How can we ensure public, political, and media debate is based on evidence? With Tracey Brown, OBE, Director of Sense About Science

Data Malarkey - the podcast about using data smarter

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Tracey Brown, the director of Sense About Science, a role she’s held since its founding in 2002. Scientific evidence can be a powerful tool for insight, accountability, and change. Yet in public life – particularly in politics and the media – debate often revolves around claims based on shoddy or misrepresented evidence.

Sense About Science exists to change all that. The charity challenges the misrepresentation of science and evidence in public life and intervenes – often in partnership with others. It holds those responsible to account, and runs highly impactful, evidence-based campaigns. Under Tracey’s leadership, Sense About Science has assessed the transparency of many government departments, and championed peer review beyond academia – especially with the public, helping people make sense of science and evidence. In June 2017, Tracey was awarded an OBE for services to science.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 26 July 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Tracey reveals how the role of Sense About Science has evolved in the past 20 years. It started life with a baptism of fire and a cauldron of front page stories, with academics, activists, companies, and government departments battling it out. The issues it tackled included Andrew Wakefield’s bogus claims on the links between MMR and autism, mobile phones apparently frying your brain, and GM crops said to be accelerating the demise of healthy food. The truth, in each case, was rather different, and Sense About Science was in the vanguard of sharing real evidence, calmly and dispassionately.

We focus on data science and what can and should be done to make it not only palatable but also comprehensible to an uninformed lay public, starting the Sense About Science’s 2018 guide on the topic. The guide asks (and answers) three key questions: where did it come from, on what assumptions does it rest, and can it bear the weight of the expectations we heap upon it?

Tracey contends that statisticians and researchers need a change of perspective. They need to think of themselves less as producing evidence and more as answering questions that matter to society. This requires them to reframe their perspective and put themselves in the public’s shoes. She also argues – elegantly and persuasively – that Big Data is often not better data, and highlights both huge potential positives (and equally huge potential negatives) offered by the new generation of AI tools. The negatives are less ‘Skynet’ and more banal error, rolled out at scale.

Tracey also details her organisation’s global AllTrials campaign, designed to ensure that data from every study conducted are reported in the public domain, not just those that bring benefits and advantages to the company, research institution, or compound that benefit from positive research outcomes. The campaign highlights researchers’ legal, moral, and ethical responsibilities and is bringing about genuine change.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Sense About Science website – https://senseaboutscience.org

The charity on Twitter – https://twitter.com/senseaboutsci

Tracey’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracey-brown-42b2788/

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