Popularizing Science for Fun and Profit

Popular science can inform people about scientific discoveries thus making a work of scientists more understandable and closer to a perceived reality of the general public. But I believe it can actually do more, it can show the scientific method and its applications, it can involve people to use this method in their lives. And it is good because the scientific method uses the same tools critical thinking uses, so people can become critical thinkers or improve their skills related to critical thinking.

Unfortunately not all of popular science media are good for that. Some media can only entertain people showing scientific wonders. Some other media can attract people only to themselves and don’t nudge them to other useful sources of information. Also some media can show science as too complicated so people wouldn’t want to do anything scientific themselves. And it is bad because applying the scientific method is basically doing some science.

But we can use critical thinking to check how good is a particular popular science medium. We can check authors and organizations producing the medium, it can help understand their goals and motives. We can check sources used in the medium. And we can check the results of people listening, reading or watching the medium. We probably couldn’t easily create an experiment to study influences of the medium on people, but we can look for any reviews and impressions people write about the medium. If the medium is popular enough we can find not only praises and curses, but more substantial reports.

During investigations like this we need to remember that producers of a popular science medium can declare one set of goals, but follow another set of goals. For example a medium can be a part of an advertisement campaign. They can even think that they are working towards their declared goals but their results wouldn’t make their goals closer. Such mistakes can also be found if we closely analyse the medium and its influence. It may take some time to find good popular science media, which can improve your critical thinking, but the process of finding and investigating would use critical thinking too, so it may be a good practice.