STEAM Punk 002:  Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion

A science narrative is a story of everyone.  It puts everyone in our species on an equal footing by showing how we all got here.  That makes the science narrative fit perfectly with Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. 

If you web search for EDI you’ll find a lot of policies of businesses and universities, where people are actively searching for a shared narrative for their groups that everyone can participate in by talking about life as they know it. 

That’s a good start.  But businesses and universities are organizations that exist to achieve some goal.  So even without intending to, the people in those organizations focus their efforts on figuring out what EDI means as it relates to their goals.  That means better relations with their employees and customers to help them make money, or overcoming obstacles to people getting education, or whatever it happens to be. 

Theatre, which is what I work in, takes the ideas of EDI all the way.  Professional theatre is a business, but more than that it’s the art of recreating the entire world and as many variations on it as people can imagine.  You make a story personally meaningful to someone by making them feel like they have important things in common with the protagonists.  The highest level of success in the art is to be able make anyone’s story personally meaningful to anyone else. 

In his book The Descent of Man, in 1871, Charles Darwin proposed how the Theory of Evolution could be used to study human psychology.  In his final book, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, he got some actors to collaborate with him to describe different emotions.  But it took 120 more years for people to develop the information processing technology that made the field of evolutionary psychology possible.    (more…)

STEAM Punk 001: The Quest for a New American Narrative

I went to the Phoenix March and Rally for Science in 2017 as a videographer. About 7,000 people came to march in support of science.  About two dozen people who work in and around science gave speeches in Cesar Chavez Plaza before and after the march. 

At that point I’d been an activist for science and education for 13 years.  As an engineer friend of mine asked me later, how do you protest for science?  Science is a mental tool for figuring things out.  It’s not like people are getting thrown in jail for thinking. 

There are a lot of parts to it.  There’s government funding for research, the government’s use of research in policy making, funding for public education, and the attitudes toward science of elected officials.  Those were all things people talked about at the march.  But it goes even further than that.

There were a lot of people at the March who had degrees and careers in science but were new to activism.  But there are also a lot of people like me who have a lot of experience with activism.  The goal isn’t to get people to remember to use science.  The goal is to change our narrative.  (more…)

Phoenix March for Science- Ezra Niesen

I got to give a speech at the Phoenix March and Rally for Science in 2017.  I talk about how the founder of modern theatre discovered the first principles of evolutionary psychology about a century ago and how the concepts are easy to talk about in terms of ideas people are already familiar with.

Phoenix March for Science

About 7,000 people came to the Phoenix March and Rally for Science on Earth Day 2017.  Eight scientists and public figures gave speeches before the march.  Meanwhile some other people had a rally for conservativism at the state capitol.

The March for Science:  What Does Political Neutrality Mean?

I’ve been an activist for science and education for 13 years.  There are a lot of teachers and social activists in my family.  Now we have the March for Science coming up in April.  I see a lot of discussion about it online by people who look like they’re new to activism.  I see a lot of debate about the meaning of scientific political neutrality.  I also see a lot of people trying to adopt the March for Science into the Democratic Party or other political groups.  So I’ve got a few things to say about this that I hope will help focus people’s efforts in constructive directions instead of the movement bogging down in a bunch of internal disagreement like activist movements so often do.

Education is the act of making the student’s mental model of the world more closely correspond to reality.  The success of education is measured by the increase in the student’s ability to succeed at his or her goals.

These are not ideological statements.  These are the basic definitions of education that every certified teacher in the US learns in the course of their certification training. (more…)