Don T Be Such A Scientist Analysis

Randy Olsen is a scientist turned film maker. He lived in the academic realm for years and saw scientist, who spent years researching to come up with real solutions to real world problems, fail over and over again to communicate their ideas to a mass audience. After spending over a decade preforming detailed scientific research he packed up his microscopes and flew to shipped off the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts to study film and become a better communicator. In his book Don’t Be Such a Scientist he goes into great detail about his experiences and the lessons he learned. Randy Olsen’s books is not an information guide on how scientist should communicate, it is a book of suggestions on how scientist should rethink
Randy Olsen’s book Don’t be Such A Scientist is a brilliant book that seeks to persuade scientist put more emphasis on mass communication.
The first chapter is appropriately named “Don’t Be So Cerebral” (Olsen, 17). The chapter’s main goal is to convince the scientific community to use more than logic when talking mass audiences. Most scientist are fine tuned information spuing machines, not dissimilar to a printer. Their ideal situation to communicate within is a group of people sitting in chairs looking forward listening and critiquing their logic and nothing else. Their focus is on accuracy and nothing else. This brings to light the main two issues Olsen sees with scientific communication, they put all their focus on accuracy and none on not being boring (Olsen 8). In the academic community the worst thing you can do is be incorrect, if one small detail of your research is wrong it can bring your entire presentation into question. In the world of mass communication, the worst thing you can be is boring, if you bore your audience it does not matter if what you have to say is accurate or not the audience will not listen.
Ethos being the authority of speaker, pathos being the emotional appeal used by the speaker, and logos being the logical arguments used by the speaker. In order to not bored the audience and to make the information more accessible Olsen translates those ideas into the “four organs theory of connecting with the mass audience” (Olsen, 18). The four organs are the head, the heart, the gut, and the sex organs. The scientific community uses the head in order to make their arguments and persuade their peers. The head is the organ of logic or logos and for the scientific community logic is the only thing that matters (Olsen, 18). These scientist practices scientism, the idea that the only path to real and meaningful knowledge is through scientific research (booth, 30). While the scientists are focusing on the head, the rest of the audience is looking for appeals to their heart, gut, and sex organs. The sex organs relate to sex appeal, something every human with sexual urges can appeal to (Olsen, 21). The gut relates to humor and gut instinct. When appealing to the gut you can either make the audience laugh or make them feel what you are saying in their gut, or have a gut feeling about the