S4 Ep 7 - Naomi Oreskes on 'Writing on Ignorance'

"In response to that article, I was getting hate mail. I was getting attacked. I thought, these people have a script. This is a story that people need to understand. This isn't just something of academic interest. This is something that has real political and cultural consequences."

Today's very special guest is acclaimed historian of science, Professor Naomi Oreskes, author of Merchants of Doubt, Science on a Mission and her most recent book with long time collaborator Erik Conway – The Big Myth – all about understanding the rise of free-market fundamentalism.

Naomi discusses what lead her shift from exploration geologist to historian and philosopher of science, as well as her somewhat accidental pathway into public discussions on pressing concerns such as climate change, trust in science, and the escalation of misinformation in the public realm.

Naomi also introduces us to the fascinating field of agnotology – the study of socially constructed ignorance. While Naomi has often written about ignorance or doubt that was deliberately cultivated by bad faith actors, she also emphasises the importance of studying ‘inadvertent ignorance.’  This is when the attention of researchers becomes focussed on certain sets of issues and not others, not due to malevolent aims, but rather due to background assumptions, commitments and even funding sources. Of course, our attention can’t be directed everywhere at once, but it is the inevitability and pervasiveness of such ‘directive forces’ that makes studying them so important.

Transcript at: www.hpsunimelb.org/post/s4-ep-7-naomi-oreskes-on-writing-on-ignorance

Relevant links:

• Naomi Oreskes | Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
• 'Merchants of Doubt' | Naomi Oreskes | ABC listen
• 'Why we should trust scientists' | Naomi Oreskes | TED YouTube
• ‘Science on a Mission’ | Naomi Oreskes | Science News
• Excerpt from ‘The Big Myth’ | Oreskes & Conway | Harvard Gazette
• Fifteen Questions: Naomi Oreskes on Climate Change Denial, Apolitical Scientists, and Her Favorite Rocks | Magazine | The Harvard Crimson

Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds.

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.

Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

Transcript

Naomi Oreskes: “In response to that article, I was getting hate mail. I was getting attacked.I thought, these people have a script. This is a story that people need to understand. This isn't just something of academic interest. This is something that has real political and cultural consequences.”

Samara Greenwood: Welcome to The HPS Podcast, where we discuss all things history, philosophy, and social studies of science. I'm your host, Samara Greenwood. 

Today I am thrilled to be talking with acclaimed historian of science, Professor Naomi Oreskes – author of such wonderful publications as Merchants of Doubt, Why Trust Science, Science on a Mission and her most recent book with long-time collaborator Erik Conway – The Big Myth – all about understanding the rise of extremist free-market fundamentalism.

In our conversation Naomi discusses what led her shift from exploration geologist to historian and philosopher of science, as well as her somewhat accidental pathway into public discussions on such pressing concerns as climate change, trust in science, and the escalation of misinformation in the public realm.

Naomi also introduces us to the fascinating field of agnotology – the study of socially constructed ignorance. While in many cases Naomi has written about, ignorance or doubt was been deliberately cultivated by bad faith actors, she also emphasises the importance of studying ‘inadvertent ignorance.’  This is when the attention of researchers becomes focussed on certain sets of issues and not others, not because of malevolent aims, but rather due to particular background assumptions, commitments or even sources of funding. Of course, our attention can’t be directed everywhere at once, but it is the inevitability and pervasiveness of such ‘directive forces’ that makes studying them so important.

 _________________________________________________________________________________________

Samara Greenwood: First of all, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Naomi. It's great to have you.

Naomi Oreskes: You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

Samara Greenwood: I'm really interested to know what led you to history of science.

Naomi Oreskes: In fact, I was a scientist in Australia. I worked as an exploration geologist in the outback of South Australia. 

