Science is screwed. Or is it?

We can't do everything, but we can do things

Science is screwed. Universities are screwed. Health is screwed.

That was the conclusion of a recent conference panel I attended on the future of science and science funding.

I found it disheartening to be in a hall of a thousand people with an atmosphere that, short of solving US politics or reinventing the global university system, there wasn’t any hope for progress.

In the Q&A, I asked if there was anything small and tangible the panel could suggest that might make a difference. What could we each do specifically, rather than just hoping things will fix themselves? There wasn’t a clear response; it veered once again into redesigning what a university should be.

This was a stark contrast to an event I co-organised back in September, on harmful information in health. It spanned everything from vaccines and climate to mental and reproductive health. Throughout the talks, speakers flagged specific levers that could be used to improve health outcomes, from better engagement with local communities, to having less institutional and more human personality in social media posts, to even just talking the time to answer questions from sceptical family members.

Just because we can’t solve everything, it doesn’t mean we can’t do anything.

In the final panel discussion, I asked panellists for some specific areas where they thought we could make progress. Read on for a summary of what they said (noting that these are brief off-the-cuff comments on a panel, so the speakers would no doubt elaborate if given more time).

‘We need to get more creative, we need to get more engaging’

Heidi Larson (Director, Vaccine Confidence Project, LSHTM) pointed out that new opportunities and communication routes available, but must be used effectively – and this will require effort and training. ‘The biggest thing I’ve learned in some of our work is that the public don’t want scientists to try and make things more simple. They want us to make it more relevant.’

‘At some point in the future, you’ll go on social media and you’ll have AI chatbots talking to AI chatbots’

Simon Piatek (New Imagination Lab) argued that the rise of AI slop will drive users away. The platform owners will realise that people are leaving those platforms, and that will create an opportunity to push platforms to make things more human-centric.

‘There is enough data to do social media mapping’

Rabiu Alhassan (GhanaFact) noted that we increasingly have data on how bad actors are manipulating social media systems. We can therefore document what’s happening: ‘Let’s understand how to collect open source data and produce reports exposing some of these efforts’.

‘There are opportunities to be a point of contact for good information’

Rebecca French (LSHTM) suggested there is an opportunity to be a resource for the many people seeking good information and options, particularly in stigmatised areas of health, such as mental health and reproductive health. She also emphasised the value of thinking about non-traditional routes to engagement, such as through art.

‘We need to make sure future generations are empowered’

Sander van der Linden (University of Cambridge) noted that human-technology interaction is fundamentally changing. We’ll have to deal with the growing integration of AI technology into daily lives, as well as a media landscape that is becoming more fragmented, so it’s harder to reach people – traditional top down communication will be harder. But he pointed to progress in education in places like Finland, encouraging critical thinking and healthy scepticism from a young age.

‘The general public want to do things that are good for their health’

Chris Whitty (LSHTM, Chief Medical Officer for England) argued that the public are generally sensible: ‘If you’re talking about something they care about – and they do care about health – and you’re coming from a position where they are broadly likely to trust, nurses and doctors being a good example of that, you’re going to get a good hearing from almost everybody.’

He suggested that if people have widespread misunderstandings, it’s often down to poor explanations by scientists or health practitioners, rather than just because someone in another country has spread falsehoods on social media. So we have the power to do something: ‘We should always start from the position that actually we can win this argument’.

A more optimistic future is possible. But it will require a shift. Scientific and health communities will need to avoid dual risks of complacency and fatalism. Current challenges won’t go away automatically, nor are they set in stone with no hope of change. Conference panels concluding we’re screwed might feel therapeutic, and that’s an understanable desire in a difficult world, but it’s ultimately deflating and counterproductive.

As I’ve written about previously, health communication will also need to overcome a habit of sometimes looking down on the public:

Some individuals will unfortunately have incentives that are not aligned with understanding and improving health (e.g. those journalists that benefit from stoking controversy or polarisation). But that doesn’t mean that all engagement is hopeless, and that the public will inevitably be against public health.

In a great recent post, Kristen Panthagani, MD, PhD explained how traditional scientific communication methods are increasingly misaligned with how people engage with information:

In the competitive attention environment of social media, the academic style simply doesn’t work. The absence of personality, storytelling, emotion, and rawness makes it less engaging, and the algorithm will learn this and stop showing it to people. Academics and institutions have a lot of important things to say, but their message will reach fewer and fewer people if they fail to adapt their communication style.

So next time you’re tempted to say science is screwed, or universities are screwed, or health is screwed, think about what you – and thousands of others like you – can actually do about it.