading in this particular sense because this is the message that we need to be conveying. And what counts as inaccurate versus merely imprecise may vary by [00:28:00] context, but that's why it's so important to think about what your audience knows and what you want them to know. I think one thing to keep in mind is that science communication has multiple goals and explanation isn't the only one. So if you think about what you want your audience to take away, maybe it isn't that they are able to like pass a multiple choice quiz on this topic.

 maybe it isn't even that they are able to describe in detail to their friends, how this phenomenon works. Maybe it's just like, wow, the world is really complex and that's kind of cool and that's an okay takeaway. I mean, to me that,would be a win in my SCOM world.

[00:28:38] Michael Hawk: Yeah, for sure. And it has me wondering a little bit too, you're talking about like, what is the goal that you have for your audience, So, a as a scientist then can maybe wear multiple hats depending on what the audience is. If they're writing an academic paper that's going to be peer reviewed and published in the journal nature, the, you may lean into the precision side of that a [00:29:00] little bit more.

if you're talking to an audience at a library, perhaps it's more the, the abstracted model in a way, the accuracy side, so they can kind of understand the concept a little bit more.

[00:29:13] Jocelyn Bosley: Absolutely. And so a slide that I like to use when I talk about this and give presentations has like two bell curves and, you know, on, on the vertical access I or access, I think we. Have precision. And then on the horizontal axis we have like maybe your audience or the people who you're engaging with. And you can have a sort of broad, low curve where you're not conveying a ton of precise information, but you're communicating it to a lot more people. And then the opposite of that, like maybe if you're writing a nature article for example, then you have this very narrow, tall curve where you're communicating. A lot of precise information, but only to a very narrow group of people. And so that's kind of a necessary trade off. if you try to maintain the high peak, [00:30:00] but broaden your audience, you're gonna fail by trying to cram all this information in. When you're talking to an audience that may not know what to do with it, for whom it may not be meaningful, what you've really done is not convey more information, you've communicated less information, because it all went sideways for the audience.

they didn't have a place to put it, they didn't have a way to connect to it.

[00:30:21] Michael Hawk: , That makes a lot of sense. And I'm thinking about in the nature realm, some of the topics we cover here. You know, like, land stewardship, wildfire management, you know, these are all pretty complex things and there's a lot of nuance. The way you might approach it is gonna vary dramatically depending on, you know, the climate that you're in, the habitat that you're in.

Maybe the recent weather patterns, you know, if you're talking wildfire has there been a lot of rain or in drought? Like, all these different things come in, so. how can these sorts of nuances be communicated to get the point across without causing like frustration or confusion among people?

[00:30:57] Jocelyn Bosley: Oh, that is such a great question because, [00:31:00] complexity is itself rather complex and it has a lot of different dimensions to it. And one aspect of it is this like very localized kind of approach where you may not be able to take a solution that works in one place or a model that you developed in one place and generalize it to every other place. And then, you know, other aspects of it are like that, that there's uncertainty built in and, and knowledge continues to evolve. So science is a process and not a fixed body of knowledge. There are instances where people get frustrated with that kind of complexity and they want a straightforward, simple answer.

I think. On an individual level, I think what people understand best is their own context. And so the more, I mean, I think actually not interested in having a solution that was developed somewhere else, like applied wholesale to their situation. So there's a level of actually like mutual of respect for the local context and the local environment that you show by not trying to adopt a one size fits all [00:32:00] solution.

So maybe that's a lens and a way of presenting it that can be helpful and. Involves a lot of listening because of course we talk too about communication not being a one way street. There's listening involved in science communication too, and it's an experiment in a way in itself.

So, just as the solutions that you are providing for, certain ecological problems are not gonna be one size fits all. The way of communicating about them probably isn't either. So, it's great when you can actually engage in a dialogue and sort of, see, is this landing, is this not, and adapt your approach and your analogies accordingly.

I mean, we've all had that one professor who had one way of explaining something, and so if there was a student who raised their hand and asked the question was confused, the professor responds by repeating exactly the same thing, louder and slower. And I think as science communicators, we have the opportunity, especially informal science communicators, the opportunity to take those questions and really reflect on those and then use those as ways to fine tune the [00:33:00] messaging to, to fine tune the signal and amid the noise.

