The key to an effective scientific presentation is having the audience think along with you, and that is really just the essence of interest. You need to be able to get the interest of a fair-sized audience possibly by establishing your expertise, but this initial interest is an advance payment by the audience and therefore needs to be repaid in the course of the presentation with some way of thinking about a problem that the audience is not only familiar with by the end of the lecture but are themselves also in a position to apply.
On one level having the audience think along with you can be as simple as using Randy Olson’s schema of “And, But, Therefore” (which I also used in the preceding paragraph). Start with some description. And introduces a second element in harmony with the first element presented. But introduces a contradictory or problematical element, and therefore introduces a proposed solution to this contradiction or problem. This doesn’t involve persuading the audience of anything, it is simply a tried and true story-telling motif.
On a higher level, an audience listening to a scientific presentation is being walked logically through some problem, and is able to do this because logic works independently of the human brain doing the thinking. And the essence of scientific discovery is sometimes the discovery of some way of abbreviating the logical process to make thinking about a problem easier.
The difference between a good scientific presentation and, say, a lecture on dowsing is that the lecture on dowsing more often than not is a simple repetition of the litany of dowsing claims involving no thinking, just a ticking off of the elements that need to be covered. There’s only one, non-trivial problem: How do you tell the difference?
It could be (and has been) argued that a scientific presentation (say, a popular presentation like the recent Cosmos series) is the presentation of a litany aimed at making people familiar with it by rote-learning, and not by thinking.
What do I mean by “thinking”? I certainly do not mean “having an opinion”, which is what “thinking” means in everyday use. I mean the application of logic to analyse or solve a problem. Logic works and it works the same for everybody. That is why great minds think alike. Why fools never differ is another question.
Let me introduce you to Lee’s Chinese Room of Cubic Roots. Cube a number and tell me what the cube is, and I’ll give you the number you started with by taking the cube root. Now just imagine that however I solve this problem, I always give the right answer. How could you tell whether I have memorised all the cubic numbers and their roots, or whether I am using some clever, logical algorithm (or whether, indeed, I am cheating by not taking cube roots at all).
If skepticism is an exercise in applied logic, then it makes no sense to be “skeptical” of it; but you could be distrustful of it. In fact anyone unfamiliar with logic and how it works would be justified in treating it with distrust, just like you would distrust anything else you were not familiar with. But distrust is not skepticism.
People who have not been taught to think react very differently to educated people when it comes to problem-solving. Have a look at The Real Meaning of MPH and see for yourself. There is nothing wrong with the woman at the focus of this short film (Chelsea), except that she never learned how to calculate rates.
There has been some reaction to this in the sense of, “Calculating rates is just a behaviour that students learn to internalise, and it’s trivial anyway, so there can’t be any advantage in having them learn this or that particular method.” Only someone using a fraction of their brain would say something like that, because it is not trivial. If Chelsea knew how rates worked she would give the answer to the problem and that would be the end of it. Instead she goes through hypothesis after hypothesis of how the problem might be solved (and there are more ways of being wrong about how to solve a problem than being right), she rejects the data given her which might help her solve the problem, and finally she rejects the idea that there could even be a simple solution to the problem at all. And that is a problem.
The important thing is that people who learn to use logic to solve problems learn how to change their minds. If you can’t think you won’t change your mind and you won’t change your mind if the solution is imposed on you by someone else. In a world where education worked in training people to think, then it would also give people confidence in using logic.
