Experts have spent years asking how to make people trust expertise again. Usually that means asking some version of: How do we get people to again believe what we’re telling them?

It’s an important question. But I think it obscures one that’s even more foundational:

Can they use what we’re telling them?

Do you know how to tell whether your expertise is usable by the people whose decisions or outcomes or behaviors you want to improve or influence?

If you respond to that question by saying, “I’m a researcher, not a consultant,” feel free to stop reading.

But if your inability to answer that question well bothers you, here are a few more questions to start out with:

How well can you describe those people you want to use your expertise? Those decisions or outcomes or behaviors?

Aim beyond mere category in your descriptions. What’s their job? Where do they live? To whom do they answer? What’s at stake in the decision or outcome or behavior change? What are the obstacles to that change? Do they even know that they might have the kind of option you’re offering them? If not, what would need to change?

If you don’t think answering these questions is important, how do you expect your expertise to be valuable to the people you intend it for? The people you want to trust you?

Now that you know who you’re trying to reach, you can ask if your expertise is usable by them. “Usable” forms a rubric:

• Is it accessible? (And not just: Can they access it? But: Are they likely to?)

• Is it readily understandable?

• Is it applicable? To their discipline? Situation? Specific challenges? Values? Yes, their values.

• Is it actionable? Does it acknowledge its uncertainties while still arriving at concrete recommendations or options? Or does it melt into a puddle of caveats and whataboutisms? Nevertheless, does the expert help me decide choose or decide what to do?

• Finally: Is it timely? Does it arrive in time for them to use it? Or is it years after the apex of utility—well after the concrete of public opinion or bureaucratic response has been set? Because an imperfect answer today usually beats by anyone’s measure a definitive answer three years from now.

If your expertise is hard to use, hard to understand and/or hard to apply to a decision, you will today be much harder to trust, regardless of your credentials, rigor and facts.

Traditional expertise struggles to rebuild trust in part because it issues findings while the public and decision-makers need decisions.

Judgement can fill that gap. I define “judgement” here as an expert using what’s known—including what remains uncertain—to recommend what someone should do. It’s the fundamental skill and practice of the public expert.

But practicing judgement routinely requires that you deliver some things that conventional expert training frequently discourages:

• Integrating evidence beyond your narrow speciality;

• Interpreting incomplete evidence;

• Deeply understanding the users of your judgement (including their values);

• Making decisions under uncertainty; and

• Saying in public, “Given what we know, I would do X.”

To win back trust, expertise can’t just produce and protect knowledge, even though that’s what the research system is still largely designed to do.

The public expert combines knowledge with judgement, often at the edge of uncertainty, in ways that specific people can and will use.

Your public value as an expert increasingly lies in helping people make good decisions. Especially when nobody knows the answer.

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If you’re a researcher, there’ll come a time when you have to tell the story of something bigger than your research—a center you lead, the impact of a research proposal you’re seeking funding for, a policy you think the world should adopt.

That’s when the trouble usually begins.

Most researchers and research organizations don’t tell stories. Instead, they fill buckets and call them “stories.” For them, “the story” of the thing is a container for conveying every aspect, feature, benefit, program, partner and nuance of the thing.

A list of attributes isn’t a story. It’s a list. You can always add more. But adding more doesn’t make it mean more—in fact, quite the opposite.

Your story is your unique path to impact and how you connect the rest of the world to it. Lists and buckets give the illusion of heft and connection—everything’s in one place—but none of connection’s satisfactions. A bucket is a list with a handle, and now you’re handing it to someone else and saying, “Isn’t my bucket special?”

The sandy beach of Research—and the nearby beaches of Think Tank and Non-Profit—are filled with buckets just like yours, as far as your funders can see.

But it’s hard to tell a story; easy to write a list and add to it. That why bucket communications is the default mode of research storytelling, especially when something’s on the line. The bigger the stakes, the greater the temptation to write a safe list of projects and priorities—at the expense of propulsion, persuasion or even basic readability. It’s human nature, sadly: We’d rather sink clutching a long list than swim holding on to a tight narrative.

But if you can’t just dump the bucket on your audience, where do you start?

‘What Would Be Missing?’

Start with this question: What would be missing without this thing you’re trying to describe?

What questions wouldn’t get answered?

What foresight would disappear? What blind spots would grow? What assumptions would go untested? What truths about impact would remain obscured?

What work couldn’t proceed with confidence or speed? What problems won’t get solved in time, or solved quickly, or solved at all?

What decisions would be made more slowly, or less intelligently, or without any basis in evidence?

Which preparations won’t be made, or made incompletely, and with which consequences?

Which mistakes will continue to be made?

Which essential qualities would your organization or sector or the world lack?

For instance, imagine if the Wellcome Sanger Institute vanished overnight, here’s what would be missing:

• The global genomics community would lose its neutral hub for open-access sequencing and data sharing.

• Private firms would dominate genomic databases, walling off discoveries behind paywalls or patents.

• Rapid responses to pandemics (like COVID-19 variant tracking) would slow dramatically.

Sanger provides more than just global technical capacity. It anchors a model of large-scale biology in the public interest, ensuring openness and speed over ownership.

That’s not a bucket. In the right hands, that’s a story worthy of Hollywood.

Think ‘Hero, Overcoming the Threat’

The Sanger example shows us how asking “what would be missing” takes you prompts you to articulate necessity, which is another way of saying unique value—the kernel of any successful pitch.

Asking “what would be missing” also carries you away from listing and back to story, because it’s impossible to answer the question without thinking in narrative: “Without X, we lose Y, and then Z happens.”

Once you’ve assembled what would be missing, you can flip those into affirmatives: “In a world where decisions are driven by urgency and emotion, our work helps keep this institution grounded in evidence.” Or: If your program prevents data from vanishing into academic silos, your story becomes: “We make vital knowledge usable where it matters most.”

Dramatic narratives don’t begin with lists of character traits. They begin with a threat—and the story of how it’s overcome.

Don’t start with a list. Start with the threat. Start with “what would be missing”—and tell the story of how you make sure it’s not.

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If this piece hit home, try this exercise: Take whatever you’re currently trying to tell the story of—a proposal, a center, your work—and spend ten minutes free-writing on what would be missing without it. Let me know how it goes. I’m betting you’ll probably find the beginning of the story you’ve been trying to tell buried in those sentences.

If you're going to be an expert in public, sooner or later you're going to be wrong in public.

What you do next tells us everything – about whether we can trust you, about whether you actually have a process worthy of an expert, and about whether you're worthy of our attention and investment.

Or, conversely: whether you're just another pundit.

Maybe that sounds dramatic. After all, aren't talking heads on cable news and Twitter wrong constantly, seemingly without consequences? But that's the pundit model of public expertise, and it's rapidly becoming obsolete in our post-legacy-media world. What's replacing it? A direct-to-audience model built on two fundamental pillars:

1. Your unmediated relationship with your audience; and

2. Your ability to provide value as defined by that audience themselves.

The audience is keeping score now. And that changes everything.

The Right Kind of Wrong: Matt Yglesias's Masterclass

Every year, Matt Yglesias turns the email celebrating the anniversary of starting his Substack, Slow Boring, into a lesson in public expert accountability. He reviews what he launched the previous year and previews upcoming directions. (His 2024 initiatives were ambitious: launching a subscription podcast, identifying high-leverage down-ballot political races where subscribers’ contributions could make a difference to worthy candidates, and partnering with GiveWell to support effective charities.)

But what truly sets him apart from other public experts is his willingness in this email to own his mistakes for the past 12 months through a public audit of his hits and misses. His most significant miss this year? Ignoring clear signals about Joe Biden's decline, despite insider warnings. Rather than burying this error, Yglesias made it central to his anniversary letter, using it as a teachable moment about blind spots and cognitive biases.

Slow Boring

Four years of boring hard boards, slowly

Today is the fourth anniversary of Slow Boring and, as ever, a day for reflection, gratitude, and transparency about where we’ve been and where we’re going…

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2 years ago · 298 likes · 588 comments · Matthew Yglesias

Lots of people disagree with Yglesias’s politics and/or can’t stand his snark. But whether you align with his positions and style or not, his approach to accountability as a public expert is extraordinary:

• He frames his work as an ongoing project of exploration;

• He sets clear, measurable goals for his audience to track;

• He maintains a public scorecard of his insights and failures; and

• He explicitly connects his misses to future course corrections.

And this transparency package here isn't just admirable—it's strategic. It signals to his audience that they're not passive consumers but active stakeholders and participants in his intellectual journey.

When Experts Fail: The Cautionary Tale of Allan Lichtman

Contrast Yglesias with Allan Lichtman, the American University political scientist who had used his famous "The Keys to the White House" model to correctly predict every US presidential election since 1984—until this year’s.

But rather than examining his model's assumptions or acknowledging its limitations, Lichtman has blamed the voters, claiming misinformation (particularly from Elon Musk) had confused them about what truly mattered. In other words: Lichtman’s keys were right—it was the electorate that was wrong.

This response perfectly encapsulates the dying pundit model: rather than adapt or learn, blame the audience. It's a strategy that might have worked in the era of unidirectional media, but it's fatal in today's landscape of direct engagement. It’s proving fatal for Lichtman’s standing as a public expert with the media as well.

Weirdly, I admired Lichtman: At least he put his system on the line every four years. He just couldn’t turn the inevitable failure of that system into the next phase of his public expertise, because his access to an audience depended on the Keys always being right. That’s not expertise: That’s a schtick, or a magic trick.

The New Rules of Expert Credibility

The shift from pundit to direct-to-audience expert requires a fundamental mindset change. Yes, you want to be consistently accurate and deliver expert insights your audience can use. But you also want to:

• Maintain transparent processes;

• Acknowledge errors promptly and thoroughly;

• Demonstrate clear learning and adaptation; and

• Treat your audience as partners in your intellectual journey.

Consider incorporating these practices into your expert presence:

• Keep "error logs" where you analyze your misses;

• Publicly document how you've updated your thinking, especially on contentious issues;

• Maintain clear frameworks for when and how you'll change your mind publicly; and

• Practice active engagement with thoughtful criticism.

In future emails I’ll go more into some of these in depth with examples.

The Path Forward

The death of the pundit model doesn't mean the death of public expertise—quite the opposite. It means the emergence of a more authentic, accountable, and ultimately valuable form of expertise. To embrace it, stop treating media appearances as the endgame. Start treating your direct audience as the primary engine not just for amplifying your thinking, but for continuously improving your value as a public expert.

Remember: In the direct-to-audience age, being the right kind of wrong isn't just about damage control—it's about demonstrating and sharing what you see as an expert (using the Public Expert Formula) and how you’re evolving to see it more clearly. Your ability to publicly acknowledge and learn from mistakes will become one of your most important traits as a public expert. Not developing that trait is the biggest mistake you could make.

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Getting scientists to work with science communicators used to be easy, at least when I was a science communicator. Tell them you’re committed to communicating their work accurately (unlike the media) and, if that didn’t persuade them, tell them what you do is “the opposite of marketing.”

Their eyes would pop wide at this phrase. For them, “the opposite of marketing” meant: The opposite of hype, exaggeration, and distortion—the opposite of lying. “The opposite of marketing” opened the doors of the mustiest of scientific hermits, because marketing was the devil. And even if I later used some marketing tactics on their behalf, the enemy of their enemy was their always their friend.