[00:33:04] Michael Hawk: Yeah, so maybe to delve into a specific example a little bit, I live in California and, you know, wildfire is something that has existed forever in, in the state. And due to a number of reasons, here we are with the complexity.

You know, it's getting worse in terms of the impact on people and actually the impact on the ecosystems as well. So we just had this devastating massive wildfire that hit different areas of Los Angeles in January, which, you know, was pretty eye-opening in and of itself, like January, that's not fire season.

And you know, I think taking your recommendations, if you are someone working with these communities, you're gonna focus on, I. That circumstance where you have suburban infrastructure meeting up with wildlands that are a community called Chaparral. It's not a forest, it's not like a forest fire.

It's, it's the shrubland community. [00:34:00] So you would really tailor your communication to that specific model. In, in that case, is, is that roughly accurate?

[00:34:07] Jocelyn Bosley: Absolutely. Right. And like maybe a sort of equivalent example in Nebraska. So the conventional wisdom, and it's not true across the board by any means, but is that, you know, particularly I'm in, so I'm in Lincoln, in the eastern part of the state. Lincoln and Omaha are the two big cities and we're in the far eastern part of the state. And, there is a lot of farmland and ranching that goes on in most of the rest of the state. And so the conventional wisdom kind of is that those tend to be more conservative politically and maybe more likely to be climate change doubters, if not deniers. And so in talking about climate change and the issues caused by climate change, with some of those farmers and ranchers.

They may not relate to that term, they may actually have their hackles actively raised, in which case that's, gonna be an obstacle to further communication. But even if they're not quite in that camp they may not relate to that term. But if you start talking with them about how the weather has been, it's not the same as it [00:35:00] used to be. How, the frequency of droughts and floods and weather extremes is a lot more than it used to be. I mean, they're absolutely on board with that. And if I ever hear anyone describe farmers as anti-science, I get all over their case because, no farmer is anti-science. They are scientists.

They need to be in order to be the solutions and paying attention to making all the observations and paying attention to all the variables. And so I think helping like that group see the connection between what they're doing and what they're experiencing and then what, scientists in the lab or the field are researching is really critical.

So I think, yeah, making that connection and making it in a way that is meaningful to that audience is super important.

[00:35:39] Michael Hawk: It reminds me, just to kind of riff on this a little bit out west here, I. There's a lot of ranch land, there's a lot of arid ranch land. And similarly you could stereotype ranchers, you know, in this sort of climate skeptic range. And the thing that seems to really often get them to raise their eyebrows a little bit is when you start talking about [00:36:00] just how the land has changed.

What do you see growing in your ranch land? And they're like, yeah, there's, there's all these new things that, that we never used to have before, grasses that I've never seen before. And small shrubs and, and it's, it's covered instead of having these, spaces between, patches of growth that your cattle could graze on or whatever.

Now it's sort of like everywhere. And when you start talking about invasive species being a contributor, that's another way to connect, and so, yeah, I think every scenario has, an avenue to get an inroad with your audience.

[00:36:34] Jocelyn Bosley: And it also comes back to that knowing what you want them to take away from it. And

[00:36:38] Michael Hawk: Mm-hmm. About a big topic like climate, I mean in those interactions that you have with farmers or ranchers, do you need them to say and to accept, yes, anthropogenic climate change is totally a thing and I am probably not.

[00:36:52] Jocelyn Bosley: I mean, probably you don't need them to accept, you know, that paradigm fully in order to make the small [00:37:00] changes that you are trying to help them make or encourage them to make. Probably enough to have a conversation with them about the changes that they're seeing, and how that's impacting them.

And you know, how, how, they're trying to mitigate some of those changes. That's probably enough. And so thinking about what your goal is and that you don't need to, I was gonna mention this earlier, just when we were talking about the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but this is maybe another time to bring it in.

The other day I saw, 'cause like my Facebook feed is, I swear, half peanuts comic strips now. And I'm totally not mad about it. 'cause I clicked on one once and now the algorithm gets a lot of hate. Rightfully so. But my algorithm's working for me right now 'cause I'm seeing a lot of peanuts, comic strips, Snoopy in particular.

And Snoopy was having a convo with Woodstock because, and he was like, you, you moved, how will I find your new nest? And so Woodstock is sketching him at a map. And Snoopy says, make it simpler. You don't have to put in all the continents. And so thinking about one way to make it simpler, is, to take [00:38:00] more of a broadening out view, more of a macro view and less of a micro view when you're communicating and realize you don't need to include all of the fine structure details, but another way to make it simpler is to realize that I don't need somebody to understand and appreciate and accept this entire area of what I do.

