Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
note them explicitly. Keep firmly in mind that there was a time
when you didn't understand any of this either. Recapitulate the
first steps that led you from ignorance to knowledge. Never forget
that native intelligence is widely distributed in our species.
Indeed, it is the secret of our success.
The effort involved is slight, the benefits great. Among the
potential pitfalls are oversimplification, the need to be sparing
with qualifications (and quantifications), inadequate credit given
to the many scientists involved, and insufficient distinctions drawn
between helpful analogy and reality. Doubtless, compromises
must be made.
The more you make such presentations, the clearer it is which
approaches work and which do not. There is a natural selection of
metaphors, images, analogies, anecdotes. After a while you find
that you can get almost anywhere you want to go, walking on
consumer-tested stepping-stones. You can then fine-tune your
presentations for the needs of a given audience.
Like some editors and television producers, some scientists
believe the public is too ignorant or too stupid to understand
science, that the enterprise of popularization is fundamentally a
lost cause, or even that it's tantamount to fraternization, if not
outright cohabitation, with the enemy. Among the many criticisms
that could be made of this judgement - along with its
insufferable arrogance and its neglect of a host of examples of
highly successful science popularizations - is that it is selfconfirming.
And also, for the scientists involved, self-defeating.
Large-scale government support for science is fairly new, dating
back only to World War Two - although patronage of a few
scientists by the rich and powerful is much older. With the end of
the Cold War, the national defence trump card that provided
support for all sorts of fundamental science became virtually
unplayable. Only partly for this reason, most scientists, I think,
are now comfortable with the idea of popularizing science. (Since
nearly all support for science comes from the public coffers, it
would be an odd flirtation with suicide for scientists to oppose
competent popularization.) What the public understands and
appreciates, it is more likely to support. I don't mean writing
articles for Scientific American, say, that are read by science
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