I’ve been thinking about “the opposite of marketing” ever since reading a recent piece by Paul von Zielbauer, a former New York Times reporter, who used his Substack to ask hard questions about a study published in Nature Aging from Stanford researchers claiming, as Fox News put it, “aging speeds up ‘massively’ at two points in one’s lifetime” (around age 45 and again at around age 60) due to what Stanford Medicine’s comms team termed “massive biomolecular shifts” that make biological aging in humans “anything but constant.”

If you regularly read health research, you develop a pretty sensitive bullshit detector. Mine went all Geiger counter when that study came out. Unfortunately, the legacy media’s didn’t—part of a “deliberate two-step,” as Von Zielbauer lays it out, “that is all too common in the world of grant-funded research”:

• First, researchers and their research comms team oversell the findings of a study in their press comms;

• Then, journalists read the press comms instead of reading the study and print the headline the research comms team want them to;

• Stanford gets “major-media coverage for research that future donors will surely notice (and potentially reward), while

• “The news companies banked lots of revenue-generating clicks.”

Von Zielbauer’s right: The two-step is deliberate, and it’s all too common as well. There’s a tweetstorm or Substack or (or even sometimes, if we’re lucky, an article in the legacy media) seemingly every week lamenting how the marketing of a study got way out over the skis of the actual findings and then, instead of being corrected by the legacy media, gets exploited by those outlets (rushed and/or science-illiterate) for their own ends.

What confuses me is von Zielbauer’s conclusion, which everybody else always reaches as well: We need better guardrails, because…this shouldn’t be happening. This isn’t what science/research do.

Really?

Is it a bug, or a feature?

The Media-Centric Communications Trap

I think to understand this fully, we need to go back to the old days of research communications. By which I mean: Before the pandemic.

Because, back in the old days, reseachers and their communications folk spent quite a lot of time feeling helpless—supplicants trapped in a media-centric communications world.

That doesn’t sound like “Saw IV” if you’ve never had to live it. But if you’ve been a researcher who wanted to reach an audience you couldn’t already reach, you had little choice but to try to reach it through the media, which theoretically might have that audience (who knew?). So you pitched/sucked up to the media in a dozen different ways that almost always left you feeling exhausted, ignored, misunderstood or used—sometimes all of the above. Then you’d have to do it all over again the next time you had a new paper or something to say. They had the power; they had the platforms. And, unless it wasn’t crystal clear, they really didn’t care about you or your nuances or that important thing they left out of the quote.

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YouTube and Substack and X et al. have changed the game for researchers. These direct-to-public platforms have given rise to what I call the new public experts, experts who use their own content and the platforms’ conversational capabilities to cultivate their own audiences, without intermediaries. As traditional media implodes, direct-to-public media continues to grow. The current presidential campaign—in which both major candidates avoided legacy media interviews but rushed to talk to podcasters—exemplifies the shift. The Age of Niches is upon us. If you’re not joining it, you should be. It is audience-centric and expert-centric, not media-centric. It is altogether healthier and more productive for all parties (except for the legacy media).

Of course, legacy media are still with us, and you or your communications folk might still think dealing with them is to your advantage. So this is where I ask: What’s the legacy for researchers of decades of media-centric communications? What are the maladpative habits that research communications has learned from decades of putting the media and its priorities first—and that don’t transfer well to being a new public expert?

Here’s my first draft at a list:

• Thinking communicating with the public is just simplification. Because that’s what the media do. When we don’t see another way of reaching our audience, we don’t think about how we might deliver value to those audiences directly, through the utility of our expertise.

• Framing everything with news pegs. Media-centric communications values research-based insights only when they dovetail tightly with “news pegs” (i.e., current events that are driving or are good bets to drive the news). That sidelines insights about the drivers of broader, less visible trends and insights about microtrends that might be valuable to niche audiences—both of which are the bread and butter of new public experts.

• Waiting to get picked instead of picking ourselves. Media-centric communications is about getting quoted or chosen for publication—a process that makes you the supplicant to reporters and editors and makes you completely dependent. That defines “success” as being included in others’ narratives, regardless of how divergent they are from our own. Thinking that communications is trying to get quoted rather than trying to deliver maximum value directly to your growing audience/community and figuring out your best modes for doing that. Cultivating obsequiousness to reporters and editors. Depending too much on media agendas, business models, trends and platforms to get our insights heard, start conversations and grow audiences.

• Confusing media power with communications power. Defining “success” as access to media power rather than direct access to our target audiences.

• Hating some of what makes us expert. Learning that nuance and uncertainty are handicaps, that process is weakness, and that what you think and know is the last thing you should say out loud.

• Conflict rather than conversation. Thinking that communications is adversarial and unpleasant, a game that you win or survive in an exchange with the media, rather than a conversation that you invest in and that’s ongoing.

• Excusing distortion. Thinking that distorting or exaggerating findings are OK if they get the media’s attention.

That last one brings us back to whether we all get old much faster in some random-sounding years according to a study done of a handful of rich white Nothern Californians.

Distorting Research Findings: A Feature, Not a Bug

We all live in Information Space now, as Brian Morrissey calls it. And in Information Space, everyone is vying for your attention.

Everyone, including science.

And getting attention through old-fashioned means—through the media, or even through an algorithm—is now extremely difficult, almost a matter of luck or magic. If the playing field is level, it requires some mysterious and magical combination of timeliness, outrageousness, counterintuitiveness, and a healthy pre-existing network that spontaneously agrees that sharing your message will benefit them as well.

This is why large, well-funded universities and research centers have public information officers. Their job is to get attention for their organizations’ and institutions’ research and researchers. If they’re doing their job, they’re looking for every way possible to make your new research and your work not just relevant enough, but exciting enough and urgent enough to break through the garbage-disposal noise levels of Information Space. It’s they’re job to push that envelope. In doing so, sometimes they break it.

This is a feature, not a bug, of institutional science communication today.

The media critic Alexander Cockburn once said that the corrections box in The New York Times functioned to assure you that everything else in the paper was accurate. Stories like von Zielbauer’s have the same function. That’s not a criticism of their existence. It’s an admission of the obvious: If we’re catching this many overhyped, overframed studies, how many more are slipping by unnoted, assumed to be accurate representations of the underlying science?

As a scientist or other kind of researcher, you probably understand the benefits of promoting your new research. But as a public expert, you should also understand that, once you offer your research up to Information Space through this system—the science-media-industrial-hype complex, you are committing to go right up to the line of credibility—and probably step over it. You’re entering a process and a system that punish modesty and reward exaggeration. And that this is a bad habit—not the worst—of a media-centric communications posture.

It’s a myth that PIOs and science communicators overframe studies on their own, while the authors of the study toil away in their labs, unaware of the marketing sins being committed in the name of their paper. In my experience, not a single piece of comms goes out promoting a study without at least the lead author signing off on the copy. Study authors are on the ground floor of formulating the communications strategy for the study—which includes development of the messaging, which of course the authors will have to know for interviews.

In the science-media-industrial-hype complex, there are no innocents.

There is no “opposite of marketing” anymore.

Unless it’s engaging honestly and directly with your audience.

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Eventually as a public expert you will have an idea a) for a book, or b) that you need to write a book, or c) that your insights and/or the issue you care most deeply about would benefit from the kind of attention that only publishing a book would provide.

So you will start thinking about a book. In fact, you probably already are.

And then you remember that we’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century and wonder: Is a new book really still the best way to introduce and spread an idea? Or is it more like trying to “do math on an abacus,” as a colleague recently put it? Why agonize over a 60,000-word book—which will take at least 24 months to write, pitch and publish in the traditional way, somewhat less if you’re self-publishing—when you can today launch an idea instantly?

Because—assuming you actually have an idea and a narrative to support a book-length treatment—nothing that displace a book as the cornerstone of a strategy to promote a big idea. Especially to policymakers and decision makers. Done correctly, it is superb ideas marketing.

But the choice isn’t book vs. getting busier at some digital things. To succeed—indeed, even to get published—you will have to have a plan to combine the book with content in these more immediate, digestible and interactive formats. A plan to pave the way for the book with your audiences and turn them into ambassadors, and also to promote the book and its core ideas.

I call this strategy book plus, and it is the most fruitful way to approach launching both a book and launching a big idea.

“Book plus,” though, requires something before book (in addition to the plan for the plus). Before you write the book — regardless of whether you’re pitching to an agent/publisher or self-publishing—you need to already have a robust platform or platforms where your audience is gathering around your insights. You can’t publish the book and then start throwing out content and hoping people see it. You need to create a warm room.

Why a book? Five reasons

Let’s touch briefly on five reasons that, yes, you still want to write a book today:

• It’s the best content peg to get you invited to external platforms. From media interviews to podcast guesting to talks to panel discussions, there’s still nothing that gets you invited more than a new book.

• It frames the issue for everyone. A book is an emphatic frame around the chaos. It helps us see something we didn’t otherwise see—with a great title as the headline for that new way of seeing.

• It can become synonymous with its big idea—and associate you with the idea. It can be amazingly good ideas marketing—again, especially if the book title or a key phrase from the book is memorable, even meme-able.

• It’s durable. Certainly more durable than a report or a series of pieces on LinkedIn. It’s a flag in the ground that can change the cognitive landscape.

• It’s a statement of your intent and authority as well as of the issue’s gravitas. Writing a book signals an urgency (no matter how long it took to write) and seriousness of purpose about the issue you’ve addressed. This is a bit of a tautology—but being able to write a book about something signals to many that, in fact, it’s a serious issue worthy of book-length consideration. And it’s a big statement of intent on the author’s part, especially if they’re an advocate on the issue.

A sample Book Plus

What would a book plus strategy look like? Maybe some combination of

• A talk for conference keynotes, ideas festivals, etc.

• A video explainer series of key concepts from the book.

• A newsletter series with excerpts from the book.

• Outreach to podcasts and newsletters whose topics and audiences match up well with yours.

• Private roundtable briefings for foundations, policymakers, philanthropists, etc.

• An executive summary of the book for policymakers ahead of these briefings.

• A Reddit AMA (for that SEO goodness).

• An infographic series pegged to book themes to prompt discussion and build awareness among media and social.

Any/all of this could be attempted without the book—but I’m hoping you see how a book can be the peg for all of these things, making it much easier to launch each of them and link them.

Author platforms, or: How do you warm the room?

Jane Friedman, an indispensable expert in strategies for getting books publishing, says definitively that you shouldn’t bother pitching a book proposal to either an agent or a publisher unless you can outline a credible marketing plan, rooted in your author platform—which she defines as “an ability to sell books because of who you are or who you can reach.”

(Why do you have to sell your book? Because publishers don’t do that anymore.)

Books reach two groups of people: Those you already reach, and those you can reach because of who you are + what your book is about. And here’s something heretofore undisclosed: The platform you build to reach both—the author’s platform—is identical to the platform you build to become a public expert.

Which is NOT, Friedman hastens to add, about marketing or making a ruckus on social. It’s “about making waves that attract other people to you”—which, she writes, includes steps such as

• Publishing or distributing quality work in outlets you want to be identified with and that your target audience reads.

• Producing a body of work on your own platform—e.g., blog, e-mail newsletter, social network, podcast, video, digital downloads, etc—that gathers quality followers or a community of people who are interested in what you have to say. This is usually a longterm process.

• Speaking at and/or attending events where you meet new people and extend your network of contacts.

• Finding meaningful ways to engage with and develop your target audience, whether through content, events, online marketing/promotion, etc.