What I really need them to understand is this area where my nest is.

[00:38:23] Michael Hawk: that makes a lot of sense to me. And maybe adding another layer of complexity to this discussion. So we talked about how maybe the causes and thus mitigations for the wildfire problem is gonna be different when you have suburban lands butting up against Chaparral versus, the arid west for ranchers versus an agricultural area, say outside of Lincoln.

Now, in the case of Los Angeles, that was a national story, and there's policy that has to come at the national level. So now suddenly you're gonna get people who maybe don't know these nuances. They don't recognize the fact that the [00:39:00] landscape is different, the weather patterns are different, the invasive species profiles are different.

What do we do in that case? Is it as simple as just saying. Everywhere's different, and in this case it's X or is there a better strategy than that?

[00:39:14] Jocelyn Bosley: That is a really good question and my answer's gonna be a little bit unsatisfying, I think, because, it isn't necessarily like a playbook, good to go, this is what we can do right now. I think what we need to work together on figuring out is how to, just shift our cultural mentality around complexity so that we're able to talk about it and able to recognize it and able to look for it and therefore able to see it. And so I think this can start and should start maybe in sciences that. actually have necessarily this element of policy and potential controversy around them. So we've been talking about climate change and um, and impacts. And obviously those are important conversations to have and to have them as well as we [00:40:00] can right now. But I think that if there are scientists who work in other areas that feel like more removed from the day-to-day experience and more removed from, from the policy realities and things like that. I'm thinking of some of my amazing colleagues at Nebraska who do great stuff with like spider behavior, and so that's a great example of research that somebody might look at that and say, who cares? Like, how do we, why do we care how spiders communicate with each other or what they're thinking? You know, like, why, why does this matter to, to our existence on earth? But first of all, there's the curiosity, the, all the wonder that I think can be a force that connects us and bring, brings us together. But I also think those are the kinds of things that people find cool to learn about with. And they don't have their guard up because it's not running up against, political beliefs or values. It's just interesting. And so people who work in those kinds of fields are maybe uniquely positioned actually to.

Start talking about the complexity and celebrating the complexity of the world and [00:41:00] bringing that into the conversation so that more people can recognize and value and appreciate complexity. So then when we get to the point of talking about a firewe've sort of, primed the narrative a little bit more, and created that narrative space to talk about how not every place is the same. that's a big shift to make and it's not something that anyone can do by themselves. That's why it's not a very satisfying answer. 'cause it's not a, playbook that you can go to right now, but I do think that this is a big, culture shift that has to happen.

[00:41:29] Michael Hawk: Yeah, I'm okay with that. It's a long-term view of, of kind of building this baseline recognition of the realities that we face. and as you were talking too, I was thinking about how if your audience in this case is politicians making policy decisions, assuming. you can trust that they are actually open-minded.

You mentioned using metaphors earlier and you know, like the economic prescription for an agricultural economy versus a technology economy versus a banking economy. Like those are all gonna be different [00:42:00] policies, and that maybe is something that they would understand that like, yeah, you know, the incentive structure that we set up for New York City is gonna be different than Miami, which is gonna be different than Dallas, Texas, for example.

And it's no different here.

[00:42:13] Jocelyn Bosley: Absolutely. Yes. That is a perfect example. That's a perfect example of saying what is the, like the bread and butter of this group that I'm talking with. What do they really understand? Well, and then, you know, how can I make an analogy that connects to that?

Perfect.

[00:42:28] Michael Hawk: One of the things I like to do when I am leading walks with the public, showing them, the miracle of nature, how, like there are all these amazing things that we just walk by every day andthey're playing a role in our environment, kind of the reductionist and material view, but also the awe that comes along with that.

You know, I like to come up with stories to tell and make it more memorable in that way. So how do you use storytelling in your communication and what might you recommend to people like me who are really trying to get people to care about a [00:43:00] given topic?

