In a earlier this week, the authors made a plea for the government to "communicate about [H5N1] more efficiently and effectively." Who could disagree? But their title opens with a dogmatic statement, "Uncertainty Isn't a Bad Word," and the piece calls for our federal agencies to "communicate what they don't know as clearly as what they do know." This may hold true for enlightened academics, but when it comes to the general public, uncertainty is somewhere between delicate and dangerous cargo.
Uncertainty is indeed a bad word for mass communication when it's not handled properly. Humans communicate through a set of core principles that are identical for all disciplines. For the most part there is no "science communication" any more than there is "economic communication" or even "Hollywood communication.
" There is just communication of information in general. For every discipline, information is presented and argued according to basic principles that are thousands of years old. Ideally three things are presented: First, a context is established.
Then a problem is identified, and then the actions to solve it are presented. One of the core consequences of this dynamic is that there are two basic audiences -- those who already know the topic, and those who do not. In the work my group has done training scientists in communication, we have developed an extremely simple yet powerful diagram to convey this divide: The inner circle is everyone who knows the topic well.
These people do.