• Partnering with peers or influencers to tackle a new project and/or extend your visibility.

All ways of sharing your expertise regularly and beneficially for others. All ways of deepening your impact as a public expert.

You write a book to write new audiences. But the irony is: You’ll only reach those new audiences—you should only bother starting to work on a book—if you’ve already proven you can reach a significant audience now.

In a way, the only reason not to write a book is similar to the only reason not to be a public expert or improve as one:

Because you can already reach everyone you need to reach already.

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You, Scientist, and you, Researcher, might (like many of your colleagues) have trouble “engaging with the public,” that clinical phrase that sounds more like a war maneuver than a conversation.

Here is where most communications people will tell you to improve your communications skills, through training. But when I work with a client who has trouble “engaging with the public,” I almost always find something more fundamental: They misunderstand what drives “engagement” in the first place.

Too many scientists and researchers think public engagement is like science and research—and it isn’t. It isn’t about the weight of your evidence or the logic of your case.

And public engagement isn’t like a TED talk, either. It isn’t about charisma, and it isn’t about how good a story you can tell. It isn’t even about the moral force of your argument.

No. Engagement with the public is 90% about the temperature of the room.

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‘The Room is Always Cold on X’

Is the room warm toward you even before you engage with it? Does the room—figuratively or virtually—know you? Do they trust you—or do you at least code as trustworthy to them? (Hint: Trustworthy isn’t necessarily “expert.”) Has someone the room knows and trusts at least vouched for you?

If the room isn’t warm before you walk in, you’re walking into an icebox. And you face a difficult slog just to get the temperature of the room up to room temperature.

Understanding this usually takes a while—but when it hits you, it tends to stick. For instance: David Heinemeier Hansson (known colloquially as DHH), co-owner of the software firm 37Signals, chronic purveyor of controversial positions and not the cuddliest teddy bear in the Internet playpen, uses his latest newsletter to thank the hosts of a popular software engineering stream on which he was a guest, crediting them for his warm reception from the audience, for “signalling to their audience that who they were about to hear [from] would be worth listening to with an open mind…”

Because, as DHH went on to note, cold rooms are hostile rooms, “and the room is always cold on X or in a one-off blog post”:

I've been making many of my main arguments for years. Some for decades, even. And I know that many in that stream had probably heard some of them before, and dismissed them out of hand, because we hadn't established a rapport that would warrant an open mind. 

That's where writing just can't compete with a podcast or a stream. Putting a face, a voice, and a vibe to the argument absolutely changes its tone, and in turn, the emotions it evokes. And that's what most people go off on. Those emotions.

I sometimes do struggle with that. Thinking that the strength of an argument should be gauged purely by its logic or at least its rhetoric. But I've really come to appreciate the value of set and setting. Of a warm introduction. Of establishing a rapport.

DHH isn’t a researcher, but you can see the application. Of course, most communications people  will take this concept of the warm room and say, of course! make more friends and build a bigger network and do more press outreach! so you can have warm introductions in already warm and successful rooms like DHH had!

I have nothing against any of that. God speed. It’s not going to hurt, unless you’re an introvert.

But I want you, the public expert, to do the following first, do something more reliable and organic and durable and yours:

I want you to create the room that is always warm toward you.

Because, in the post-media age, you the public expert can’t just rely on other people’s rooms. You can’t rely on the sporadic invitations of media and colleagues. You have too much to say about too much and with too much urgency to wait to be picked.

And you have a community waiting to gather around that expertise and intelligence. They just don’t know it yet.

Create a Warm Room of Your Own

You create your warm room on a platform that is yours, that can attract the community, where they can subscribe to everything you publish and post and share it with others, where your audience can converse with you and teach you as much as you teach them, where you can revise your positions and that’s an accepted part of the culture, where you can probe where the bleeding edge because no one here is a stranger, and where your influence grows fungally, without you even knowing it.

Shawn Willsey has YouTube.  Natalia Petrzela has PastPresent. Jeff Selingo has LinkedIn. Kizzmekia Corbett has X.

It’s great and gratifying to get a warm introduction to someone else’s room—it can build your audience, it’s important validation, it’s just a nice human experience.

But to grow your impact consistently, every public expert today should have that on tap, all the time. Should have a homebase, a city-state, a warm room of their own.

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You—the researcher and disciplinary expert—also want to become an effective public expert, a role which requires a very different set of skills and competencies. So, as you take your first steps toward achieving this goal, you will probably at some point say something like the following:

“I need training. Can I get some training?”

Training as in: Media training. Messaging training. Storytelling training. On-camera training. Presentation training.

All the trainings. So many trainings. Everyone wants training.

Because training—as in, hiring professional trainers to come in and train you in dedicated training sessions—is how you acquire the skills and competencies you need to be a public expert, isn’t it?

No. No, it isn’t.

This news is bewildering and perhaps even shocking, especially if you’re a professional communications trainer, and especially if you’re a manager in a research organization who has been hiring professional communications trainers because your organization’s researchers have less than stellar communications skills.

But I’ve been working with researchers for over 25 years and hired countless trainers to give countless trainings (as well as, years ago, giving many myself) and…no.

At best, training is just a very small part of how you become an effective public expert.

Why do I say these terrible things? Three reasons, gleaned from bitter experience:

1. Training is worthless if you’re not already working to become a (better) public expert.

Have you ever wanted to do something new for a while (like get into photography) and finally bought something expensive (like a fancy camera) as the motivation to actually do it? Communications training works about as well—if you’re not already communicating with the public.

Becoming a competent public expert from a standing start takes most researchers a minimum of a year—a year of frequent opportunities to learn your craft, feedback that both supports and challenges you, and real incentives for success and failure. On its own, training isn’t catalytic; dedicated training sessions are too short to inculcate anything useful. And if the training can’t be embedded in your ongoing public expert practice—a practice in which you regularly use, adapt and make your own what you learn in training—the training won’t stick.

2. Training isn’t experiential learning. Becoming a public expert is all about experiential learning.

Training consists of learning about concepts and then acting them out periodically during the day of training in a few controlled exercises with a group of your colleagues, all of whom speak your language. That experience doesn’t teach you a million essential skills you need as a public expert—such as how to tell good content ideas vs. bad ones, or when your talk has tipped over the line of having too much detail, or what your best response options are to a mistake you’ve made in social.

The only way to learn these things—and all the other essential aspects of being a public expert—is through experiential learning: by actually translating your expertise into something useful for non-specialists and using the feedback you get to make the next piece of content even more useful to them. You can learn about them in theory; but you cannot learn them that way.

Now, if you’re working under the guidance of a) a mentor who’s been through what you’re going through, and/or b) a communications expert who understands your research and what you want to accomplish in your public outreach, you’re going to progress much faster. But the work is the best teacher.

3. There’s nothing on the line in training.

A hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully. Giving a talk in front of your colleagues doesn’t push you like giving the same talk to people who can fund you for the next three years—or take all your funding away. You wouldn’t dare give the second group anything resembling the first talk. So why give the first talk at all?

As quickly as you can, you must put yourself into situations that expose you the public expert to real incentives, high stakes and live fire. There are no better accelerants to your learning curve.

Bottom Line: Training is Not Transformation

So why do so many research organizations keep defaulting to training ?

In part, the industry of science communication is structured around training instead of longer, more strategic advisory work.

In larger part, training allows organizations to say they offered a solution to a problem without taking their researchers away from their day jobs for too long.

It’s a gestural, bureaucratic fix for a much bigger need—a Band-Aid on a chainsaw wound.

Becoming a public expert is transformative—for your career, for your organization and its strategic goals. But being transformative requires a transformation, one in which you learn how to inhabit the role of public expert in alignment with your professional identity as a researcher and disciplinary expert.

That transformation takes courage, commitment and time. Training might be a small part of that process. But it is never a catalyst or a substitute for it.

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Robert Putnam thinks his life's work has been "a total failure."

That seems harsh, coming from the author of the 2000 book Bowling Alone, whose title alone became the indispensable catchphrase describing the loss of community in American life—and made Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, a minor celebrity.

But Putnam didn't want to create a meme or become a cultural icon. He wanted to change the world. "I've been working for most of my adult life to try to build a better, more productive, more equal, more connected community in America, and now I'm 83 and looking back, and it's been a total failure," he tells The New York Times Magazine in a new interview. "I tried my damnedest to sketch a way forward, but I've not been persuasive enough."

"Persuasive" is a telling word. As a public expert, Putnam is what I call an Advocate--the fourth of the four Public Expert Archetypes. He's displayed the classic freneticism of the Advocate on behalf of his findings and ideas over the last 25 years, working across so many tools and fronts, including:

• Writing books—Bowling Alone, of course, and 2021's The Upswing (written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett), which traces the historical rise and fall of social capital from 1900 to the present.

• Meeting many times with government officials (including with President Bill Clinton) about his research.

• Holding workshops with elites to figure out ways to crack the problem of declining civic and community engagement (including Barack Obama pre-politics).

• Giving innumerable media interviews about his research findings, ideas and opinions about how to solve the loss of community in America.

• And, by Putnam's count, traveling and addressing hundreds of thousands of people, inspiring community foundations to follow his recommendations for building more social capital in their communities.

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When Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro wonders why Bowling Alone and his arguments about community disintegration haven't move enough people to action, Putnam responds that maybe the problem was with his solutions:

"There are some groups, largely around community foundations across America, that actually are now, they would tell you, following my agenda for trying to fix their communities, who have spent a lot of their time over the last 20 years trying to do what I said they should do. Has that made a difference? I don’t know. I’d be hard pressed to make the case. But that’s, you know—believe me, I’m more aware than you are of my failures."

The consultant in me wonders: Would Putnam have gotten more traction in the 1990s and 2000s with some of today's digital tools and a more populist campaign? For example, look at how social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has turbocharged his "Free the Anxious Generation" campaign against social media and smartphones for preteens and for unsupervised play for children—with everything from Substack to podcast interviews, an art project on billboards in select US cities, even (!) social media.

Or: What if Putnam had given people four clear action steps like those Haidt and his colleagues use: 1) no smartphones before high school, 2) no social media before 16, 3) phone-free schools, and 4) more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world? Laughably ambitious goals...except now six US states have banned cellphones in classrooms.

Mostly, though, I'm just sad that Putnam measures his impact as a public expert against an impossible standard—and that such standards aren't unusual among researchers.

Of the four Public Expert Archetypes, Putnam is most naturally and most usefully an Explainer—the researcher who uses data, narrative and an expert's perception to frame our lives in a new, productive and unforgettable way.

But he wanted to be a revolutionary (or at least a reformer), and he's not alone. The Advocate is still the mode of choice for researchers who want to be public experts—whether it makes sense for them or their audiences or not. About 80 percent of my work is helping my clients craft an argument and a campaign for motivating an audience to action—and it starts with understanding who the audience is and what they'll respond to.

Would-be Advocates need to know, though: Haidt's example is at least as much survivors' bias as it is playbook. The indisputably successful Advocate is surprisingly rare, and understands that advocacy is very difficult and usually a very long game. Evidence and a compelling argument—or even an op-ed in a prestigious outlet—don't by themselves persuade, much less create a movement. The main task for any public expert isn't just to speak the truth; it's to understand what the audience will truly hear. Which, in the case of a certain group of 300 million people in a certain country, often challenges the best political and advertising strategists—much less a Harvard political scientist.