There were really two things. I was interested in philosophy of science, and I read philosophy of science in my spare time. I guess that already marked me as someone a little unusual. In the outback at night, there's nothing to do except read or look at the stars. So, I found myself reading a lot of philosophy, a lot of theology. One of the things that struck me was that the philosophy of science that I was reading bore no resemblance whatsoever to anything that I was actually doing as a working, practicing scientist. I became interested in that gap. That gap between what philosophers of science were saying about science versus my experience of doing science. 

The other thing had to do with an experience I had before I got to Australia. So, I started my undergraduate education in the United States in 1976, that was just a few years after the development of the theory of plate tectonics. I talk about this in the introduction to my first book, The Rejection of Continental Drift. My professors in the United States were telling us how this was such an exciting time to do geology because we had this great new theory that had really opened up all these interesting lines of investigation. Then, I went overseas to study in England. I studied at Imperial College, University of London, and my professor's attitude towards plate tectonics was very different. It was much more evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, that it was something that people had kind of known about for a long time. In fact, Arthur Holmes had written about it in the 1920s. It was good, it was definitely a step forward, but they didn't treat it as if it was anything rather dramatic. That was quite shocking to see these very different attitudes about what had just happened in our own science.

So that combination of experiences, when I came back to the United States to go to graduate school, I thought, ‘Well, let me take a philosophy of science class, because it's something I've always been interested in’. I met a bunch of great scholars, Peter Galison, Nancy Cartwright, John Dupre. I was very lucky that in this moment at Stanford, there were these really terrific philosophers of science who were engaged with history of science. It was a moment where HPS was a project where philosophers were taking seriously what Kuhn had said about not considering history just to be anecdote or chronology. It was a really vital, exciting time in the field. Also, sociology of scientific knowledge was getting a lot of attention. So, it just felt like a very, very exciting time to be interested in these questions. 

I had always been interested in the background and also to meet people who earned a living doing this work. Growing up, I didn't know that history of science was a profession where you could get a paycheck. To realise you could actually study these things and still eat dinner, that was pretty exciting! 

So that's my journey into history and philosophy of science.

Samara Greenwood: Today though, I'd like to focus our discussion on your highly successful work in bridging the gap between academic history of science and public debate. To start, I'm interested to know what initially motivated you to begin working in these more public facing ways?

Naomi Oreskes: So that began in the mid-2000s when I met Eric Conway, who's my long-term collaborator. Eric and I met at a rather obscure conference, The International Commission on the History of Meteorology. Not exactly one of the world's giant conferences, I think 80 or 90 people. 

It just happened that I had recently published my article on the scientific consensus on climate change, which was the first peer reviewed article to look at the question, ‘Is there a scientific consensus on this issue?’ 

In response to that article, I was getting hate mail. I was getting attacked. That was a very odd moment in my life. I hadn't really sought out the public sphere, but the public sphere had come to me. 

So over drinks one night at this meeting, I mentioned what was happening and Eric – who I had never met before - said, ‘Well, who are the people who are attacking you?’ I said, ‘Well, there's a few, but particularly this one guy named Fred Singer.’ Eric said, ‘Well, Naomi, that's the same person who attacked Sherry [Sherwood] Rowland, Mario Molina, and Paul Crutzen over the discovery of the ozone hole.’

I remember that very clearly because I remember thinking, ‘Huh?’ Like, that was just very weird.

Then I said, ‘Wait, did you just mention my name in the same sentence as Sherry Rowland, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century?’ Not just a great scientist, but Sherry Rowland had always been sort of a hero to me because he was a great scientist who was also a great public figure. Eric said, ‘Yeah, I have a whole folder of stuff back at the ranch in California about these attacks on the ozone scientists.’ He said, ‘I'll send them to you when I get home.’

So, he did. I started looking at these materials and two things happened. One was that it was exactly identical to what was happening to me. It was like that game of Madlibs. You take out the word ‘ozone’ and put in ‘climate change’, take out ‘Roland’, put in ‘Oreskes’, and I thought, ‘These people have a script. This is a story that people need to understand. This isn't just something of academic interest. This is something that has real political and cultural consequences.’

