Festivals. I justha really want to say thak you to all of you for coming out today and having come out for 15 years. I also want to say thank you Madison Public Library for taking this event on when it was unsure whether someone would and for giving us this beautiful space to keep putting on the fence for the public in medicine and just in where you came from today. I also wantt to thank the madisn Public Library foundation. They do all the private fundraising. It keeps these events free and t open to the public. Weve been doing this is our fifth festival at Madison Public Library at all our events have been free. We can break even about that and we hope you do, too. I want to say a huge thank you h to them and to all the sponsors who helped put on this festival throughout the years. I would ask you now to please silence your cell phones. That goes for date as well. And probably me. Youve got to check. I really would just like to start my introduction today by saying im not a scientist but i really believe that book festivals are a solution to Climate Change. [laughing] and their data. Im not going toat shoji right w but just believe it. Ru its true. I think weve all heard some version of that in the past and date is here today to tell us why we shouldnt just believe. He is a crusading scientific journalist. I was just saying to how important i feel it is that somebody is writing about these things. In an age will be dealt no necessary whats going on allimf the time. Dave is reducing this is going on and is going on probably more than you think. Its a very important topic. I think to hold the people who represent us accountable but tos also know what the facts are when were talking the fact that so here iss dave to tell us what we need to know. [applause] well, thank you very much for the introduction, thank you to the festival of the library for having me. And i want to thank you all for coming as well. My name is dave levitan and i am a science journalist based near philadelphia. Ive written for a whole bunch of places on whole bunch of scientific topics. The book i wrote isic called nt a scientist how politicians mistake, misrepresent, and utterly mangle science. It is essentially a playbook of how politicians get science wrong here i thought what i woo today is go through the origins of the book, where it came from, and also discuss that line, the title, not a scientist and where they came from. Grocery couple of examples that are in there and then talk a biw about how some of the things of writing but in the book are playing out today and more recentlyn in politics so to stat off, the book actually sort of arose out of my time as a staff writer for factcheck. Org. Im a freelancer generally but i spent time as a fulltime staff writer for fact check which helped one is aware of that website. They got a grant in early 2015 to start covering science sorted and a dedicated fashion. They had covered some scientific issues before but they didnt have ais Science Writer traineds a Science Writer who are sort of hit and miss on that but they got a grant to start covering science directly and they hired me to do that. We launched a new section of the site called my day job is basic Pay Attention to what politicians are saying about size and explaining why they were wrong when they were wrong, which i do not lack for material. [laughing] and basically early on in that job i started to notice some patterns in the ways they were talking about science. Sometimes this was actually repeated talking points, just the same exact words from different people but other times is more sort of patterns of speech, rhetorical tricks, devices that i started noticing crop up again and again. I started collecting and basically at first listing them down. And very rapidly i had a pretty long list, and i decided it might be a useful sort of endeavor to put them all into one place, basically collected these as a playbook, the way politicians are trying to fooll us when it comes to scientific topics. I left that job in late 2015 basically to work on the book and to go back to freelancing, which im still doing. So thats sort of where it came from. I divided the book up, basically, into types of errors, types of devices of tricks. So some of these would sound very familiar. Theyre things like the cherry pick. Im sure people are aware of the oversimplification, obvious what that means. Others i had not seen described specifically before so i gave them weird names, things look the butterup and undercut or the certain uncertainty. A bunch of names. I was making them up. So ill get into a few of those examples in a minute first, going to that title im not a scientist. Im shower everybody has heard some version of that line before. It really sort of picked up in popularity, probably point 2009 or 2010 when he heard it a lot, related to Climate Change. It really sort of came from almost any politician you could fine. It was remarkably ubiquitous. I realized i should probably figure out where it came from so i tried to figure at out. Goes back farther than i anticipated. At first should i say, since im all about requiring evidence of people i cannot prom mis100 this is the very first time that someone used the line and its exactly this way, but its the first one i could find and a pretty good example. Actually goes back to september of 1980. During the end of the president ial campaign that year, thencandidate Ronald Reagan was asked during a campaign stop, i think it was in ohio, asked some questions about environmental issuesbut typically about sulfur dioxide, the primary component of acid rain. Dont hear much about these days. And ill just read you his quit. He said i have flown twice over mt. St. Helens. Im not a scientist and i dont know the figures but i have a suspicion that one Little Mountain out there has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in the world that hand been released in the last ten yours of alldriving and things of that kind that people are so concerned about. Okay. So, i feel like that should sound very familiar. People didnt use this