I’ve always thought of Putnam as a hero for describing and providing evidence for a way of seeing what has been happening to the United States over the last 60 years that, once I and so many others heard it, became the way we saw it as well. After Putnam finishes berating himself for his failures, Garcia-Navarro says to him, "Well, maybe it’s just that one man can’t do it alone. We need community." This makes Putnam laugh in recognition. "You’re right!" he tells her. More than he knows.

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Note: See some of the main differences among the Four Public Expert Archetypes in this spreadsheet.  

Most people don’t have time for new research.

That’s because most new research doesn’t have time for them. It isn’t about them—about their felt needs.

At best, new research is about something that researchers think people should be concerned about but aren’t, or aren’t sufficiently. (A long and ever-growing list.)

At worst (for communicating the research, anyway), new research is about filling a research gap.

So research goes, and always has. But it begs the question: Why does so much research communications start with a new piece of research instead of with what the audience cares about? And then oversell the research’s findings or their applicability so they appeals to an impossibly large audience? Does that seem like a road to impact?

Why not start instead (like all other communicators do) with a real audience—a real community or community of interest? One that shares specific, pressing and evolving questions and challenges that you’re plugged into? And find the data and evidence that applies to those questions and challenges—whether it’s new or settled?

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Of course, research communications is too often designed to market individual pieces of research newly produced by institutions. Not to build relationships and trust with real communities.

And, of course: Researchers almost never have to think seriously about audiences outside of their professional community to achieve professional success.

All this adds up to terrible communications practice.

We could learn a lot from the stunning successes of The Advisor, possibly the most impactful of the Four Public Expert Archetypes (more on those at the link below).

Advisors: Deep Understanding of a Community, Paired with Objectivity

Of the four archetypes (The Translator, The Explainer, The Advisor and The Advocate), Advisors are unique in that they always aim their public work at a particular community—e.g., prospective college students and their parents, or climate philanthropists, or corporate water sustainability officers, or university administrators and faculty trying to understand how AI will disrupt and change research .

The Advisor is committed to their target community and its success. Their work as a public expert is to deliver research-based insights and advice that directly help that community—help it navigate its particular challenges and achieve its particular goals.

The most effective Advisors have a sense of mission to their target communities. They provide that community with high-value content, full of objective, research-based insights. They also learn as much as they can about the community, to keep their insights keen and relevant. This simultaneous insider/outsider position regarding the target community—deep understanding paired with objectivity—fuels the community’s trust in The Advisor.

Economist Emily Oster is an Advisor. She’s built a small empire by giving evidence-based advice to parents and expecting parents through her books, podcast, newsletters, social media accounts and ParentData.org resource hub and community.

Management professor Ethan Mollick is an Advisor, too. He’s rocketed to prominence over the past two years by becoming one of the leading voices on how to use AI for business purposes, using Substack, Twitter, LinkedIn and his new book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, to share AI prompting tactics and strategies for entrepreneurs and managers as well as which specific AI disruptions specific sectors should be anticipating and preparing for.

Oster and Mollick share one priority most researchers engaging with the public don’t bother with: They put their chosen communities first, instead of the research.

This week, Oster just put out a newsletter Q&A in which she finds data and evidence to answer questions from parents on

• whether dolls help prepare children for a new sibling,

• whether you should worry about waxing and waning fetal movement early in a pregnancy,

• whether zinc helps build immunity against colds, and

• whether a few glasses of wine during pregnancy could put your child at risk of heart defects.

Sure, she has a team. But she does a similar Q&A every week. Imagine any of the “public intellectuals” you know showing that much commitment to the concerns of any particular community, as opposed to whatever pops into their heads.

But that’s why people have time for what Advisors say—because Advisors have time for them.

More next week on the distinct values and behaviors of The Advisor. Meanwhile, send me a reply or hit the comments and let me know what you think.

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Why does Ozempic work so very well (for the people for whom it works)?

Because, as the primary care physician Lucy McBride explains, the drug doesn't just curtail your hunger and promote satiety faster—it helps you reallocate brain space you were previously devoting to rumination about food and eating, allowing you to gain a stronger sense of agency over your relationship with food.

Why is the world more resilient to disasters than it was 50 years ago, despite the accelerating impacts of climate change?

The data scientist Hannah Ritchie explains it's because we've reduced vulnerability to disaster across a number of dimensions—investments, she adds, we must redouble if we hope to keep pace with climate change in the future.

Where is the largest group of people in need of humanitarian relief right now?

Not in Gaza, explains economist Adam Tooze, but instead in a huge swath of Africa from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Yemen, where 136 million people are being wracked by war, drought, hunger and displacement—while the wealthy countries of the world pay almost no attention and contribute even less aid.

How many of those answers did you know?

One or none, if you’re like me. That’s because they’re un- or underreported, counterintuitive or just plain unthinkable under the regular operating procedures of life.

That’s why you had to have them explained to you.

And once you have them explained properly—compellingly, that is, by an expert you find trustworthy—you tend not to forget them.

They often change the way you think about the world and how quickly you might agree with widely held opinions.

You’re likely to use them in conversation.

They might even change your behavior.

This is what the Explainer does, better than anyone.

Which is why these research-based public experts are so valuable to their institutions or organizations. Not to mention to the rest of us.

Wait. Don’t all public experts have to explain stuff they understand to the rest of us?

Of course. Explaining is a bedrock skill of the successful public expert. Each of the four Public Expert Archetypes—the Translator, the Explainer, the Advisor and the Advocate—have to be able to explain to non-specialists what they’re talking about and why it’s relevant to that audience.

But of the four Public Expert Archetypes, it’s the Explainers (like McBride, Ritchie and Tooze) who elevate explaining to a specialty—and who in doing so consistently and satisfyingly answer unanswered questions, solve previously unsolved challenges, explain the mysterious, and frame the familiar in novel ways so we can see it anew.

Unfortunately, most researchers still don’t understand that they can be wonderfully successful as public experts by being really good Explainers. Research communication (what I call Translation) gets all the buzz in the research world, with its impact way overrated by researchers, research communicators and journalists. (No surprise). Researchers also have been told by their communications people (and sometimes their supervisors) that they have to be Advocates, because advocacy pieces are how researchers traditionally get published as an outsider by legacy media outlets (The New York Times, The Atlantic etc.) that everybody reads (except they don’t).

But relatively few public experts (much less researchers) are natural Advocates, and many are unsatisfied with the constraints of simply communicating research. They often feel far more comfortable creating value as Explainers—in part because the Explainer is closest to what many researchers do at least some of their professional lives: teaching.

Explainers are teachers on steroids

McBride, Ritchie, Tooze, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Phil Plait—despite their differences across disciplines, topics, subject matter, tone and preferred platforms, all of these Explainers use their expertise and the sum of research and evidence to teach the rest of us what's really going with things that matter to us or fascinate us.

Like great teachers, great Explainers engage you as they educate you:

• They know what to leave in and what to leave out.

• They’re usually good to superb at accessible writing and storytelling—unusual skills in researchers.

• Their presentations mix compelling storylines, striking imagery, accessible analysis, quick pacing and enough but not an overwhelming amount of key science.

• They avoid the jargon and soup of detail that trip up other researchers that stumble with the public.

• They are surehanded guides. Their narratives inexorably lead us to see what they see.

Explainers aren’t just research communicators. Far from it.

Explainers are near to Translators (my catch-all category for those researchers who just communicate their research) in the Archetypes list. And that’s where the similarity ends:

• While Translators start and end with the research, translating what it says into terms we can understand, Explainers start with a problem first and dive into the research and data and use their own expertise to explain or solve it in a new way.

• This problem-first, solutions-first approach almost always yields a tighter fit between expertise and topic than the usual science communication tactic of trying to retrofit new research findings to issues non-researchers are interested in. (Believe me—I did that retrofitting for 25 years; it’s painful.)

• The Explainer (like The Advisor and The Advocate) is rooted in what I call The Essential Public Expert Formula—providing expertise specifically designed to help the needs of non-specialists. Translators don’t share that formula. Their role —the classic science/research communicator role—too often fails (in its tight focus on communicating the research) to speak to specific audiences, specific challenges or questions, and in ways that are easily useful to nonspecialists.

This is why its Explainers—not Translators, no matter how skilled they are at research communications—who are consistently developing new memes break new ground in generating public knowledge and delivering outsize value to their audiences. A Translator would never come up with big, synthetic ideas like Adam Grant's “originals” or Angela Duckworth's “grit.” A Translator would never be able to hold our attention as they explain, week after week, what's going on with that volcano in Iceland or the Fed and interest rates. Translators lack Explainers' content metabolism, narrative skills, points of view and populist streak—just to name a few qualities that make great Explainers great public experts.

Traits of The Explainer

Let's dive a little more into the Explainer. First thing to note: There are actually two kinds of Explainers:

1. The Disciplinary Explainer A disciplinary expert who applies that expertise to explain a discrete set of phenomena.

Examples: Brad DeLong, Claudia Sahm, Noah Smith and Tooze (economists explaining economic phenomena); Phil Plait (explaining astronomical developments); Shawn Willsey (geologist explaining seismic and volcano activity worldwide).

2. The Big Idea Explainer An expert with an "big idea" or framing that purports to be the explanation for seemingly disparate or mysterious phenomena. A "hedgehog" to the disciplinary explainer's "fox."

Examples: Grant; Duckworth; Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein on "nudges"; Leidy Klotz on the virtues of subtracting.

Typical Behaviors/Platforms/Content

• Behaviors

  • All the traits of having a high-content metabolism (see "Superpowers of the Explainer" below).

  • Explainers are very responsive to requests for their insights—from media and podcasts for interviews, from editors for analyses and opinion pieces, from conferences and roundtables and panels to participate.

    • They run toward opportunities to engage.

    • Their bias is to post, publish, contribute—not to hold back.

  • Explainers are generally extroverted, or play extroverts—highly unusual for researchers.

  • As a side activity, Explainers often share and curate new research and data-driven content. Some examples I follow: Adam Tooze's Chartbook Top Links; Brad DeLong's Briefly Noted at his Grasping Reality Substack; Tyler Cowen's daily assorted links at his blog Marginal Revolution.

• Platforms & Content

  • YouTube channels explaining recent events (e.g., Willsey on Iceland).

  • Frequently updated blogs/social media channels on economics, policy and other fast-moving phenomena (e.g., Cowen, Sahm, Roger Pielke, Jr, Tooze, Smith).

  • Books and talks (for Big Idea Explainers).

Superpowers of the Explainer

• They have a fast content metabolism.

  • Explainers are fast writers/content generators.

  • They’re quick to see and seize opportunities in the news cycle where explanation could be valuable.

  • They’re quick to synthesize what's happening in current news cycles with patterns and analyses from the past.

• They’re teachers on steroids—they’re very skilled and compelling explainers.

  • They keep their explanations moving—they don't get bogged down in detail or jargon.

  • They have a presentation structure and style—which could be direct or discursive, it doesn’t matter—that weaves a strong narrative through striking visuals, accessible analysis and just enough key science and storytelling.

• They have a populist streak that serves them and their audiences well.

  • They understand what people are curious about (and will be, once they know about it), and they gravitate to explaining it.

  • Conversely, while they might delight in bringing something obscure to an audience that’s relevant to the explanation, they're allergic to pedantry.

Values: "As an Explainer, I want my public expertise to..."

• Make discourse and decision-making more rational and evidence-based.

• Improved policy, outcomes, practices, societies and lives.

• Demystify expertise and make research and researchers more relevant.