As we started digging, and began to work together, I actually said to Eric, ‘What would you think about me seeing if we can find ourselves an agent or talking to editors?’ or something like that. I can't remember exactly, but I remember starting to think this was probably bigger. So, I called an editor who I'd worked with who I really liked, and I told her what it was, and she agreed. She gave me the names of some literary agents and encouraged me to talk to them. Once I started talking to agents, everyone agreed this was a story that could be a trade book. 

So, it wasn't like we made the decision to go public. It was more like we were pursuing a story that became clear needed to be told to the public.

Samara Greenwood: I did read in an article Eric said that you mentioned something about ‘the social responsibility of historians’ to convince him that this was maybe the pathway to go, 

Naomi Oreskes: Oh, did I? It's possible I said that, but I really don't remember. I don't think I had a very giant notion of the social responsibility of historians, but maybe I had some kind of notion of the social responsibility of scientists. Maybe I figured, ‘well, if scientists have a social responsibility, then historians do too.’ I can't really tell the scientists they have to take on social responsibility, but then shirk it as a historian. 

Samara Greenwood: That collaboration led to Merchants of Doubt which is a fabulous book where you and Eric explore how a small group of contrarian scientists helped obscure broad scientific agreement on issues, like you mentioned, of existence of climate change, as well as dangers of smoking, the effects of acid rain etc. I'm interested how you feel the book has contributed to public debate around these issues. Where has its impact really been strongest, do you think?

Naomi Oreskes: It is always hard to know as an author. You know what you've done, and you know what you've tried to do, and you never really know how the book is received by other people. Obviously, there are reviews, there are book sales and stuff, but I think for me, the biggest proof of the pudding is that the term ‘merchants of doubt’ is now used by people in other contexts and without citation, right?

The other day, I heard someone was talking about the soda industry, and they referred to them as ‘merchants of doubt’, and I thought, ‘Oh, that's kind of cool.’  We put that concept out there - that there are people who sell doubt in order to defend dangerous products - and you can now use that term in any situation where you see that happening. It could be the meat industry, it could be Coca Cola, it could be whatever. So, that's kind of gratifying.

Samara Greenwood: Definitely. And it is such a good term, isn't it? Merchants of doubt. It really captures something.

Naomi Oreskes: I guess the other thing is sometimes when I meet students who tell me they became historians of science or environmental scientists because of that book, and I actually meet quite a few young people who tell me that.

Samara Greenwood: Well, that is really interesting because it is something I'm going to get to later. But one of the questions is, how do we get a bit of a higher profile for history of science and HPS? And, I think some of these public facing ways is how you can. As you said, you didn't know that history of science was a way that you could make money, and it's still the case. Lots of people haven't heard of it. Just getting that voice out there is great.

In your most recent book with Eric, The Big Myth: How American business taught us to loathe government and love the free market, you appear to be shifting away a bit from history of science, but I noticed you reference many similar themes as you do in Merchants of Doubt.

So, I'm interested. What do you see as the similarities and differences between this new book and your work in history of science? Did you have a different goal here or was it similar?

Naomi Oreskes: Well, I think everything we've done is about knowledge and ignorance. 

So, in some ways, it's a departure because it's not about a particular science, right? Except in so far as to some degree, it's about economics, but it's not a work in the history of economics. 

But it is about knowledge, it is about information, and it is about disinformation. And, it is about how we come to believe the things we believe, true or false. In that sense, I don’t see it as a departure, but a hundred percent continuous with everything I've done before, because all my work has really been about understanding scientific knowledge, how scientists evaluate evidence, why scientists reject some ideas, but accept others. This is what I've argued alongside people like Robert Proctor, Londa Schiebinger, Alison Wiley, and others that, if you're interested in knowledge, at some point you have to be interested in ignorance too, because it's the flip side. If we're interested in how knowledge gets produced, then we also have to be interested in why sometimes knowledge isn't produced, or why knowledge is sometimes blocked or hindered. 

