I talked to a client based in the Midwest this week, in a state where social distancing is recommended but not compelled. He said he had just gone to one of those giant home improvement stores to buy his spring plants.…
OK: which of you is wearing a mask now or about to start? And why?
The US government seems on the verge of reversing its position on whether all of its citizens should now wear some sort of covering over those noses and mouths while in public.…
Here’s a condensed version of what I’m telling all my clients — all researchers who run their own teams and organizations, large and small — right now:
There is only one story for the foreseeable future.
If you can’t be hyper-relevant to it, hold off on almost all your communications for now.…
Politico reports this morning that Morgan Stanley economists are now predicting a 30.1% annualized decline in US GDP for Q2 — which would be the worst quarterly performance in 74 years. That’s the good news. The bad news: lots of other economists think that prediction might be optimistic.…
Conservatives are biologically and neurologically different from liberals. Science says so.
If you follow politics at all in the United States, you’ll have heard that claim, and even perhaps read about some of the individual studies supporting it. Social or political conservatives, these studies have found, are more reactive to threats, more easily disgusted, more dogmatic and more receptive to authoritarian structures and leaders.…
It isn’t just citations, and it isn’t just where you’ve been published, and it isn’t just about being fresh and accurate and right. Those might feed into it. But first: It’s who you can talk with and why they listen to you.…
It’s now an article of both evidence and faith among science communicators that the information deficit model of communicating science (the idea that you, a non-scientist, have a deficit of information or knowledge about something and I, the expert, am going to give you enough information to remove your deficit) doesn’t work.…
There should be a German word for the special despair researchers feel when an idea they’ve debunked takes off in the mass imagination.
For if we had such a word, we’d be using it right now to describe the pain and frustration researchers feel at the Trillion Tree Initiative.…
How do you justify that the study you’ve just published (or that a staff researcher has just published and that you’re being asked to promote) is sound?
Well, it was published in a peer-reviewed journal, wasn’t it? Isn’t that enough justification?…
Experts know.
Authorities know and apply that knowledge credibly, sharing the application habitually and liberally with others it might benefit, building a relationship of trust.
Implicit in that application of knowledge is POV and the risk of focusing your and others’ attention — on the issue, the problem, the solution set.…