• The knowledge I give people makes them better informed and better decision-makers.

• The knowledge I give people sometimes or even often satisfies their curiosity about questions they have.

  • It can even make them happier.

Achilles Heels

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To The Explainer, everything in their balliwick looks like something to be explained. When people want recommendations for action, mere explanation sometimes falls short. This is why many Explainers become undercover Advisors (more on that later).

Best Situations for the Explainer

Platforms on which they can build audiences for a focused set of ongoing explanations on related or ongoing phenomena (Willsey on Icelandic seismic activity)

Where/When Being an Explainer Usually Doesn't Work

When the community you're addressing needs advice or the issue you're addressing needs a solution, not just explanation.

One Way to Practice Being an Explainer

• Make a short list of events or ongoing challenges in the world that your wheelhouse of expertise encompasses. (Hint: That’s bigger than just what you’ve done research about. It’s what you know.)

• Ask of each item on the list: What don’t people understand about this that you wish they did—that would be fascinating to them, make them think differently, maybe even make their lives better?

• Take one and write 500 words on it for a non-specialist audience.

• Now cut that in half. That’s the first draft of a two-minute video script, or your first draft of a Substack post. Try it out on a few people. Revise and repeat until you’re happy with it. Then do something with it.

Next: The Advisor.

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Of the Four Public Expert Archetypes—the Translator, the Explainer, the Advisor, and the Advocate—the Translator is easily the most celebrated.

The research communication-media industrial complex loves Translators—those experts who focus on taking research and turn it into something comprehensible for the rest of the world. They give good quote.

But translation by itself isn’t of much value, since most research (newsworthy or not) is off-point for most real-life challenges. The other three archetypes—the Explainer, Advisor and Advocate—bring far more value to the public because they’re not just about translating the research; they’re about using a researcher’s full expertise (not just their ability to translate research) to address specific audience challenges in immediately helpful ways (what I call the Essential Public Expert Formula). That move—help the audience with something they care about (or should care about), and do so in an accessible, useful fashion—is often antithetical to research culture. It’s also a hard move for researchers to learn and habituate.

That’s why most researchers who do public work stop at Translator: They feel uncomfortable straying too far from the research. But stopping there leaves 95 percent of the value you could bring as an expert off the table. It’s like trying to win at poker by hoping everyone else folds after the ante.

Still, The Translator describes the archetype most researchers identify with, if they identify with public work at all. So to kick off this series describing the four Public Expert Archetypes, then, let’s start with the archetype that best describes this relatively silent majority: The Translator.

In a nutshell: The Translator

The Translator is the classic research/science communicator: the findings, the whole findings and nothing but the findings. At most, they speak for the body of research, advocating for it as a public good. But they don’t go beyond it.

As public expert, Translators start with…

The research (usually, just published and their own). Translators are often uncomfortable talking about other researchers’ research. The Translators who aren’t get most of the interviews (which probably suits the other Translators just fine).

How does the Translator behave as a public expert?

• A new study comes out in their subspecialty, they translate it and contextualize it—what it's found and what it means--for non-specialists.

• They also synthesize the state of the research/science on questions of moment (e.g., will there be a next wave of COVID?).

Superpowers of the Translator

• Translation, of course: The ability to translate new research--its findings and relevance--into language that's accessible, quickly consumable and (in those rare occasions when the findings of a single piece of research should drive behavior or policy change) actionable.

• Synthesis (sometimes): The ability to understand and summarize what new research means in the context of an existing body of knowledge; how significant it is without exaggeration.

Content metabolism

Usually slow and reactive. Typically only responds when asked, when there’s new research to translate.

Typical content platforms (as public expert)

• Media interviews

• X and other short-form content channels

• Newsletters (sometimes)

• Reports

Values: ‘As a Translator, I believe…’

• “Knowing the state of the science on any given question can improve the decision making and quality of life for many people.”

• “New research often carries important findings non-researchers need to understand.”

• “The public should understand and appreciate the full value science can bring to their lives.”

Achilles’ Heels

Translation isn't everything. Their very narrow view of expertise (as ambassador for the research and for research/science writ large) means they won't/can't address anything that the research doesn't explicitly cover--which limits their relevance and effectiveness to the public.

Best situations for the Translator

• As conduits between communities and new research (especially obscure/abstruse research)

• As vending machines for quotes, for the dwindling media that cover science or research

Worst situations for the Translator

• When trust of research/science or researchers/scientists (including you) is less than ideal

• In situations where audiences want more than just the best available evidence—they want your expertise in interpreting that evidence for their situation. They want your advice. (They want an Advisor.)

• In situations where contextual explaining is called for—where it's not just about the science, but about a narrative of events that is the focus of attention and decision making and that needs to be framed within the evidence but not subordinated to it (e.g., an ongoing crisis).

How Do I Know That I’m a Translator?

• You feel a mission to improve the public understanding of science.

• You enjoy communicating science but feel uncomfortable straying beyond your research or that of others and especially to matters beyond research.

• Once a research project is finished, you spend at least some time thinking of how I might help wider audiences understand it.

• Non-researchers actually better understand a research project or research findings once they’ve heard you translate them.

Typical Language of the Translator

• “In layperson’s terms…”

• “Uncertainty”

• “The limits of this research include...”

• “We should be cautious about applying these findings too broadly.”

• “More research is needed”

Often Found In

• R1 universities and research professorships/fellowships.

• University extension offices.

• Committees/commissions charged with doing meta-analysis reports.

Next up: The Explainer. The way I explain the difference between the Translator and the Explainer? You’re lost in a foreign city and you need help getting around. The Translator can help you read the street signs. The Explainer is your trusted guide.

What do Peter Hotez, Fenaba Addo, Jean Twenge and Ray Rast have in common?

They're all outstanding researchers who are also outstanding public experts. That's in large part because, despite their vast differences in tone, audiences, expertise and methods of delivering that expertise publicly, none of them simply communicates their research and leaves it at that.

Instead, they go beyond research communications with three elements essential to all effective public experts:

• They address a specific audience or specific audience challenge in mind;

• They address that challenge or question with an expert's POV—rooted in the research but also in their own expert reading of the challenge's context (political, social, economic, cultural);

• That application of POV to challenge or question is always designed to be of use to the audience—an insight, reframing or solution that improves or at least enriches the audience's lives and work.

For non-researchers, these elements and their combination into content of high value to an audience might seem obvious. But incorporating these three elements into their public work is routinely the hardest step for researchers to learn and habituate.

Indeed, what sets effective public experts from the crowd is how relentlessly their public work is driven by this formula (Audience ✕ Challenge or Question ✕ Expert POV ✕ Application for Use).

Great public experts don't wait to be presented with the challenge or asked the question. They already know the audience well enough to anticipate the questions that need asking—or they're plugged into the audience enough to hear those questions bubble up, before they reach a crescendo, so they can bring them into consciousness.

Last week I described four public expert archetypes—four distinct pathways (The Translator, The Explainer, The Advisor and The Advocate) that researchers who take their expertise public follow time and again.

The Explainer, The Advisor and The Advocate are very different pathways—again, in tone, content frequency, intended change in the audience and dozens of other ways. (Look here next week for the first of a series of in-depth descriptions of each of these archetypes. I'll also be rolling out a quick archetype assessment before the middle of the year, so any researcher can discover which archetype fits them best—and where they should then go next with their public work.)

But The Explainer, The Advisor and The Advocate all are rooted in what I'll call the Essential Public Expert Formula. And that rooting makes them fundamentally different from The Translator, the classic science/research communicator role, which too often fails to speak to specific audiences, specific challenges or questions, and in ways that are easily useful.

Which brings me to the first law of public experts. Advocate, Advisor, Explainer—regardless of which archetype you are, your first job as one of these public experts will be to move beyond Translation to providing expertise specifically designed to help. It's hard to do. But it's even harder to fake.

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In my previous, misspent career as a science communicator, I eventually stopped focusing on communicating science.

Why? Because whenever I paid attention to those researchers actually having impact with policymakers, CEOs, the public...i.e., anyone who wasn't a researcher—I quickly saw they were never just "communicating research."

Even if they had a new paper out—the classic research communication scenario—these impactful researcher never just talked about the paper's new findings and then made some vague recommendations for change.

Instead, they were advocating—like James Hansen or Naomi Oreskes or Jon Foley—for ideas, solutions, or changes in policy and behavior, with sharp recommendations aimed at specific audiences and names named of whoever stood in the way.

Or advising—like Angela Duckworth or Emily Oster or Ethan Mollick—everyone from consumers to policymakers, civil society and corporations, on everything from healthy parenting choices to how to incorporate AI into strategic business planning.

Or explaining current events—like Shawn Willsey or Claudia Sahm or Noah Smith, explaining everything from why volcanos in Iceland are erupting now to why housing prices are driving economic inequality.

Sure, all of these modes require competence at communicating research and its processes into information non-specialists can understand. And all of these researchers are more than competent as research communicators—or what I'll call "translators."

But translation of research to non-researchers is just table stakes for these and other effective public experts.

Translation has its place. It occasionally generates large value for the rest of us. But advocacy, advising and explaining reliably do, in large part because those modes help non-researchers recognize and use the value of expertise far more quickly than they do with just translation.

So, while translation (and the best practices of science communications that support it) might be a good starting point for researchers interested in public impact, we need a much more sophisticated framework to help improve those experts ready to become consistently effective and impactful in public.

The Deep, Distinct Patterns Researchers in Public Follow

The good news: Advocating, advising and explaining give us that framework. They give researchers the right pathways for improving their public impact.

That's because these three modes of public engagement (along with translating) aren’t just activities. They’re deep and distinct patterns that researchers follow time and again when they connect their expertise directly with the world.

In fact, you'll see many individual researchers gravitate toward one of these patterns in their public engagement:

• Emily Oster, for example, is a supremely persuasive advisor for parents and parents-to-be.

• Jonathan Haidt, who recently launched his new book and campaign arguing that childhoods be smartphone-free, is a forceful advocate for his research-based positions.

• Tressie McMillian Cottom, who has a regular column in The New York Times where she writes about everything from folk economics to the multi-layered codings of Beyonce's country album, is an exceptionally effective explainer of mystified cultural phenomena.

When researchers become effective public experts, it's in large part because they're especially comfortable in one of these patterns and develop the skillsets the patterns require.

Shawn Willsey, a public expert I've written about before (he's the geologist with the popular YouTube channel of explainer videos on volcanoes and other seismic activity around the world), is a fantastic explainer.

Would he be an equally effective advocate? Not immediately.

That's because each of these patterns/roles also require distinct skills, behaviors, habits of language, values, and superpowers.

They also have uniquely optimal situations and opportunities—not to mention unique and distinct Achilles heels.

It's not that researchers can't inhabit or combine two or three of the modes. Of course they can. (We see them do this a lot, often confusingly, on social media.)

But over and over, researchers I work or talk with identify with one of these patterns/roles over the others.

One pattern just feels right to them. It makes sense of what they've been trying to do as experts in public—and it explains why they're uncomfortable when asked by their organizations or institutions to inhabit another one of the patterns.

You can learn another pattern. But it's usually easier to get great at the one you’re pulled towards. And easier to build trust for your expertise through it.

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Why Everyone Responds to These Archetypes

Another way of saying all this: These patterns/roles—the Advocate, the Advisor, the Explainer, and the Translator—are archetypes of researchers being experts in public.

