Re: International Conference on Communications - IAEA

["ruth_weiner" <ruth_weiner@email.msn.com>]

>In Stockholm, June 2000, we had a one day workshop with 30 participants at
>SSI on information in radiation protection for editors in the field.
>Lars Persson
>Swedish Radiation Protection Institute

Was there a result of this meeting discernible in newspaper reports?   This
is not a facetious or even rhetorical question.  Vincent Covello came out
with the cited ideas about 15 years ago (or maybe even before).  At a
similar workshop in Washington in, as I recall, 1985, they sounded fresh and
new and convincing.  But by now I don't think people ignore the need to
communicate, few people try deliberately to be obscure, and finally, the
notion that "scientists don't know how to talk to ordinary people" is a
generalization that is mostly fiction (and insulting).

"... people are entitled to their opinions..." : I am certainly entitled to
the opinion that the earth is flat, but that doesn't make  the earth flat.
And by now there is plenty of evidence that such an opinion is simply wrong.
We do not, for example, teach creationism in public school, though many are
of the opinion that it accurately describes the way homo sapiens evolved.
What many of us are asking, in the LNT debate, is that it be acknowledged
that the accumulated evidence suggests a threshold of adverse effect  and
does not appear to support the LNT hypothesis.

I recognize that it is heresy currently (or at least politically incorrect)
to suggest that a conference on communication would serve no useful purpose
unless it can be shown that past conferences have had a tangible result.

Ruth Weiner
ruth_weiner@msn.com



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