[00:43:01] Jocelyn Bosley: Absolutely agree. Yes. I think for me, history, is a rich source of stories. And sometimes it's directly related to the content. Sometimes it's just providing more context that gives people more of something to anchor it to. So this is a completely different example, but Lavoisier who came up with the law of the Conservation of Matter was also a tax collector during the French Revolution and ended up getting beheaded. And so when my students learned about the conservation of matter, when I was working with middle school students, they also learned about La Fosse and the story. And then, when the conservation of matter would come up later, they would be like, making guillotine motions across their throat guy, that guy.

Right. It is like a trivial example in some ways, but they would remember a concept because there was a story that went along with it. And so I think, you know, sometimes the packaging is definitely, um, one way to make the content more valued and valuable to people. And storytelling is a great. Way. I [00:44:00] totally agree with you a great way, and I actually, you said that's kind of the reductionist, materialist view of like listing all these things and here's what they're doing for each other. But I don't know that it necessarily is because I think storytelling, I mentioned meaning earlier that what we're trying to do is make science meaningful for people who are not experts and for ourselves as well. And I think storytelling makes meaning that is its primary function. I mean, there's this. Historically tendency for people who, are studying humans as a species to want to put something in the blank. Humans are the blank animal. and they keep having you revise what goes in there because they keep finding like, oh, actually other, animals do use tools.

Oh, actually other animals might use language depending on how we define language. So we probably can't. But despite recognizing that this is a tendency that people have and there's no good reason to think that there's one word that goes in that blank, I'm not immune from the tendency. And if I had to say something, I would say are the narrative animal.

and that we really make sense of things based on how they're [00:45:00] connected in a story. This also to me is the total antidote to listing. Objects and relationships that are part of the ontology of what you're trying to describe, because you can remember a story because it ties together all of these different things.

You remember the story in a way that you wouldn't remember all the individual parts. It's like, psychological phenomenon of chunking, right? If you can take a bunch of disparate things and put them together into one, that's why remembering an acronym is easier than remembering a whole series of letters individually. Or why phone numbers. They, they like to figure out what words to spell out and put the phone number, in a text format so you only have to remember one thing versus, a bunch of things. And so one example that I love that highlights the role that, a different way, a storytelling, a more of an arts and humanities approach can have in helping us communicate about scientific topics. Daniel t is an author and artist. he has Asperger's and he wrote a book called Born on a Blue Day. He also has anesthesia. [00:46:00] So the blue day, is the day that he was born is coated blue for him. he set a record at the time, which was I think mid two thousands for reciting the most digits of pi.

He later made a painting that reflected how he saw pi. And this was why he, this is so timely because we're recording this the day before pi day. So, he explained this is, this is how pie looked in his mind. And so when he was remembering pi and recalling it and reciting it, he wasn't actually remembering. Th 10,000 digits or whatever it was that he recited pie out to, he was remembering this picture in his mind, and then he could go in his mind and kinda zoom into different parts of it and see it in detail. So we don't all have the benefit of being able to see numbers in that way. But I do think that a story is a similar kind of device, or maybe it is a poem or maybe it is a painting.

But it, it's something that integrates these different sources of information and makes it a whole thing so that instead of remembering all the individual pieces, you remember a whole thing. And then it brings in the [00:47:00] emotion as well, which is another point of connection.

[00:47:02] Michael Hawk: I realized that my question was not well worded, but you opened up a whole other avenue of thought for me because I was thinking about how I like to point out these things like, here's a certain type of jumping spider and it's here because of this, but really that is a primitive story in itself.

It's here because of this, but what I like to do is build it broader. And I think what you're saying here is that We're only limited by the creativity we bring to the storytelling because it's sort of an infinite set of options of ways that we can relate this subject. something that, that I tried here just recently was how there was a mystery, years and years ago of migratory birds.

Where did they go? when they left for the winter? And this is, I forget where in Europe, but here it is again. I'm remembering the story. I'm not remembering the specifics.

[00:47:50] Jocelyn Bosley: right.

[00:47:51] Michael Hawk: and people had all these theories. They thought that maybe they went under water and burrowed into the mud and then they came back in the spring or they flew to the moon.

Like that was [00:48:00] actually an accepted story that they went to the moon and then they came back. And when I'm leading bird walks talking about migratory birds, adding that little story into. you know whatever, we just saw this bird that just arrived from Argentina yesterday, or, you know, whatever the case might be, that really helps make it memorable.

So I thank you for helping kind of show the spectrum of storytelling that could exist.