Archetypes are foundational pathways of being and creating meaning in the world. The meaning an archetype creates is both personal and communal: It creates an identity for the individual and fills a need or set of needs for the community.

Jung and others have thought archetypes are innate—"innate universal pre-conscious psychic dispositions." OK.

But you don't have to be a Jungian for archetypes to work for you. For instance, try this lighter way of holding the archetype concept, courtesy of my colleague David Chapin: "Archetypes are self-reinforcing patterns."

Self-reinforcing for the expert who follows them, and for the culture around them.

When you inhabit an archetype, and especially when you articulate one, everyone quickly understands what you're talking about and what it brings to them.

That's because archetypes are all about value—in this instance, the particular value an expert is bringing to the community in their particular role.

The reason why Shawn Willsey's YouTube channel has +100K followers is because of his value as an explainer to this audience. Oster, Haidt, Cottom et al. have our attention because they generate similar value.

Value isn't a word you'll see much in science communications. Communicating science is considered by science to automatically be valuable to everyone.

What if that isn't true? Because, outside of the research community, value is relational. It exists not in the abstract but in the exchange between expert and community. The community decides if the information on offer is valuable.

And one of the fundamental shifts researchers must make to become effective public experts is to thinking in terms of what they can generate from their expertise that's of value to their target audiences and communities.

Which Archetype Are You?

In coming weeks here I'll go deeper into each archetype. In summary, though, they are:

The Translator (or The Bridge). They explain to non-experts new research and how it fits into the larger body of science. This is as close to pure science communication as a public expert gets.

• Their identity is wrapped up in being a researcher/scientist, speaking for the body of research, advocating for it as a public good—but not in going beyond it.

• Their highest value? Their confidence that translating the state of science on any given question can improve the decision-making and quality of life for many people.

  • Real-life examples include Ken Caldeira, Katelyn Jetelina, Eric Topol and the IPCC.

The Explainer. They explain and interpret current events in light of research and evidence. They differ from The Translator largely in their focus--their lens is trained on explaining current events and potential solutions for big challenges, not on explicating new research.

• Translation is more straightforward. You're taking one narrative and giving it meaning in a different context. It starts and ends with the text.

• Explanation starts and ends with the question, the problem, the challenge. It marshals evidence to answer the question, solve the problem, rise to the challenge—but it is never limited to just the evidence. It’s the intersection of the state of the research, your expertise/insight and the challenge. You want to give the audience a new way of seeing the challenge—you want them to see it as you the expert see it.

• There are two kinds of Explainers: Disciplinary Explainers (who apply their expertise in a field to explain a discrete set of phenomena), and Big Idea Explainers, who use a big idea or framing that purports to be the explanation for seemingly disparate or mysterious phenomena.

• Among their values: Making discourse and decision-making more rational and evidence-based, and giving people knowledge that demystifies life and its challenges.

  • Real-life examples of the Disciplinary Explainer include Brad DeLong, Claudia Sahm, Noah Smith and Adam Tooze (economists explaining economic phenomena) and, of course, Shawn Willsey.

  • Real-life examples of the Big Idea Explainer are researchers such as Angela Duckworth ("grit") or Adam Grant ("thinking again").

  • As we'll see in coming editions, the Big Idea Explainer often becomes an Advisor in private.

The Advisor. The Advisor uses new research or bodies of research to help people do their jobs, fulfill their roles and live their lives better.

• These researchers apply research and their expertise for the challenges faced by and needs of specific audiences—especially clear communities of practice or interest that are looking to improve their performance in some way.

• The Advisor is in frequent communication this audience, and steeped in both research relevant to that audience and the dynamics of the audience's cohort or sector.

• The core of an Advisor's work is to take positions on significant questions facing the cohort/sector—but they're advising on options as conditions and goals change, not advocating for a position.

• Real-life examples include Angela Duckworth, Adam Grant, Ethan Mollick and Emily Oster.

The Advocate. The Advocate's mission is--based on conclusions from the evidence and their expertise—to convince the world to change or improve...usually before it's too late.

• Advocates have superpowers that intensify their persuasiveness--skilled and thorough argumentation, persistence in making their case, and a taste for debate, which they run towards rather than shy away from.

• They are comfortable being known for their advocacy as much (or more) as their research.

• They're also are generally creative marketers of their own ideas, frequently publishing content and aggressively exploring and expounding their positions through a variety of platforms as well as cultivating like minded audiences.

• Real-life examples include Hansen, Foley, Michael Mann and Vijaya Ramachandran.

The Power of Using Public Expert Archetypes

Once you start thinking in public expert archetypes, you suddenly have not just a pathway for improvement as a public expert, but a name for those many instances of friction and misalignment that you’ve felt in public that might not have made sense to you before other than “I’m not very good at this advocacy thing.” For instance, if your goal is helping to create some sort of change in the world but your archetype is Translator, you’re probably going to always feel frustrated at your relative inability to be a good Advocate (at least in relation to other Advocates as well as your own ability to translate). But now you have choices. You can work at becoming a better Advocate. You can also choose to support change through translation—for example, by creating a wiki that answers questions about the science regarding the challenge you’re focused on.

Similarly, in organizations, it’s often fruitful to align archetypes and roles within an organization—e.g., put an Advisor in the Advisor role, an Advocate in the Advocate role. You should never force a Translator or even an Explainer to suddenly be an Advocate (especially in real-time) if they haven’t practiced it a lot in low-stakes settings. In addition, research organizations seeking public impact should create a strategic mix of archetypes to cover all of their messaging and communications needs—e.g., Advocates and Advisors and Explainers. Not doing so is tantamount to assuming your experts can just jump into any of these archetypes once a call for an interview or a roundtable or a webinar comes in and perform all of them flawlessly. (I assume you understand how ridiculous that assumption is, as well as how common.)

One archetype isn't better or more valuable than the others. But inhabiting any of them, I'm seeing again and again, is far more valuable for the public expert—and for their public—than just "communicating science" and hoping for the best.

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Shawn Willsey is a geology professor at the College of Southern Idaho, which also sounds like an identity you’d give the “obscure academic” character in your hobby screenplay. Willsey has also written a couple of books—Geology Underfoot in Southern Idaho and Roadside Geology of Idaho (written with Paul Link and Keegan Schmidt)—that probably aren’t on your nightstand, either.

But then there’s Willsey’s YouTube channel.

A YouTube channel on which, in his modest words, he posts “a variety of engaging videos to help folks understand geology from a variety of locations in throughout the western US and beyond.” Including frequently posting explainers and livestreams on the latest seismic and volcanic activity in Iceland, which has been a big deal lately, ICYMI.

The Iceland focus partially explains why 93,000 people subscribe to the channel, and why some of his videos have gotten around 1 million views.

I say “partially explains” because it’s not a given that 1 million people will watch your video just because you are a geologist trying to explain what’s going on as lava threatens to engulf a town in Iceland.

You also need to be very good at explaining. Which Willsey certainly is.

The Age of Direct Access to How Experts See and Process the World

Watch any Willsey video and you’ll quickly see what I mean. He keeps things moving; he doesn’t get bogged down in detail and jargon. He’s refined a direct presentation structure and style that tells a strong narrative about the Iceland eruptions through striking visuals, accessible analysis and just enough key science.

The first video of his that I saw was one of his most recent, but I didn’t feel as if I’d missed much if anything; I was easily able to jump in and follow the analysis and data and understand what Willsey thinks is coming next. And make no mistake: Willsey knows “what’s coming next?” is what his audience wants from him. (As of now, a new lava eruption early in March, he says.)

Some would call this “science communications”—but that radically sells short what Willsey is doing here. He’s allowing you in a very immediate, accessible way to experience how an expert sees and processes the data, the images and the science. He’s giving you direct access to his expertise.

But even being a great explainer isn’t enough to gather a committed and growing audience. You need to be explaining on a platform where your audiences can find your insights and share them with others. And you need audiences that have the habit of seeking out experts on their own to go deeper into a story—far deeper than conventional media are taking them.

Which, of course, describes not just why Willsey’s successful, but why tens of thousands of other public experts are now reaching their audiences in ways and with sustained dialogue they never dreamed possible. We’re in a new age of direct-to-public expertise, alongside (and, increasingly, supplanting) traditional media as the curator of expert opinions on what’s happening.

Expertise isn’t dying. Instead, experts are coming out from under the media thumb and translating their expertise into accessible content published on platforms (Substack, YouTube, podcasting, X and its competitors) that reach audiences directly, without intermediation. And audiences that care about these topics are finding the content and subscribing directly to the experts for more content.

You Are a City-State in the Information Space

This direct-to-public expert playbook is a radical rewrite of the public expert playbook of even just 18 months ago, which relied on a Jack “The Shining” Torrance level of obsessiveness with using pitching and cultivating media using Twitter, in hopes that media would quote you or publish your op-ed or somehow eventually express your ideas, even (and often) if without attribution.

The shift has happened in part because the accelerating evaporation of traditional media and especially journalism has left a media landscape, per The Ringer’s Derek Thompson, of extremely small and extremely large, where the survivors are either “city-states” (individuals or small collectives doing newsletters and/or podcasts) or “empires” like the New York Times. Everything in the middle (from your local newspaper to CNN) is failing. That’s terrifying if you’re a journalist; often lamentable from the standpoint of citizenry. But you can’t solve those problems. You can only take advantage of the opportunity it’s presenting.

You as public expert are a city-state, and one with potentially powerful impact on the civic discourse. You have the virtues of highly concentrated expertise and specialization as well as your powers of analysis and your opinions and style. That’s a package few media giants can challenge or will bother to.

But to have impact, you need to produce content that applies that package of virtues to a set of issues that a) you care about and b) others care about as well (or find out that they care about once they see what you’re doing).

That could be volcanoes in Iceland, a la Willsey. It could be what the latest evidence says on best practices for childbirth and childrearing, a la Emily Oster. It could how you should be thinking about using AI in your organization, a la Ethan Mollick, or the latest epidemiology, a la Katelyn Jetelina, or US fiscal policy, a la Claudia Sahm, or jazz and pop criticism, a la Ted Gioia.

I laughed when I read Ezra Klein go on the other week about the death of the music criticism site Pitchfork, and how that death epitomizes “what’s been lost as we’ve moved from an internet built around curation to an internet built around algorithmic recommendation.” When I read Ted Gioia, I think: He is so good, so smart, so accessible, so useful—why do I need Pitchfork? I’ll just go right to the expert.

‘Consumers Are Increasingly Picking the Expert’

The venture capitalist and podcast Jason Calacanis sees this generalist-to-expert dynamic as a defining media trend:

Calacanis estimates that 20-30 percent of tradmedia traffic has already been taken by expert city-states. Rafat Ali, the founder of Skift, which covers the travel industry, goes considerably further, arguing that mainstream journalism’s lack of expertise (when compared with the rise of public expertise) has made it culturally obsolescent over the last decade:

I agree with the way Matt Yglesias frames this problem for journalism in his recent essay “The two crises in the news business.” The structural crisis for journalism jobs, he argues, isn’t one of declining public literacy and appetite for information. It’s one of competition—including from public experts:

"The loss of these jobs is a disaster for journalism careers, but they're so painfully and utterly gone in part because their loss clearly isn't a disaster for the reading public. People can still find out about movies and world affairs. They're surely better-informed than ever before…The internet has dramatically increased competition — both among news outlets for audience, between news outlets and things that are not news outlets for audience, and between news outlets and everything else for ad dollars. This has been good for both readers and advertisers, but bad for news producers, including journalists." (emphasis mine)

Stop Worrying about the Future of Media. You are the Media.