So, The Big Myth continues on that theme by looking hard at this question of how these myths about free markets have been perpetrated and how they've perpetuated ignorance or misunderstanding about the actual history of markets, the history of our economies, the role of child labour, etc. So many issues that we know a lot about historically, but yet get effaced because of the propagandistic promotion of free market neoliberal ideologies.

Samara Greenwood: Just on that question there, you mentioned both ignorance and misunderstanding. Do you see significant difference between those two or how they work? 

Naomi Oreskes: I think of ignorance as being kind of a broader category. There are many different forms of ignorance. So, someone could be ignorant because they've simply never learned about something - like naive or native state ignorance, people sometimes call it. Somebody could be ignorant because other people are actually deliberately trying to keep them in a state of ignorance. We could be confused because we've been subject to propaganda campaigns. So, there are many different forms. 

One thing I like to say about my own work, I consider myself to be working in the field of agnotology, the study of the social construction of ignorance. Because the people who first pioneered this field, people like Robert Proctor who worked on the tobacco industry, I think some people have the impression that agnotology is only about malevolent actors. And certainly, that’s an important part of this field, but it's not by any means the only part and maybe not even the most important. Because, if you really think about the sources of ignorance, the overt, disgraceful, malevolent, you know, tobacco industry, fossil fuel industry - I know I have to keep it polite here, but you know what I mean - those are egregious examples. They're important to understand because they're sort of Weberian end members, but they're probably not the dominant thing. I think much more common are these other forms of ignorance production have to do with laziness, sloppiness, various forms of self-interest, denial, motivated reasoning.

I mean, there are so many things that contribute to ignorance, many of which are not necessarily malevolent, but they can still have bad outcomes. Then there's also the inadvertent stuff. In some of my work I've distinguished between deliberate versus inadvertent. 

In my book, Science on a Mission, I talk about what I consider to be the inadvertent magnetological problem. The U. S. Navy supported oceanography, not for malevolent reasons, in fact, quite the opposite. They wanted to understand the oceans because this was the environment in which they operated, and they knew that if they had a good understanding of the ocean, they could operate effectively, and they could protect sailors and submariners from being killed from things like submarines crashing into seamounts. It's a worthy goal, and they are interested in the truth. Unlike the tobacco industry, they're not trying to hide the truth.

But by focusing attention on certain kinds of issues that were salient for submarine warfare, they also diverted attention away from other things. In the book I talk about how, particularly in American oceanography - not as much in the Soviet Union, there's different stories in different countries - but in the United States, most of American oceanography really focused on physical and chemical oceanography at the expense of biological oceanography. 

There are multiple reasons for that, but a major reason I think is the way the military priorities really focused attention on a certain set of physical issues. I don't want to overstate that. I'm not saying there was no biology done, because some people have gotten mad at me about this. Of course there was still biological research done. But, if you look at where the money flowed, how many people, the size of the ichthyology department at Scripps, for example, where I worked for many years, versus the size of the Marine Physical Lab, you see how in many, many ways the balance was shifted in favor of physical and chemical oceanography rather than biological.

Samara Greenwood: As listeners of the podcast know, I'm doing my PhD on context and science and looking at the classic case of feminism and primatology in the 1970s. There is a similar story, where it's not malevolent, yet there are forces at play that mean that certain ideas and certain theories are de-escalated while others are promoted.

As you say, it's not that it's anyone's consciously making these moves, yet some bits of knowledge get known more and others get suppressed. 

Naomi Oreskes: Exactly. I think in some ways that is more important because it's more prevalent, because in a sense, it's everywhere. No matter where you are, people's prior commitments, funding structures, background assumptions, there's a whole set of things that go on in all science, that will cause us to pay more attention to certain things than others.

On some level, you can argue that's inevitable because there's only so many hours in the day, only so many people. So, it's not malevolent. In fact, it's normal. But, it has really significant epistemic consequences, so it's relevant to look at it. That's why I say, agnotology in some ways is even more important because it's everywhere.

