Man forums

I’ve been writing about science for quite some time—more than three years. I write on the Internet, so it ’s easy for readers to comment on my texts - and they actively do this both on the forums of the publications for which I work and in their online diaries. I try to monitor the reaction to my articles - sometimes readers notice inaccuracies or make judgments that require comments on my part. In the process of monitoring the Network, I have accumulated some statistics on reader reviews of certain scientific news. Based on it, I can roughly predict which messages will cause the most lively response, and which will remain without comments at all.

So, readers least often comment on news about animals. The exception is messages illustrated with photographs of cute or, conversely, unpleasant creatures. Responses to such news are usually limited to more or less emotional epithets relating to the appearance of animals.

News from the world of physics is also not very often commented on - descriptions of new properties of graphene or notes on Bose-Einstein condensates are either accompanied by comments like “I didn’t understand anything, but it’s interesting,” or provoke long discussions among people who are “in the know.” The frequency of commenting on astronomical news is very clearly differentiated. The hits are often messages related to the search for extraterrestrial life or habitable planets, as well as news about new space missions and especially their costs. Forums of posts that talk about, say, new hypotheses about star formation or the study of microwave radiation often remain pristine.

Go ahead. Mathematics attracts mainly experts; “complex” molecular biology, biochemistry, and simply chemistry are not in particular demand among commentators. Readers love anthropology, but mainly the part that studies possible sexual relationships between our ancestors and other species of people. Almost always, geology, mineralogy and ingenious geographical news, such as reports on the study of lightning and clouds, remain “in passing”.

But there is news that will certainly be discussed on the Internet and often for more than one day. These include: messages about the reality or, on the contrary, the far-fetchedness of global warming, news that questions generally accepted historical hypotheses, messages about how bad everything is in Russian science, and, finally, notes from the series “humanity is becoming stupid before our eyes.” The latter include, for example, the results of a recent VTsIOM survey, which found that a third of Russians consider the Sun to be a satellite of the Earth and believe that radiation was created by people.

If you try to analyze all of the above, you get a sad picture. Most readers do not understand the natural and exact sciences, but at the same time they consider themselves experts in history and climatology and are sincerely indignant that there are so many fools around. At the same time, most likely, many commentators only think that they know a lot about the history of mankind or global warming - these topics simply seem to be much simpler in appearance than the Schrödinger equation or the Chandrasekhar limit, and in discussions about them one can not use formulas and limit oneself to general reasoning.

In other words, many readers, being amateurs in almost all areas of science (reading Fomenko’s books and media reports about a conspiracy to inflate temperature data, is still not enough to become a specialist), nevertheless consider themselves literate enough to to talk about “understandable” sciences and make assessments of the mental abilities of others. At least in part, this widespread lack of self-criticism may be a consequence of, let’s say, the frivolous attitude of school teachers and professors of many universities to how well students have learned the information offered to them. As a result, graduates do not get used to objectively assessing their own knowledge and acquire natural confidence that they understand the structure of the world around them (after all, they have a higher education!). At the same time, the idea of ​​many natural phenomena among such citizens is not very different from the ideas of people of the century before last.

How to deal with people’s incorrect opinions about their own erudition is not very clear. The answer that it is necessary to radically rework the existing system of secondary and higher education is probably correct, but it is unlikely that such a program will be implemented in the near future. One can only believe that those who comment on news on the Internet make up only a small percentage of the total number of readers, and there, in this non-public terra incognita, things may not be so bad.