on sulfur dioxide but the similar form racing how they talk about something. He starts by saying, im not a scientist and i dont know in thing theirs but heres a figure. Just goes right ahead and disavows expertise to start, and then offers up what amounts to an expert opinion. Obviously the line, im not a scientist, itself is basically meaningless. We n youre not a scientist. Its the but that fulls is the most important part, what they offer up instead of what an actual scientist i would say. I fine the technique amounts to to smoke screen. A way to put the experts the actual scientists in the corner that no one is going to bother listening to because they seem out of touch. Its a way to make it seem like we shouldnt listen to experts. And in reagans particular case here, he was very much wrong about this point on sulfur dioxide. Generally meeking when you hear the line, whatever follows it is wrong. Never actually heard a version where there was a little bit of right following it. Just quickly, so, mt. St. Hell loans at that point was releaseing 2,000 tons of sulfur dioxide a day into the atmosphere. Sounds like a lot but humans were releasing 81,000tons a day and thats just in the u. S. If he was referring to the eeruption of mt. St. Helens which happened three or four months before that, that was 1. 5 million tons per sorry eruption itself. That is still not enough. The said ten years of human activity choo we Something Like 200 million tons. Again, just in the u. S. It sounded reasonable, though, right . The idea of this huge massive explosion this had been a big deal in the u. S. At the time. It killed a bunch of people, this massive thing. To claim that humans couldnt possibly compete with Something Like that sort of sounds like it should make sense, and people have used similar techniques on Climate Change, how could we possibly change the climate. Were so small compared to the earth, about we do manage to change it pretty effectively. That is sort of the first version of that line that i ever found, and i find it to be a really good example because it took its not like somebody started using it then. It took a few decade before people used it again. I was so bizarre to be used all the time because it is such a meaningless thing to say. People dont say im not an economist, they dont say im not an expert on north korean culture and diplomacy. Just say the thing they want to say, and again, i really think its sort of stems from marginalized experts and i am not the only one that thought this was weird, republican strategist and consultant neighborhood mike mckenna who called the line im not a scientist the dumbest talking point in the history of man kind. Feel pretty good got having it as the title of a book. Im going through a couple of examples. I mentioned the chapter titles of names of techniques and i get asked a lot about which one of these people people can never decide, your favorite or least favorite. Hard to say. Its the one that wounds me the most, i think, its called the ridicule and smith. The concept here is that science and especially basic Scientific Research can often be described in absurd sounding terms because it is basic, done on model organizisms or on just cells, and when you just Say Something about this quickly its not going to sounds like youre curing cancer. Going to sound ridiculous. And politicians seize on that in order to try and question funding of that science. Always about funding. So always been trying to undercut our sort of support for federally funded research. So heres an example. This is from kentucky senator rand paul. A few years ago. He was talking about funding for the National Institutes of health, nih, and he said we did discover, they spent a Million Dollars trying to determine whether male fruit flies like younger female fruit flies. Think we could have polled the audience and saved a million bucks he gets a laugh because is does sound ridiculous. If that is actually what youre doing. But thats not even close. Its only like in the very be a sis of sense is correct and only without any sort of context. The lab he was actually talking about was at the university of michigan, and they do work on basically how healthy sexuality can promote healthy aging, and its the connection between sexuality and aging and other lines of research in this, but when you put it that way, it certainly done sound as ridiculous. Might actually be very useful, and you can do this for some much when it comes to basic research and especially basic research that involves model organisms like a fruit fly. It can sound ridiculous, or a mouse, or a zebra fish. Very valuable model organizisms that scientists use. Wont sound reasonable until you make it sound reason. This is why this wounds me so much, it really serves to sort of undermine all of our support for Scientific Research. If we think what the government is spending money on is ridiculous, then were not going to want the government to spend money on it anymore. But it is not all all ridiculous. Even if that particular research is not going cure a disease tomorrow, that is just out in how science works. We fund a whole ton of individual little basic bits of research that over years and decade pile on to each other until we come to usable answers for things, and we do if the with fruit flies or mice or other things. And the funding that the federal government has put out for that has resulted in incredible amounts of useful discoveries we live Something Like 30 years longer today than we did 100 years ago, largely because of federally funded basic Scientific Research, and that sounds a lot better when you put it that way than were spending a Million Dollars to study whether male fruit flies whatever. Just sounds ridiculous. People have been doing this using this technique for many years. Former senate william proximate mire, from wax, the income . Used to give out the Golden Fleece awards. Basically just trying to call out ridiculous sounding bits of government spending. Often focused on science because, again, itseesey to focus on science, he did get in