Samara Greenwood: A question that comes up for me a bit is this concept of what's deemed legitimate versus illegitimate. I'm wondering if that comes up in your work?

Naomi Oreskes: Absolutely. Yes, that's another area that's really important. We see that again everywhere in science. Particularly, feminists have called attention to why are certain kinds of investigations considered legitimate or mainstream and others are considered quirky, off track, or even the whole question of how we set priorities. 

In one of my books, I think this is in the oceanography book, I recount when I was in graduate school, the Dean of the School, who is a very famous geophysicist, said, you should always try to work on the next most important question. I remember thinking way back when in graduate school, ‘Yes, okay, but how do we know what is the next most important? And who decides what is most important?’ So that judgment about importance, and there are big anchoring effects. 

This is in my oceanography book. I remember now because part of the argument I make there is because there are big anchoring effects. If you have 50 years of Navy funding of oceanography in which they said, ‘understanding deep ocean circulation currents, sound transmission, these are the key things.’ Now you've spent 50 years doing that. Well, that's going to influence what comes next, because now you've developed a skill set. You've developed knowledge that makes it easy to do certain kinds of things and much harder to do others. 

It doesn't mean you can't do those other things, and it doesn't mean a creative and determined person couldn't do those other things. But the barrier to entry, the activation energy, is going to be much greater.

Samara Greenwood: Since its publication in 2010, we're talking about here Merchants of Doubt, we've seen an upswing in the spread of both misinformation and disinformation about science using many of the same tactics you identified, including personal attacks on scientists and clearly historians of science as well, denying evidence and arguing for more debate, even in cases where there is overwhelming evidence that urgent change is required.

I was particularly struck by this quote, just to include it here. 

Small numbers of people can have large negative impacts, especially if they are organized, determined and have access to power. 

So, I was wondering if you see value in a larger scale role, perhaps for historians of science in contributing to public debate on issues such as the spread of misinformation and distrust in science, might a more coordinated effort have an impact potentially?

Naomi Oreskes: Oh, interesting that we should be more coordinated. Absolutely, I've certainly been in many places where historians lament something that's going on in the world or lament that some conversation seems very ill informed or ahistorical. But yet, those same historians don't step up to the plate to see if there could be an intervention. I get it that it's not always obvious what the intervention could look like, but you have to start somewhere.

I have an interesting story about how I first started doing public things even before Merchants of Doubt. There was an incredibly idiotic opinion piece in a newspaper in America written by the novelist Michael Crichton, who was a highly opinionated jerk. He thought he knew better than everybody about just about everything and was highly sceptical about mainstream science for a variety of reasons. He wrote this piece that was sceptical of climate change. He became a big public climate denier for many years in the United States. He wrote this piece in which he said, climate change is bogus, just look at eugenics. And I remember reading this thing and thinking, ‘Okay, well, first of all, climate change is not bogus. Second of all, that's a very illogical argument.’ The fact that one group of people 100 years ago did something bad, that doesn't really tell you anything about a totally different group of people 100 years later in a completely different science.

I remember seeing this thing and thinking Dan Kevles or Gar Allen, one of these people who have written about the history of eugenics, should really respond to this. A day went by, I didn't see anything, two days went by, and then I was stuck in an airport with a delayed flight, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I'll just write something, I know enough about this.’

