Appalling and infuriating. As a Maine resident, I cannot think of a reason not to take every cent of federal tax and apply it to Maine state taxes instead.

I want to keep fighting the good fight, but an institutional shift toward the hype side of things has put me on the sidelines. Will it be more successful than my approach? 🤷‍♂️ All I know is that it's vital to keep working together on the problem to help sustain our wonderful scientific communities.

A backwoods politician who mangled proverbs said "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't look him in the eye." I feel like in #SciComm we're desperately trying to drag more people to the water, but we're not successful at looking them in the eye to explain why. I don't have a solution for it.

What stories should we tell, via what media? How can we build a more effective, accurate scientist->comms->influential media->broader audience pipeline? Should we target those who might care or blast to everyone? Is it even possible within an influencer, TikTok, Insta, Meta culture?

Now we're ~waves around~ here. There's been a failure, but where? Current research is 🤯 but so few people know. In a society, whose responsibility is it to engage, educate and excite people about a subject they find opaque? It looks like whoever it is, we/they haven't done a good enough job.

Others focus on feel-good stories and mass media, which can lead to overselling. It's another way of doing it, but, as others have pointed out, it can backfire, e.g., HGP->"blueprint of life"->clinical nirvana. The HGP's huge positive effects can be overshadowed by the hype it didn't live up to.

I was in institutional comms. I covered basic biomedical science, important to document but only v rarely mass media fodder IMO. My main audience was those who understood the importance and implications of the small gains for medical progress, without hype or much "up close and personal" stuff.