trouble win thing the said was ridiculous was not ridiculous at all and now there are responses to this thing, something called the golden goose award, which takes things that sound ridiculous and then ended up being incredibly useful and gives them award mitchell favorite example was a study involving massaging rat pups, which does sound ridiculous, until you realize the study the results of the study was used to change how we treat premature babies and we have not only saved a whole lot of lives but billions of dollars in how hospitals have to manage premature babies. So, again, massaging rat pups, to saving premature babies, you can choose how you want to describe Scientific Research, and politicians, like paul, will sometimes choose to make it sound as ridiculous as possible, and he should know better because he is an m. D. , doctor, and should understand how basic science works. Anyway, thats the one that sort of gets me the most. Another example, another technique that i call the demonizer is another one that is actually very old. Almost universally used to connect immigration with disease. So, politicians who are very much against immigration are always looking for ways to sort of prove their opinion on this. One they come back to over and over is immigrants bring disease with them. So, this is a quote from an alabama congressman named mo brooks. This was a few years ago. Right when the was a Measles Outbreak happening that started at disneyland, actually. And he was talking about how at the same time there was this sort of stream of children who were showing up at the border from some Central American countries and he was sort of arguing we should be turning them back because theyre bringing disease in. So he said, unfortunately, our kid just arent prepared for a lot of the diseases that come in and are borne bill illegal aliens. Have to have simple for the plight of illegal aliened but they have not been blessed with in their home country the kind of health care, the kind after immunization we demand of our children in the united states. So, again, this probably sounds reasonable to a lot of people, that the u. S. Health care system is going to be better than, say, anything nick nicaragua. He mentioned immunization because of the Measles Outbreak. Im sure a lot of people are well aware of the antivaccination movement in the country. Wont go into the details hope to background of this but theres a bunch of it in the book, but i think its really important to realize just how wrong this sort of bit of speech is. He is saying, theyre coming in that might be bringing diseases that they dont have protection against and might harm us by doing so. So, according to the world health organization, the coverage at oneyearold babies at oneyearold covered by the mmr vaccine, in the u. S. Has been holding pretty steady or two the last couple of decade at 92 . 92 of one years are covered. Sounds okay, except the really ideal level for maintaining herd immunity, so that means that those of white house us are veining nateed. Herd immunity should be 95 because it this singlele most contagious disease for man. This is a little misleading because this is a nationwide stack. Actually a little more relevant to look at smaller areas because its not like we come into contact with the entire country. There are plenty of pockets in the u. S. Because of the antivaccination movement which are far blow this, ma rein county, orange county, where disneyland us, had dropped down into the 70 kind of range, which is far, far away. From what herd immunity requires. So anyway, were at 92 if you take the wide average. Mexico for the last couple of decades has 95 . Oneyearold year where they dipped and i dont know why, but generally they have been better than the u. S. Anything rag would nicaragua for a decade has been at 99 coverage. El salvador has been around 9495. Again, the implication was all these countries where these kidder coming from have no health care at all. Its nothing. And theyre going to come in to the u. S. And put all of us at risk, when in actuality those kids were put at risk by us. We were the ones who are much more likely to give them measles than the other way around. But this sort of technique is so old. Goes back into you can go back to aids crisis. There was a huge push to prevent people entering the country who are hiv positive. Again, without any particular scientific reason for this. There werent actually that mean people showing up at borders with who are hiv positive, and obviously we in the u. S. Were perfectly capable of spreading the disease ourselves. Just to she that these kinds of this kind of rhetoric can have farreaching implicationsings, because another of discussion about not letting people in they did pass a basically did not allow anyone to enter the country which was hiv positive and this leased until 2009 when president obama lifted it. No one was think about it anymore but that was in place all through the 2001s 2,000s and the nines. This is hilarious their immigration act of 1917, im just going to read you this to show how far back this fearmongerring goes. The following classes of aliens shall be excluded from admission into the united states. All idiots, imbeciles, teenle minded person, epileptic, insane pin persons, persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority, chronicle alcoholism, paupers, vagrants and people with tb or with a loathesome or dangerous contagious disease and goes on for a while. The opinion is, this has been used for so long, and it will always to certain people be a useful technique because its always going to sound scary to bring diseases into a country. Dont want these diseases. Generally speaking, if you hear a politician say Something Like this, the first step should be to doubt it. Not saying that there wont ever be a time when people when another country has peerer health care on a given issue that we do. Certainly possible. But generally speaking, the people who use this technique are not using actual science or data get to us believe it. So, that was a couple of examples