I hesitated because I was not an expert on the history of eugenics, but then I thought, I know enough about it to see why this argument Crichton is making is wrong. So, I write this piece, I mail it in, it gets published. Then, some months later, I, see Gar Allen at a workshop and so I tell the story and Gar says, ‘Well, why didn't you just call me? We could have done it together.’ I was like, Oh yeah, right. A lot of times we hesitate because we know there are people out there who know more about it than us. We're sensitive about expertise, and rightly so. We should be sensitive about that. We should be super respectful of the fact that often there are people who do know more about these issues than we do. But that's what we should do. As Gar said, pick up the phone and call them and say, ‘Hey, you know, how would you like to write a piece with me about this? Let's put our heads together.’ And if you think about it, that's not that hard a thing to do. And yet we rarely do it. And why do we not do it? I don't know. Why didn't I do it? It's a good question. I don't know why I didn't. I was junior person. I didn't know Gar that well. Gar was such a super incredibly generous, kind person that knowing what I know now, it's like crazy that I didn't pick up the phone, but maybe I thought he was a senior person. He wouldn't want to hear from me. I'm bothering him. 

I can easily imagine lots of junior people thinking they wouldn't call me. They'd think, ‘oh, Oreskes, she's way too busy. She won't take a call from me.’ Pick up the phone. What do you have to lose? Nothing. So that would be my plea to people is, call a friend who knows something about it and work together and write something and get involved.

Writing opinion pieces, it's a particular genre. It's quite different from what we do most of the time, but once you get used to it, it's not that hard. I mean, it's hard at first. It is hard at first. It's very hard initially writing 800 words because it's so unbelievably tiny compared to what we normally do. But then you get used to it and you get used to the feel of 800 words in a similar way that you get used to the feel of a 20-minute talk, right? 

Most of us are working on things that we know we need way more than 20 minutes to tell the whole story. But we learned how to do a 20-minute talk at a conference. So just as you can learn to do that, you can learn to write 800 words.

I'm going to get all these phone calls from junior people want to write opinion pieces.

Samara Greenwood: Yes, you might have opened a bag of worms there. But you mentioned collaboration there and that is something that historians of science don't do enough of perhaps. Perhaps if we could just in smaller projects do some collaboration where it is opinion pieces or something like this might be a good first step to doing more collaboration.

What is your collaboration experience been like with Eric? Do you find you work well together?

Naomi Oreskes: Oh yes, great. Well, we wouldn't have written three books if we didn't write work well together. I love collaborating. I was just actually talking to some students of mine about possibly having a collaborative book with them, and they were saying they like that idea because frankly it's kind of lonely just sitting in your office working on your dissertation by yourself.

It's an interesting thing about history because we're one of the least collaborative disciplines there is. I mean, if you look at scientists, they collaborate all the time. A lot of social scientists, economists, psychologists, they also collaborate all the time. But we still have this very traditional, one man, one book model.

I don't want to criticize that. I think for people who are happy working on their own, God bless you. And there can be something very satisfying about actually the sole author project where you really find your voice and you write something that is uniquely yours. I've done that and I have loved it. So, it's not a criticism of the traditional of the sole authored book, but I think we could have a bit more capacious notion of what constitutes work in our field that could involve more collaborative efforts. 

The great benefit of that, of course, is two things. In general, it's fun. I mean, it's fun to bounce off ideas off other people. Actually, there's many benefits. It's fun. It's just plain fun. Second of all, it's productive because having a colleague to say, ‘Hey, Naomi, how you doing in chapter three?’ It can keep you moving along and prevent you from pushing something to the back burner. 

We're all bombarded all the time with immediate things. A student needs us, our department chair needs us, an editor is saying, ‘where's that paper that was due?’ If you don't have a collaborator to keep the thing moving along, I think that's one of the reasons for many of us, our big projects actually stall, or at least are hard to finish, because we don't have anyone saying, ‘Well, how's it going? Where's that acid rain chapter?’ So having a collaborator can help keep the thing moving. 

Then there's just the obvious thing of bringing complementary expertise. I knew about climate science. If I had written something with Gar, who knew a lot about eugenics, then we know we're getting both parts right. Whereas when I wrote that piece, even though I was pretty sure I knew enough about eugenics to say what I needed to, there's always this anxiety that maybe I'm not getting it quite right because I have taught it, I've read the books, but I never actually went to the archives.