[00:48:23] Jocelyn Bosley: that's a a

[00:48:24] Michael Hawk: I,

[00:48:24] Jocelyn Bosley: point. Absolutely. It's all about, yeah. You know, just making something meaningful.

[00:48:29] Michael Hawk: And you know, along these lines since this audience here, it's a mix of scientists and iNaturalist and people just interested in nature. And I, I always like to advocate that anyone listening, please have discussions with your friends and neighbors and coworkers about the wonder of nature and the importance of nature.

What techniques or tips or suggestions might you have for for people in those more casual conversations that they may be having?

[00:48:55] Jocelyn Bosley: That's a great question. So I think, you know, one of my bits of advice to anybody, whether [00:49:00] they're working in science or just a science enthusiast or a nature enthusiast, is to not edit out your passion, to let your passion show through. And so that may be more of an issue for people who are working in science and have been trained in this sort of very narrow way of communicating. But to them I would say actually that, the skills that you develop in communicating more informally about your research with non-experts is also gonna help you ultimately in communicating your work with other experts as well. And so I mean, if human beings are uniquely neurally coded to respond to stories, then that's the same is gonna be true for other scientists as well as for non-scientists.

And so I think it's worth having those, informal conversations and. Bring the same kind of energy that you would have in sharing, something you're excited about with your friends, to communicating to more professional audiences as well.

[00:49:51] Michael Hawk: that makes sense as well. 

[00:49:52] Jocelyn Bosley: I feel

like I had something else to say to that question too, but it's escaped me so we'll. We'll, I'll circle back to it. If I think of it,

[00:49:58] Michael Hawk: sure. And I,I [00:50:00] was on the verge of an, of what I thought was an interesting thought, but I think I lost it too. So, my one interesting thought.

[00:50:08] Jocelyn Bosley: so many interesting thoughts. They're just a mile a minute. It's hard to capture them.

[00:50:13] Michael Hawk: There you go again. I was gonna say, I, I almost had my one interesting thought of the day but, you reframed it. So that's another technique, I suppose, is reframing things.

[00:50:21] Jocelyn Bosley: Absolutely.

[00:50:24] Michael Hawk: Well, this has really been interesting, and I think you've helped me, you know, at least recognize some ways that in multiple aspects of my life when I'm interviewing scientists, how I, maybe I can help. Cultivate, getting them to, to communicate a little more broadly to this broad audience that we have here.

And also what I can do day to day when I'm, say leading walks or speaking at an event or something like that. So thank you so much for that. I know you are a wealth of knowledge in this space, so I'm curious you know, where can people go maybe to find more about your work or get some more insights or inspiration when it comes to [00:51:00] communicating?

[00:51:00] Jocelyn Bosley: So, I have a number of projects that you can find online. Not yet all in one place. I do not have, I have a website, but I, I should work on that. But I'm on social media, particularly Blue Sky now as scitalker. So SCI. Talker, it fits. and, 

one of my recent projects that I'm excited about takes some of these ideas and puts them into, a context of lesson plans for middle school and high school students which think could also be valuable just for regular folks to check out. And it's really, it's called Side Journeys is the name of the, of the mini unit.

And I collaborated with the Amazing Education Studio, galactic Polymath, which has the greatest name in the history of ever. their experts helped me think through how we could take the idea that science is a process and it's. More than that. It's a whole universe of processes and make students more aware of that.

So this is another kind of complexity adjacent topic that I'm really passionate about. I [00:52:00] once, when I was hosting a podcast, we did a discussion episode called The Scientific Method. Is it a thing? And I was on team. No, it is not a thing. It is a lot of different things. the idea that all scientists do exactly the same thing and exactly the same order is so untrue and so boring and alienates a bunch of people who don't wanna do exactly those things in that order.

They don't realize the diversity of science. Oh, I guess, this might be a good kind of concluding, way to think about this. I, I like to make analogies as you know. AndI make analogies between science and music a lot. So they're two of my passions. And. I am always baffled when people say, oh, I don't like science.

Because to me that's like someone saying, I don't like music. And yes, there are very, very few people who have like dysphonia or, you know, other, issues where they truly do not like to listen to any music. But I, the vast majority of people, love some music. It just varies what they like or love. They might hate the same music that I love and I might love hate the music they love, but [00:53:00] somebody is loving some music usually. They have their niche and their things that they love. and for me, science is just as diverse as music is. And so a lot of the way when we talk about the scientific method, we are kind of like saying music uses notes okay.

