science communication is kindness

A short reflection on why scientists should communicate publicly, and how to do it with care.

I have been thinking more about science communication.

Not just “how do I give a better talk?” or “how do I write a clearer blog post?” Those are important, but they feel like symptoms of a deeper question:

What does it mean to explain science in a way that actually respects the person listening?

I used to think of communication as something that happens after the real work. You do the research, write the paper, make the slides, and then package the knowledge for other people.

I do not think that anymore.

Communication is part of research culture. It shapes who can enter a field, who trusts a field, who benefits from a field, and who gets left outside of it. It is also part of public responsibility. Science is not produced in a vacuum. People fund it, live with its consequences, vote around it, misunderstand it, argue about it, and sometimes need it.

If we want people to care about science, we probably have to care about them first.

The audience is not generic

One lesson I learned from my undergraduate advisor, Judith E. Fan, is that a talk is not just a container for what the speaker knows.

A talk is an encounter between a speaker, an audience, and an idea.

That sounds obvious, but it changes everything. If I am talking to cognitive scientists, I can assume one kind of background. If I am talking to designers, engineers, high school students, or family members, I need a different path into the same idea. The point is not to make the science less rigorous. The point is to build the bridge from where people actually are.

Judy is very good at this. In her MIT talk, “Cognitive Tools for Making the Invisible Visible”, the ideas are subtle, but the talk still feels generous. There is a clear sense that the audience is being guided, not tested. The figures, examples, and structure are not decoration. They are part of the thinking.

That is the first thing I want to remember:

Good science communication begins by asking who the audience is, what they already know, and what would help them care.

Public communication is not extra credit

This year I also took COGS 260 with Bradley Voytek, a course on communicating science. The Winter 2026 syllabus and readings made the point from many angles: communication is not a side quest for people who happen to like writing or performing. It is a skill scientists should take seriously.

Brad is a great example of this because he is clearly not embarrassed by meeting people where they are. His zombie-brain work, including the TED-Ed videos on diagnosing a zombie’s brain and body (part one, part two), is funny, but it is not only funny. It uses a playful frame to smuggle in real neuroscience.

That feels important. Science communication does not have to mean sanding away the weirdness of science. Sometimes the weirdness is the door.

Brad’s outreach page also makes this broader point nicely: outreach can happen online, in classrooms, in museums, in public talks, and in strange cultural spaces where people are already curious. The scientist does not always need to drag people into the seminar room. Sometimes the better move is to go where attention already lives and bring the science there.

Why bother?

The obvious answer is that people deserve to understand science that affects their lives.

That is especially true when scientific ideas shape health, education, technology, climate, public policy, and everyday decisions. If researchers only talk to each other, then the public conversation gets filled by whoever is most confident, most entertaining, or most willing to oversimplify.

But there is also a selfish reason to communicate well: explaining an idea to real people reveals what I do and do not understand.

Writing for a broader audience is a stress test. If I cannot explain the core idea without hiding behind jargon, maybe I do not understand the core idea yet. If the story only works when I omit every caveat, maybe the story is too weak. If people consistently misunderstand the point, maybe the problem is not only with them.

Communication can be a public service and an idea engine at the same time.

This is one reason I liked Jamil Zaki’s essay “So you want to write about science…”, published on May 19, 2026. Zaki argues, among other things, that outreach can serve civic life and also sharpen the scientist’s own thinking. He also frames communication as a kind of service: the communicator is not the main character; the goal is to create an encounter between readers and ideas.

I like that framing a lot.

How to do it better

I am still learning, but a few principles feel useful.

First, know the audience. Not in a shallow demographic way, but in a practical empathy way. What do they care about? What are they afraid of? What words will open the door, and what words will quietly close it?

Second, center people. Science writing often becomes abstract because abstraction feels safer. But most readers understand people before they understand constructs. Instead of beginning with a technical phrase, begin with a situation someone can recognize. Then introduce the concept when it becomes useful.

Third, tell science as a process, not a monument. Science is not a pile of finished facts guarded by experts. It is a way of becoming less wrong. That means uncertainty is not the enemy of communication. It can be part of the story. The interesting thing is often how a question changed, how a result surprised someone, or how a field learned that an older explanation was not enough.

Fourth, be gentle with the reader’s attention. A sentence can be accurate and still be unkind. If it makes the reader carry too many terms, clauses, and assumptions at once, it might be technically correct but communicatively careless.

This does not mean talking down to people. It means taking responsibility for the path.

The goal

Good science communication is not about sounding impressive.

It is not about proving that I know a lot, or making every caveat visible at once, or compressing a whole literature into one heroic paragraph.

The goal is simpler and harder:

Help someone hold an idea they could not hold before.

That might mean giving them a metaphor. It might mean removing a piece of jargon. It might mean telling a story. It might mean admitting uncertainty. It might mean changing the talk because the audience in front of me is not the audience I imagined while making the slides.

That is why I keep coming back to kindness.

Science communication is kindness when it treats attention as precious, meets people where they are, and gives them a real path into the idea.

And if we are lucky, it makes the science better too.