We also tend to set a very high bar for ourselves for what constitutes expertise. I guess that would be another thing. I think if you read widely in the literature of a field, even if you have not yourself written in it, our colleagues are good. We can trust their work, right? It's not like I haven't read lots of books about eugenics. I had, and I had taught it in my survey of 20th century history of science. So, we could trust our colleagues a little more and say, okay, well, I didn't write these books myself, but I did read them, so I can draw on what our colleagues have done and I can trust that they've done a good job.

Samara Greenwood: And that leads well onto my next question, which is at the start of last season, I interviewed Lorraine Daston and Peter Harrison as a pair who both were advocating for increased work in public facing history of science very much along the same lines, but they also acknowledged the challenge of making complex scientific histories accessible and even entertaining.

I was wondering what your approach is. How do you maintain that scholarly rigor at the same time as ensuring the work is accessible and engaging to non-specialists?

Naomi Oreskes: It's an interesting thing. I feel personally it's a mistake to emphasize how hard that is. I mean, doing really serious scholarly work is hard too, but we don't sit around gnashing our teeth about how hard it is to do serious work or how hard it is to spend the day in the archive. I mean, we accept that as the challenge, right? That's the challenge of doing serious historical work. 

So, I don't think it's harder. I think it's just a different kind of challenge. It's a different kind of work. And in a weird way, what makes it different is you have to relax. It's a little like skiing. I have a lot of skiing metaphors. You know, skiing can be hard. Skiing is a hard sport. And the paradox of skiing is to be good you have to relax, right? You have to relax, you have to trust the skis, you have to trust gravity. When I first started skiing, you know, I had this little mantra, gravity is my friend, right? You have to actually relax and go downhill.

And because we train ourselves not to do that, we train ourselves to be serious and scholarly, we find it hard to relax. But once you relax, you realize that public writing is not actually that hard. In fact, in some ways, it's easier because it's more like a normal conversation. 

That's the other way I think about it. If you're trying to reach an audience of people who are not all fellow scholars, fellow academics, what is it you need to do? Well, I think, first of all, you need to envision your reader. You have to have a sense in your head, who am I writing this for? It could be a general image, but it could also be something really specific, like your mother, your best friend from high school, your children, or in my case, my hairdresser.

Many years ago, I had a very great hairdresser who was great at cutting hair, and was also a very intelligent person. He'd gone to university, he was interested in the world, but for a variety of reasons he had professionalized as a hairdresser, but he was not at all unintelligent. So, sometimes when I would get to some complex idea, and I had to think about, okay, how am I going to explain this? I would just imagine myself talking to Ian. How would I explain this to Ian? It worked every single time, just by making my audience into a real person who I liked and who I respect and who I cared about. 

That's the other thing I also think about. it's really about being kind to your reader. Once you begin to imagine your reader as a real person, you realize why would you want to make your reader suffer, right? You wouldn't. You wouldn't do that to your mother or friend. You would want them to have a good time reading this book. Yet, in academic life, we almost never think of it that way. We never think, ‘oh, I really want people to have a good time reading my book.’ But why shouldn't they? Why shouldn't they have a good time, learn a lot, find out about interesting and important things, and also enjoy reading the book? I don't want to say it's easy, but as I just said, all the other stuff we do isn't easy too.

Nothing important in life is easy. Everything important in life takes work, takes practice, takes effort. But I want to reject the idea that writing for a broad audience is somehow uniquely difficult. I don't think that's true.

Samara Greenwood: It sounds like, again, it's one of those skills that once you practice, you can get to a point where you enjoy it and it is not too hard. Fabulous.

Naomi Oreskes: It's hard the first time because you're not used to it. Like the first time you strap on skis and try to go downhill. But once you get used to it, then it becomes easy and then it is fun. And then skiing is like one of the greatest feelings on earth when you're going down that slope and the sun is shining and the snow is cold and you know the winds in your face and you're like life is pretty darn good, you know, that popular book I wrote that paid royalties helped pay for it.