Journalists (and conventional science communicators, who are utterly dependent on the media for impact) have become really good at worrying about the future of journalism—it’s a question they’ve been asking for 25 years without reaching much of an answer.

In the age of expertise, that question is at best secondary, and the model it was based on is evaporating. There’s a new model for you to embrace—one that requires a new skill set and a more direct relationship with the audience you want to influence. Your primary tasks as public expert are to

• Identify your audiences;

• Address questions they care about and that you have strong, evidence-based perspectives on;

• Create accessible content for them on platforms where they can access that content directly, subscribe to your future content and share it with others, building your audience for you;

• Rely on strong narratives, compelling visuals or audio, the most relevant research, crisp points-of-view and a minimum of jargon.

It’s not easy, especially for busy researchers. And Shawn Willsey makes it look much easier than it is. But it’s a much better bet than the old Jack Torrance media-first playbook.

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Life’s a marathon, not a sprint—everybody knows that. What about your career? That’s a marathon, too; so pace yourself, don’t get too high or low. And changing anything, especially through research? You won’t believe how long that takes. Everything’s a slog. Long way to go, my friend. You’ve got plenty of time.

Except it’s not. There isn’t. And you—as a public expert—don’t.

For a senior leader, says Sasha Dichter, the most important job is to make quick decisions on the most important things. That’s how you scale your impact as a leader—decisions that work through the scale of your organization. And how exactly do you do that? By embracing a process he calls fast and now:

The senior leader is faced with the following question in every moment of the day:

Of the million things that are going on right now (that I’m aware of) which of these needs my attention and my voice right now?…

To do this, both her decision-making and her meta-cognition need to operate at a very high level.

The only way she can survive and consistently add value in this maelstrom is if she:

• Has easy access to the right information (from dashboards; from colleagues; etc.) She is IN the information flow and has open, trusting relationships with the right folks in the organization.

• Processes all of this information quickly and acts decisively (“I can ignore all of this things, and these things need my attention right now.”)

Her job is to constantly be getting new information and successfully deciding: where to act; how loudly her voice should be heard; when to ensure that things are continuing or accelerating; and when to redirect or even stop.

There is no way she will pull this off if she is not both fast and deciding now.

I often remind myself and my team that, to make lasting change, our work is a marathon, not a sprint.

However, the requirement of “fast and now” brings to mind the capabilities of a soccer player, not a marathoner.

As leaders, we need to be able to accelerate quickly for a short distance, over and over again. This skill allows us to achieve a high throughput on all the inputs we see, so that we can add value when and where it’s most needed.

So decision makers aren’t marathoners after all. They’re Lionel Messi.

Have you seen Messi play? That’s the target for you, the researcher who wants to make public impact. Make in-his-prime-Messi pay attention to your insights.

To do that, your public expert content must be optimized for fast and now. Not only does it have to present quickly actionable information, it also has to break through their attention filters. Are you confident it’s doing all that? What would make you more confident?

And as a public expert, you also must practice fast and now—in your leadership within your organization, but equally for your content. That doesn’t mean posting immediate hot takes. It means: Do you have “easy access to the right information”? Are you delaying posting timely insights because your information processing or your risk evaluation are kludgy? Are you afraid of making a permanent mistake?

“It helps to remind ourselves,” finishes Dichter, “that most of the decisions we make are Type 2 decisions—they are relatively easy to reverse—and that the enemy of progress is lack of clarity and the unwillingness to take a stand.”

What’s a Type 2 decision? It’s the opposite of a Type 1 decision, as defined by former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a letter some years ago to Amazon’s shareholders. Type 1 decisions are irreversible, and thus worthy of length deliberations, while Type 2 decisions are experiments, and (as Bezos put it in his shareholders’ letter):

“can and should be made by high judgement individuals or small groups. As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavyweight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.”

I don’t know many researchers who would get excited about following advice from Jeff Bezos. But here’s the thing: The Type 1/Type 2 framework is incredibly useful for the public expert. Because content is almost always a Type 2 decision. Content is almost always revisable.

Researchers usually don’t think about their public-facing content this way. It might be because post-publication revision is rare in research, a sign something was deficient with the original. It’s not that way for public expert content. It’s also almost always a piece of a larger project to understand something, a project that’s in some kind of progress.

This was driven home for me by a recent very short Substack post from Timothy Burke, professor of history at Swarthmore College:

I should have a new piece on an old subject (the “crisis of the humanities”) later today, but I did want to let all my subscribers know that I did some substantial revision this morning of yesterday’s essay, which was a bit of a mess from being composed too hastily after a very exhausting couple of days. If you had trouble figuring out what I was trying to say about what diplomats say and don’t say, give it another go.

Nobody died.

Revise often. First be fast and now.

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Nearly every week, I’m asked by at least one of my clients—all of them research-based experts—some version of this question:

“Should I write about this?”

“This” could be anything: something in the news; a new paper; an issue that’s surfacing; a controversy that’s boiling over; or (best) something that nobody else sees.

They’re not asking if they should drum up an insight on “this.” They already have one—at least one.

Instead, they’re asking me to help them assess the risks of them going public with that insight.

Risks to their organization or institution of them speaking out. The risk of entering a debate that’s too polarized for their insight to be constructive. The risk of being overwhelmed by distracting online blowback they’ll feel they have to manage. The risk of bad actors misusing their contrarian take to further a cause the researcher doesn’t agree with. Etc.

They’re researchers, so research culture has taught them to be cautious, to have an aversion to haste. (Although research culture seems to be breaking that teaching with increasing frequency and impudence.)

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But overcautiousness doesn’t serve these researchers well when they’re in their public expert role. It leads them to overestimate small risks, underestimate potential rewards, and hesitate about intervening in the conversation. Which eventually leads to no longer being a public expert.

The Public Expert Content Matrix: Risk vs. Benefit

About 75% of the time, I advise my clients to “write about that.” (Which doesn’t, of course, always literally write about that. More and more, it means “do video about that” or “do an event about that.”)

What are the criteria I use to make that recommendation? They work out to the following Risk vs. Benefit three by three, with three potential scores for each component:

Risks

• Potential Risk to Your Organization. Is it

  • 1) minimal;

  • 2) moderate (something a funder or donor might question or even complain about); or

  • 3) catastrophic (something a funder or donor might pull organizational support over in a worst-case scenario)?

• Potential Risk to Your Credibility with Your Key Audiences. Would it be

  • 1) minimal (something that would tweak a few chronic complainers);

  • 2) moderate (something up to 1/3 of your audience will still be asking you pointed questions about in a year); or

  • 3) maximal (something that will make most of your audience question your continued commitment to evidence and research methods, or something someone could use to promote a position you disagree with)?

• Risk of Overinvesting Resources in Defending Your Insight’s Positions. Will you have to spend

  • 1) almost no time explaining and defending your positions,

  • 2) up to two hours on the first day after you post the insight,

  • or 3) at least most of the free time you have for at least the first week after you post?

Benefits

• Timeliness of Your Insight. Is the insight

  • 1) late (weeks after the event),

  • 2) a week behind the event but with unique framing of the issue/problem; or

  • 3) either right after the event with unique framing of the issue/problem or so ahead of the curve that timeliness doesn’t matter?

• Uniqueness of Your Insight. Is your insight

  • 1) common (shared by other analysts);

  • 2) new (building off other analysis but with a new spin); or

  • 3) seriously fresh (utterly yours and explosive, pushing the conversation in a new direction)?

• Utility/Transformative Power of Your Insight for Your Key Audiences. Will your insight and recommendations for action be

  • 1) quickly forgotten by your key audiences;

  • 2) shared, commented on and potentially implemented by your key audiences; or

  • 3) transformative for the way your key audiences think and/or do business?

Scoring

You might have noticed something about the Benefits categories—none of them are direct benefits for you or your organization. They’re all about the ways your insight might benefit your audience. That’s because if your content benefits your audiences, it will eventually benefit you and your organization in myriad ways—among them, increased opportunities for collaboration and funding, increased access to decision makers and media, and access to more impactful audiences.

On to scoring. If your Risk score is 5 or over (or if any single category is a 3), seriously reconsider your intention to make the insight public.

If your Benefits score isn’t at least a 6 (and scores 2 in each category), forget about making the insight public.

If your insight doesn’t clear one or both of those bars, don’t worry. A lot of them won’t. One of your most important tasks as a public expert is getting in the rhythm of quickly generating lots of insights for the public. With practice, the timely, unique, valuable insights come faster and easier. And you also get smarter at crafting them to minimize your situational risks.

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What’s the biggest fear many researchers have about becoming public experts? That being effective with non-experts will require them to give up being an expert—to abandon essential qualities and values that make them a research-based expert in the first place. To be understood by non-experts, goes this thinking, they’ll have to cut corners, be sensationalistic, stray epistemically outside their comfort zones, and dumb down—all of which will reduce if not destroy their credibility with their fellow experts.

The good news: None of these horrible things are necessary to become a public expert.

The uncomfortable news: To be effective as a public expert, you do have to set aside five expert habits—not always, but whenever you inhabit your public role. These habits might seem at first fundamental to research expertise, but they are actually just customs that are specific (I almost said “peculiar”) to research culture. As such, they don’t translate well to other cultures—for instance, every time you the researcher cross the bridge into Non-Researchland.

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Look at it this way: If you always ate with a fork and knife at home but a knife looked bizarre or even hostile in the country to which you had just traveled (and which instead used spoons), you would probably pretty quickly learn to use a spoon at dinner instead of insisting on a knife…if you wanted to be understood by your hosts as having come in peace, that is, rather than to insist on your superior knife-wielding ways.

Another metaphor: As an expert, you’re a superhero. But you wouldn’t always wear superhero tights in public. (No, I don’t think you would.)

The Five Non-Translatable Expert Customs

Enough metaphors. The five non-translatable expert customs are:

• Only thinking about “doing content” when it’s time to promote your new papers or reports.

• Insisting on multiple (three or more) authors/bylines for public content.

• Mistaking research gaps for public knowledge gaps.

• Expecting non-researchers to be on research’s wavelength and timeline.

• Fear of repeating yourself.

Let’s run through each of these.

Only doing content for the public when you want to promote new research means you’ve given away your access to the audiences and communities you want to reach. Instead, you’re dependent on gatekeepers saying yes to your out-of-the-blue pitch—and, should you get that yes, dependent on increasingly fickle algorithms of social media to amplify your messages.

The better play is to gather your audiences around your thinking by publishing content frequently and regularly on platforms that give you immediate access to the communities you want to reach and allow them to have immediate dialogue with you. Email is one such durable platform. Twitch or LinkedIn are others.

The more bylines, the weaker a piece of public content seems. Three or more bylines signal to the non-research world that water follows is watered-down and group-written, as interesting as a letter to the editor. The world listens to individuals, not institutions. So put the content in your voice, thread it with your stories, sharpen it with your hard-won expert perspective, and fire it with a call-to-action that reflects your passion to make things better. Limit yourself to a single co-author with whom

No one outside of research cares about whether your new study fills a research gap. The only gap they might care about is the one between a problem they face and a solution for it—a gap you can fill with your expertise-based framing, insight or solution.