That's true, but it's not very informative. , It doesn't tell you anything about like why the same note sounds different when different instruments play it or why, some sequences of notes sound happy and some sound sad. And so all the really interesting stuff that makes music powerful is not captured in saying music uses notes.

And I think the same is true of science as a process, which is what we tried to get at in this side journeys lesson. But the other thing that makes this maybe a nice, way to end is that I think music is an example of an area where we already value complexity. So the idea that people want. Simple answers from scientists has become the case, but I don't think it's inevitable that it has to be the case because, if you think about like three melodies, let's say three earworms baby shark, let's [00:54:00] say, uh, let's go nineties in sync. Bye bye bye. And like the classic Queen Bohemian Rhapsody. So which of those do you like best? Michael, I'm just gonna ask you this question.

[00:54:11] Michael Hawk: Oh probably, uh, the classic queen.

[00:54:14] Jocelyn Bosley: I thought so. That would be my answer as well. also clearly the most complex of the three examples I gave. But you know, whether you, whether you're team Queen or team in sync, whatever, I think very few adults, and I'm not, don't mean to other, if there are adults out there listening and you just love Baby Shark, I don't understand you, but I respect you. I imagine that most adults are not gonna choose Baby Shark, which is by far the simplest of the melodies, which is part of what makes it annoying because it's so simple and repetitive. And so I think in music we've already shown that we do value complexity and that we can value complexity. And so, I think that taking that kind of approach to communicating about other things, I also get a lot of inspiration from, indigenous ways of knowing and talking about science. Which do a really great [00:55:00] job, I think, of centering the relationships, among, natural phenomena among organisms in an ecosystem, and even between the observer and the observed. And so I think, they, there's a great example of indigenous storytelling is a great example of how we can talk about nature really effectively too.

Two

[00:55:15] Michael Hawk: Yeah. So many things. I know we're out of time, but, I had a fun conversation with Chairman Valentine Lopez from the Amah Mutsun tribe here in the Bay Area, talking about science and what does science mean. and that was on the Jumpstart Nature podcast. I'll have to link to that, but it was definitelyenlightening for me.

And in terms of side journeys, are there any, like, you know, I know that there are teachers that listen to this and probably homeschoolers, and as you said, really anyone who really is looking to help instill some of these ideas. Are there any specific lessons or, topics that you would like to call out that I could include as a direct link?

[00:55:52] Jocelyn Bosley: Oh, absolutely, yes. I can give you the link to the mini unit right now. There are three lessons and each one of them features um, [00:56:00] in science. And they, they're talking about their particular side journey. And so we have a unit on asking questions, which is like the foundation of all science, but we spend so little time talking about how to do it well and what it means.

And so I certainly have been in that situation where if I'm told to ask a question, I'm like. I don't know. I have questions all the time, but not when I'm put on the spot and told to ask a question. And so there, that's a really great unit that features in fact Rose Bear Don't Walk, who's an indigenous ethnobotanist.

And so, she rattles off a bunch of questions. She makes a question web all in about two minutes. She comes up with like 30 questions. And so you really begin to see how when science is working effectively, the, outcome of a scientific investigation often isn't only an answer, but the more interesting part is that it's another question or another whole set of questions, which is part of understanding the complexity of science as a process.

So there's a unit on questions, there's a unit on. Hypotheses and what that actually means and why it's more fun than it sounds. And then, a unit on collecting data. so we have [00:57:00] units still to be developed pending acquisition of funding. So if any funders out there uh, we see this and, and wanna, wanna support, uh, expanding the lesson, we wanna have one about analyzing data interpreting data, and really communicating science, which is of course happening throughout the process of science and not just at the end of it.

So, that's kind of the hub where all these things fit together.

[00:57:21] Michael Hawk: Well, thank you for those insights and I'll link to those. Definitely. And, thank you so much for making time to do this today. It was really enjoyable for me and, I hope that you've enjoyed this little, diversion from your normal Thursday evening.

[00:57:34] Jocelyn Bosley: I spend most of my Thursday evenings obsessing about complexity alone, so it's nice to spend one obsessing with, a fellow traveler.

[00:57:42] Michael Hawk: thank you again, Jocelyn. I appreciate you and the work that you've done and the time that you spent here today.

[00:57:47] Jocelyn Bosley: Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me, Michael.

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