When butterflies screw up forecasts
On Lehman Brothers, cold fronts, and the principles that really matter to public understanding of science and technology
Science and technology communicators -- whether they’re working as public-health officials, NASA outreach ambassadors, or television meteorologists -- all too often run into a thorny problem: It’s not so bad that the public often doesn’t know the details of science, but it’s crippling that so many members don’t want to understand certain fundamentals.
■ For example: Weather forecasters don’t particularly need people to understand the basic principles of how airmasses behave. It wouldn’t hurt, of course, if the public generally knew that cold fronts tend to wedge beneath warmer airmasses due to their greater density, frequently leading to storms. But that’s the kind of thing a forecaster can explain with a screen and some graphics.
■ But it would make a world of difference for all of those science and technology communicators if a majority of people could be counted upon to understand the butterfly effect, which says that very small changes in inputs can lead to very big changes in outcomes later on.
■ That’s why there’s only so far in advance that any weather forecast can reasonably be trusted. There will always be a market for people promising unreal levels of forecasting certainty, but that market can be minimized if there’s a general understanding that something like a pinpoint-precise 20-day forecast is mainly snake oil.
■ It’s not such a big deal to communicate science if people are willing to listen to the explanations on details. But just like we need a common understanding of phonetics in order for written speech to work, we need common agreement on at least a few big principles for public-facing science to work.
■ The good news is that those big principles tend to apply across a huge range of domains: The butterfly effect is why the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers set off a global recession and how a fried wire made a mess out of air travel in the spring. So if only we can get people to understand and embrace a few big ideas early on, society at large can benefit from the rewards of an advanced understanding of the world.