Samara Greenwood: Sometimes you have encountered sceptical or potentially resistant audiences to some of these messages. I was interested in how you address those kinds of challenges.

Naomi Oreskes: Well, I think it's a similar thing, right? Why are you there and why are they there? You're there because you've been invited. You think you have something to say, but the person has shown up, right? And the very fact they've shown up means that there's got to be at least some little piece of them that either is open to learning something new or they just want to be heard and I've come to think that the latter one is, is really huge.

Psychologists say, basically, fundamentally, all of us want to be seen, we want to be heard, and we want to be appreciated. And there are a lot of people in the world who don't feel seen. I have noticed that sometimes when I give public talks and someone asks a question that seems kind of aggressive, it would be easy to take offense or to become aggressive back, but I realized, they just want to be seen.

So I always try to take the question seriously. I always try to, as much as possible say, ‘well, it's a legitimate question’ because often it is. I remember years ago, I used to often get questions like, ‘well, how do we know [global warming is not caused by] volcanoes?’ That's a legitimate question. And thank you for the opportunity to explain - to geek out and explain - a little bit about carbon isotopes, you know, and sometimes a little bit of humor, right? I'm going to geek out now. So just hang with me. 

The other important thing is to realize you may or may not persuade that person if they're very locked in, probably not, but there could be other people in the audience who have the same question. It's a bit like teaching. In teaching, if a student asks a question, you could be pretty sure there are other students in the class who are also confused on that point, but they didn't have the courage to speak up. I always figure there are other people in the audience who maybe have wondered the same thing. So, I'm not just answering that one person. I'm actually answering anyone in the audience who might have thought, ‘Oh yeah, how do we know global warming isn't caused by volcanoes?’

Samara Greenwood: Looking back at your career, I'm sure you've observed significant shifts in the history of science, so I'm interested to know where you would like to see history of science head in the future.

Naomi Oreskes: I guess I would just say that I would want to encourage younger scholars not to be afraid to try to reach broader audiences, not to be afraid.

It's not about dumbing it down. It's about finding more capacious and expansive and inclusive ways to have a conversation. If you think about it as a form of DEI, a form of inclusivity, we're trying to include people in this conversation. Lots of people are interested in the topics we study. I mean, popular books about medicine sell like hotcakes, right? Or you think about the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, or the longitude books. There have been books that historians of science could have written, but didn't, and someone else got famous and made money. So, it's really about a kind of inclusivity. I would just really encourage junior scholars to embrace that, not to be afraid and to say, yeah, we can do this. 

Or the other thing I sometimes think about, if you go to an airport - Oh, another reason I love Australia is because I've seen my books in more airports in Australia than any other country on earth - but you go to an airport and there are a lot of history books for sale in airports and almost none of them are written by professional historians.

This isn't just about history of science is about history broadly construed. So, what is that telling us? It's telling us that people are interested in history, but not in the way we write it. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that we want to write a pop biography of a president. I mean, we might. But it means that if we're willing to think about writing in a more inviting, inclusive way, it's possible that there is an audience for this work. I think it's more than possible. I think we actually know that the audience is out there, but we haven't found the ways to reach them. 

I just think we should, because it would make the world a better place. You could actually make some money doing it and then go skiing or do whatever it is that makes you happy.

And more importantly, we sit around a lot of time bemoaning the state of our field. ‘People don't care. People don't love us.’ Well, it's not that they don't care and they don't listen, it's that they don't actually know what we do. They don't see it because we don't make it visible to them. We don't make it legible. But if we can make it legible, they could learn something, we could learn something. As I've already said, we could maybe make a little money. I mean, not big bucks, you don't get to quit your day job, but you know, you could pay for a good vacation, right? And we actually could make the world a better place.

Samara Greenwood: Oh, that is an excellent spot to finish the podcast. Thank you so much, Naomi, for coming on. It's been a delight.

Naomi Oreskes: You're welcome. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for inviting me.