As a child, I hated museums. They were full of more or less identifiable things, labelled with meaningless names, dates and places. In other words: They were boring. Guided tours did nothing to change that. They merely herded us around, restricting our movement and making us wait in front of things that the guide deemed interesting. By the time I was fifteen, I had been thoroughly and repeatedly convinced that museums were torture.

We are all storytellers. Each and every one of us is a world-builder and a creator of characters and stories. We just refer to it differently. We call our world a “bubble”, our character creation “education” or “learning” or “manipulation” or “judgment” and we call our stories “life”. But we are all observers and creators. None of us holds the ultimate truth, if there is any.

This also means that we all hold unique truths, initially defined by our parents and the environment in which we lived as children, but which we later develop into a distinct view of the world, the people around us, and their stories. We all have our own subjective truths, our own world, our identity and our view of the identities of others, our stories. All based on our individual experiences.

You’re in the middle of a conversation, but then: “Oh, there’s Claudia. Sorry, I really need to talk to her”. - You’ve given a talk, there’s no question in the Q&A, and the moderator asks something superficial before sending you off with a polite round of applause. - You’re halfway through a lecture, looking out at hundreds of blank faces, and no one answers the question you asked. This is boredom in action.

In just two months, the Left Party in Germany went from being virtually written off for this election to winning 8.8%. In the news, the success is described as “unexpected”, a “surprise” or even a “miracle”¹. Speculation is rife as to how they did it. I won’t argue with any of the theories, but I will add my own: The Left Party did an excellent job of storytelling.

In fact, the Left Party did such a good job that I kept their flyer (which happened to be the only direct campaign advertisement I received) as an example.

We need to stop leaving our audience stranded. Especially if we care about democracy.

That’s it, that’s all I wanted to say. You can go back to whatever you were doing, unless it involves leaving your audience stranded. Then please just stop.

Here’s an explanation so you have something else to do.

The Stranded Audience

First, we need to get the unpleasant business out of the way of actually looking at how to leave our audience helpless. The thing we shouldn’t do¹.

Lexical hedges are an essential part of good scientific writing, but for writers they are tripwires that need to be removed unless a writer wants to get rid of their readers. For a long time this was a conflict I did not know how to approach.

Phrases like “seems to” and “may” are valued by scientists as expressions of uncertainty in an environment that contains varying degrees of uncertainty but is almost never free of it. In writing, the same phrases are spurned as useless clutter that disrupts the flow of reading. Does this mean that scientists, like writers, need to avoid hedging if they want their writing to be accessible and engaging for all readers?

Oppenheimer and Barbie are great examples of how (not) to tell a story. But what really intrigued me was how it parallels the world of scientific discourse. In my opinion, contrary to what I expected, Barbie makes for a better scientist.

I grew up around physicists and the story of Oppenheimer intrigued me. I didn’t expect anything special, just a good movie with a chance of being great. I was disappointed. The storytelling in Oppenheimer is so bad that it undermines the whole movie.