Very few non-experts think like scientists and researchers. You change your mind based on new data, which might appear frequently, episodically or not at all. Very few other people are wired like this. We watched countless public health experts during the pandemic pivot their messaging on a dime when new evidence emerged, without much more explanation than “that’s how science works.” Within science, yes. Within society, not so much. The process of science and research for any question—and the evolving or steady state of evidence on any question—must today be translated and contextualized to make sense to the non-expert. Do not assume the validity of the process and the weight of the literature with these communities.

In the real world, repetition is important. As I wrote recently, repetition is important “when working to get something across to actual people instead of conforming to a guild or cultural norm….Most concepts infiltrate very slowly. Marketing science shows that, unless people are repeatedly exposed to a new concept or product, they won’t even acknowledge it.” In research, you find something and then move on to filling the next gap. When in Non-Researchland, you keep talking about your insight until you’ve broken through.

Being a public expert is a role you assume when you want to bridge the gap between your expertise and the public’s needs. It’s a role rooted in your expertise but not wholly subsumed in it—it has dimensions outside that of the identity of expert that it requires for full success. If you want that success—if you want to bridge that gap—you have to wear the right clothes, use the spoon and never, ever bring a knife to dinner.

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I know probably a dozen scientists who privately confide that they think the idea Earth is in its Sixth Extinction Event possesses a distinct barnyard odor.

So why is the idea we’re in a Sixth Extinction Event now gospel among so many journalists, policymakers and even conservationists?

Because repetition is important.

Years ago I saw the scientist Jon Foley tweeting the same item 10 or 15 times a week. How annoying, I remember thinking. What the hell is he doing?

But MIT Technology Review—an account with more than 1 million followers—was doing the same thing with an annoying tweet about a 1959 essay on creativity by Isaac Asimov, written about in an MIT Tech Review article first published in 2014. The scientist Andrew Maynard looked into it and found, much to his surprise, that MIT Technology Review knew what it was doing. “Aggressively reposting the same tweet over long periods actually works,” wrote Maynard on Medium, “no matter how irritating it is to your followers.”

You’re not going to offend anybody with repetition, because no one is paying that kind of attention.

Repetition is important.

Last week I found myself wondering whatever had happened to “appealing to science curiosity,” which just a few years back had become the new great hope among science communicators for reducing climate polarization. It had seemed to me such a labored, unlikely route to success.

Then I remembered: Repetition is important.

If there’s one thing researchers, communicators and journalists agree on, it’s this:

Don’t repeat yourself.

Researchers don’t publish the same finding twice. Communicators don’t make the same announcement twice. Journalists don’t break the same story twice.

For each of these professions, getting it out first is all there is. If you missed what they published, they won’t repeat it. They might expand on it later, but they won’t repeat it.

But when working to get something across to actual people — instead of conforming to a guild or cultural norm — repetition is important.

That’s because reality isn’t viral. It’s fungal. Most concepts infiltrate very slowly. Marketing science shows that, unless people are repeatedly exposed to a new concept or product, they won’t even acknowledge it.

And once we’ve acknowledged the new thing, repeating it again and again builds our processing and retrieval fluency around it. We come to believe or prefer it — the truth effect.

So in marketing, we repeat. We say something until we are beyond sick of saying it, until we are convinced that our repetition has become embarrassing.

Only then can we start to be hopeful that other people might have heard it for the first time.

Clarity by itself doesn’t beget understanding. Repetition does.

Most research-driven organizations, steeped as they are in research culture, resist making this shift from clarity to repetition.

Doing so requires a fundamental shift from communications — from the beautiful fantasy of saying something clearly just once and being understood — to marketing, to the long, messy, exhausting campaign mode of repeating and testing messages and insights and ideas until they and you have market penetration.

But if impact is your job, then repetition is your job.

Or, as I heard someone say last week (rather memorably):

“There’s something to be said for having people say, ‘Everywhere I go, I now see what he’s saying. It must be true.’”

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If you’re a researcher who wants to be an effective public expert, there’s a transition you need to make that almost no one talks about: from a) living inside research time (here’s what the research now says, adjust accordingly) to b) understanding public narratives and their slower timelines of change.

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Option a)—a flat declaration, here’s the research, take it or leave it—is where most researchers get stuck. Option b) isn’t “dumbing down” the research—rather, it’s you becoming aware and then sophisticated about the discourses into which the research must fit and be framed. It’s accepting that, even though you don’t like where the public narrative is, it’s going to take a lot more than just a new finding to change minds. As a public expert, you should be in it for the long haul.

Accepting all this is especially difficult when the media is involved in producing the prevailing public narrative, because we’ve all been trained to think it’s the media’s job to inform and educate the public—to help change public narratives when the evidence says so. But that’s the (ideal) dynamic of a research narrative, not a prevailing public one. (And the media is often a trailing indicator of the public narrative, not a driver.)

Changing the Narrative: Reducing Food Waste & Loss as Climate Action

Here’s an interesting example of this disjunction. Anthropocene Magazine reported last week on new research finding that reducing food loss and waste globally—a often-touted-as-major-but-never-taken pathway to reducing global greenhouse emissions—would actually catalyze food price decreases and subsequent food consumption increases. Those consumption increases would, in turn, drive production and distribution that would wipe out more than half of the avoided emissions benefits of the original food loss and waste reduction.

It’s a classic “rebound effect,” similar to when increasing fuel-use efficiency has just led to increased use of fuel. And, in fact, this new finding for a rebound effect from food loss and waste reduction is a major reversal of a long-standing claim in the climate science literature advocating for food waste and loss reduction as a pillar of climate action. The finding should be major news in climate science, activist and policy discourse. (Indeed, the rebound effect and tradeoffs around it were the thrust of the whole paper.)

However, the paper also had incidental good news: Those lower food prices and increased food consumption would also benefit food security for many millions of people—especially people in low-income countries. According to Anthropocene, “in sub-Saharan Africa more food at cheaper prices would increase the availability of calories by 320 per person, per day—which makes up 16% of the daily calorie intake that’s recommended for a healthy diet.” The paper briefly discusses that any attempt by policymakers to repress the rebound effects from reducing food waste and loss would also repress these gains in food security. Again, these points—the gains in food security from the rebound effect and the tradeoffs between food security and environmental gains in managing the rebound effect—are subordinate points in the paper. (Here’s the full paper.)

Ken Caldeira of Breakthrough Energy, who will be a guest on my podcast coming up this fall and whom I respect immensely, tweeted out this subtle, puckish take on the Anthropocene piece:

Other scientists (responding to Ken) were less subtle in their complaints:

Even a co-author of the paper weighed in:

These researchers are all living on research time, and so all these takes are bad. The prevailing public narrative the paper was written to address—a narrative promoted for over a decade by science—is the narrative about reducing food loss and waste as an important climate-action pathway. Just look at the title of the paper: “Rebound effects could offset more than one half of avoided food loss and waste.” It doesn’t even mention what’s being offset because everyone knows—especially the self-selected and hyper-climate-aware audience of Anthropocene Magazine.

Be Such a Scientist, But Also Be a Public Expert

What’s going on here? I’d say the scientists tweeting in response to Anthropocene’s article are asking Anthropocene (and its readers) to behave like scientists—to respond to the new findings, pivot to a new narrative supported by those findings, and abandon the old prevailing scientific narrative. Something like: Oops, food waste and loss wasn’t much about climate action, after all. It’s now about food security. Carry on.

But if you’re not a scientist, you might understand that making this sudden pivot could be less than smooth. For instance: Imagine if you were a US policymaker who has been struggling for a decade to get action on food waste and loss to counteract climate change, only to see this study. Well of course you’d have questions and would have to reassess—that’s essential for promoting science-based policy. But let’s not pretend that shift wouldn’t come without major dislocations for policy approaches you’d be anchored to for quite a while, not to mention important parts of your constituency. Let’s not pretend that you might not want to see more data and some confirmatory takes (if not more studies) from researchers outside the study.

Researchers like to bitch about the media, and I’m sometimes sympathetic. But researchers are also often wildly unrealistic about the media’s role in the world (it’s not your stenographer) and the hard work it takes to change a public narrative. Reducing food waste and loss as climate action has been a major public narrative, and the public anchors on public narratives. Changing that narrative because of new science requires contextualizing the new knowledge within the persistence of the old narrative as well as acknowledging and managing the uncomfortable truth (for non-researchers) that policies based on research are only as good as the research.

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Inside Higher Ed reports that Substack has more than doubled the number of academics publishing newsletters through the site, representing “‘thousands’ of new publications” and “a 42 percent increase in academic paid subscriptions.” IHE quotes five current and former academics — one of which quit his faculty position to go full-time doing his Substack — on why they do Substack newsletters. I counted at least seven reasons:

• They can consistently reach tens of thousands of readers without having to worry about the whims of a platform (ahem, Twitter and Facebook);

• They can publish when and on what they want, unlike with legacy media (ahem, New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, etc.);

• They can “play with ideas, float sparks of future academic work, but also ideas I have about the world that don’t fit in a piece for a publication” (that from Brian Klass, University College London associate professor of global politics and publisher of Substack The Garden of Forking Paths);

• They can test those ideas with their readers — “which means they’ll develop differently” than they would in a journal, argues Adam Mastroianni, post doc at Columbia Business School who publishes Experimental History;

• They can quickly gather collaborators for their best ideas and build momentum for grant applications around the ideas;

• They can gather information on topics from readers that can fuel future content (such as Emily Oster and her next book on “navigating pregnancy after prior complications); and

• Sometimes, they even gain supplemental income, if they take subscribers.

“I realized people would wake up, check their phones and, yes, read an email or watch a TikTok video, but they would also read an essay if you get them at the right time,” Erik Hoel, who quit his biology research professorship at Tufts to publish the Substack The Intrinsic Perspective, told IHE. He added he found the appetite for long-form research-based essays “unimaginatively powerful.”

This isn’t an advertisement for you to move to Substack ASAP. Consistently publishing a good newsletter is demanding; to do it, you should develop a content strategy, at lease a dozen kick-off topics, a healthy-sized list and a distribution plan.

But here’s what strikes me about that list of benefits: They’re very similar to the benefits I’ve been saying you get when you create a public expert ecosystem around your insights—a community to which you publish those insights directly and regularly, and a community that pushes you to make those insights better.

You can do that on Substack. You can also do it on IG, YouTube, Slack, Facebook, maybe Twitter still, and maybe Threads someday, and maybe just plain email or podcasting. But if you’re waiting for someone else to allow you to create that ecosystem through their platform, through their yes to your pitch or query, you’ll be waiting forever.

Michael Beam, director of emerging media and technology at Kent State, tells IHE that Substack is just another wave in the ongoing disruption of legacy media:

“For a long time in the blogosphere world, it was a place for dialogue. With Twitter, it was public dialogue,” Beam said. “I wouldn’t call Substack and (blogging host site) Medium as the central place for it now, but I don’t know if there is a central place.”

(Amazes me to see Medium and Substack lumped in the same sentence.)

Later in the article, Beam predicts that, in the wake of Twitter’s declension, the next “central place” will still be a single place:

“It won’t be the next big product; it’ll be who gets everyone to sign up,” he said. “We don’t end up where it’s the best practices or user interface. We end up where everyone else is.”

That strikes me as nostalgic, and skating to where the puck was. If Substack is a new “central place,” it’s a central place with no center—or with thousands of centers, each created by an individual public expert or group of experts.

From what I’m seeing, going forward there will be no “the” central place; only “your” central place.

You and your community need to create and grow your central place.

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