HDYK Episode 8: Eminent ladybugologists and zombie ideas with Kaitlin Stack Whitney and Sara Hermann Artwork

How do you know?

It’s ironic that in an era of big data, truth sometimes seems more elusive than ever. To make better choices about how to manage our lives, our work, and our environment, we need to use the best possible information to guide us. But even with great data, humans don’t always make great choices- we misinterpret, we oversimplify, we fail to see fallacies in logic or flaws in the data itself- and even our most rational examinations of the numbers are fundamentally human, shaped by culture, prior experience, and our internal biases.In this podcast, we explore the process of how data becomes information, information becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes belief- and how, in turn, belief shapes the way we take and interpret data. From young learners to practicing scientists, the ways we incorporate information into our worldview is affected by our experiences. We combine social and data science perspectives with the study of how humans learn, in order to examine not just what we know, but how we know it.

All Episodes

How do you know?

HDYK Episode 8: Eminent ladybugologists and zombie ideas with Kaitlin Stack Whitney and Sara Hermann

February 03, 2022 • Christie Bahlai • Season 1 • Episode 8

What happens to public understanding when science communication goes wrong? Experts go on the media to talk about their work, and somehow, something doesn’t connect. This misinterpretation gains steam, and soon it becomes an outright conspiracy, used to manipulate, polarize and undermine one political agenda or reinforce another. The misunderstanding becomes the message- chances to communicate new findings get lost as we get pulled into conversations trying to debunk rumors and myths. Today, we’re tackling one of these zombie popular science ideas, once and for all.

Today is a special episode because we've got not one, but two experts to chat with us.

Kaitlin Stack Whitney is an Assistant Professor in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Rochester Institute of Technology. Her work centers Sustainability science and environmental policy, with particular interests in how human factors affect scientist’s approaches to natural resources.

Sara Hermann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Entomology at Penn State University. Sara’s work centers approaches from chemical ecology, physiology and behavior to study how insects make choices about what resources they use.

A complete episode transcript is available here.

This podcast is produced with the generous support of the Mozilla Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and with input from community members from Mozilla, the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network, and our colleagues and students at Kent State University. A special shout Jen Zink for audio production. Music featured in this episode is When, by Metre, and obtained from freemusicarchive.org under a CC-BY license. This podcast and its accompanying materials licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license- please share, like and use our stuff!

Some additional resources- here's what we're talking about- a news story featuring the 'not real ladybug' myth.

One of Sara's lab members, Dr. Jess Kansman, has an educational TikTok on ladybugs.