About the benefits of tables and provocativeness

End of discussion. For the beginning, see the articlesby Natalia Demina and Egor Zadereev .

Egor Bykovsky, scientific journal , head. science department of the magazine “Around the World”, author and host of the radio program “Science in Focus”:

Science communication is necessary, but tables about science communication are not so much (especially if those tables don’t have drinks and snacks). I have been in different industries throughout my life. So, all sorts of intra-industry conferences are usually organized not in order to exchange useful information (this mostly happens during work), but rather in order to hang out together and see each other in person. If people already meet regularly (like automotive journalists, on road trips and test drives), then they don’t need a special conference. At one time, Internet users, who were glued to their computers, urgently needed it - and RIF appeared.

Scientific communicators already overlap, they don’t really need additional “desks”.

Sasha, I always read you with fascination, honestly. But it seems to me in this case that you are mistaken. Interdisciplinary connections in science, when there is a need for them, arise without intermediaries. Between science and business - even more so.

I understand what popularization is. I have to admit, I don’t really understand about scientific communication. What is she and why? Probably, if everyone didn’t understand the meaning of this word differently (or didn’t understand it at all), it would be easier. Otherwise, we now meet at conferences about the benefits of sepulecs and sepulenium and feel some frustration about this. You say that there is some important problem of scientific communication (the lack, supposedly, of the proper provocativeness of our meetings), but I would like to first understand who exactly is meeting and how they understand their activities and themselves in it. And then it will become clear whether it is necessary to meet at all - even if without the proper provocation.

Alexander Sergeev, science journalist, moderator of the Club of Science Journalists:

Science communication, as I understand it, is a relatively recently emerged form of activity, which partly includes the popularization of science, but also contains new aspects that are still very poorly understood even by the communicators themselves. From my point of view, science communication is a response to the problem of cultural fragmentation caused by the extremely rapid development of science. C. P. Snow was the first to outline this topic in his essay “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” A little later in our country, the problem of cultural fragmentation was reflected in the discussion of “physicists and lyricists.”

But this was only the first stage - a divorce between general (“humanitarian”) culture and science. Further - more: biologists began to look askance at physicists, physicists - at engineers, engineers - at psychologists, and all of them together - at philosophers, entrepreneurs and politicians. The given examples of miscommunication between a physicist and neuroscientists, as well as between Elena Kogteva and Mikhail Gelfand, perfectly illustrate the state of affairs. On my own behalf, I can add an example of the ugly persecution to which some biologists subjected scientific journalists who recently organized the Center for Combating Pseudoscience. Instead of helping journalists with advice and consultation, they began to be compulsively trolled because the head of the Center, TV presenter Anna Urmantseva, had made certain scientific mistakes in her other projects .

Science communication is an activity within the broad task of cultural reintegration. If popularization performs the function of social advertising of science, then communication is the restoration of destroyed bridges and the construction of new ones. Almost no one understands how to do this correctly - the problem is real and deep, no one has ready-made recipes.

Most communicators act on instinct. Sometimes they find bright, successful solutions, and sometimes they fail. Today, science communicators are advanced negotiators from their pseudo-scientific subcultures. And now they are painfully searching for a common language, at least among themselves. This is precisely why they need numerous meetings where they get used to each other, test their ideas and generally try to understand what scientific communication is.

In general, I see a real problem that is gradually and covertly being solved at such events. Therefore, the call that was made in the spirit of “what is there to think about - you need to shake it” seems to me deeply erroneous. Another thing is that specific events are sometimes carried out ineffectively, without the necessary provocation. This is an important particular problem of scientific communication that needs to be solved. Otherwise, communicators will get the impression that not only budgets are being wasted at events, but also their own time.