Randy Olson: “Don’t Be Such a Scientist”

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if the picture is a bar graph with a bunch of statistical notations? It may be worth a thousand words, but only to a handful of people. In the context of climate change, that’s clearly not enough. This week’s guest on Sea Change Radio, is Randy Olson, a marine biology professor turned filmmaker and author whose book “Don’t Be Such A Scientist” makes the case that scientists can and should be better communicators, especially to regular (non-scientist) folk. Olson draws what he considers to be an important distinction between narration and storytelling, attempts to explain the mystifying ascendancy of Donald Trump, and gives us examples of what does and does not work in messaging scientific knowledge.