The world's information is available to us at our fingertips. How do we recognize good sources and evaluate scientific claims? Melanie Trecek-King describes her tool kit for critical thinking.
Talking Biotech is a weekly podcast that uncovers the stories, ideas and research of people at the frontier of biology and engineering.
Each episode explores how science and technology will transform agriculture, protect the environment, and feed 10 billion people by 2050.
Interviews are led by Dr. Kevin Folta, a professor of molecular biology and genomics.
336 - Evaluation of Scientific Claims - Melanie Trecek-King
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Kevin Folta: [00:00:00] Hi everybody. And welcome back to the talking biotech podcast. Now we live in an age of information where information is coming at us fast and furious from all sides. And we can find almost any information we're looking for on the internet, even if it's not true, we've had this big problem with whether you want to call it fake news or truthiness, or just outright fraud.
When we're talking about major issues in science, whether it's COVID-19 vaccinations, genetic engineering climate, how do we know what to believe when we see it? And so what we've turned into is instead of being simple information gatherers, we're now forced to be better kind of sewers of information, and also better at synthesizing it to make a real representation of what the truth really is.
And with that in mind, I wanted to invite today's guest. Today's guest is Melanie Theresa King. She's [00:01:00] at, oh no, what's the name of the community college. Massasoit community college in Brockton, Massachusetts. And she said that one to me a little while ago and I Massasoit, it doesn't look like the way it's spelled anyway.
So any most of you know, Melanie from social media, like Twitter With the account thinking is power and welcome to the podcast mail.
Melanie Trecek-King: Thank you for having me, Kevin. I'm so excited to be on. I'm
Kevin Folta: excited. You're on too, because your account and your website are exactly what this world needs.
And I have been so excited because Melanie has always post very insightful comments about critical thinking and analysis, and also as assembled tool kits for her students to help them identify how to think. Issues critically incorrectly. And I wanted to kind of share those with this audience because all of you are really deputies of what we discuss on this podcast.
How do you share this with your friends and family and how do you think about science [00:02:00] and are you being deceived? So I want to make my deceiving you, and so these are questions I really wanted to get into. So Melanie, could you tell me a little bit first about your background in science and how you got into the area of skepticism and critical.
Melanie Trecek-King: Yeah. So it was a long road of, I think, a lot of mistakes before I got to where I think I'm hopefully making fewer. So my background is general biology and chemistry is my undergrad. And my graduate work was plant ecology, actually studied Prairie, succession and fire ecology, and the great Plains.
And then followed my husband for a job in Massachusetts and started teaching at a community college, which I adore. And I, I especially. In the non-majors science classes. So those are the courses that people who aren't going to be scientists when they grow up, have to take. And most of the time that course is introduction to biology or the baby bio approach, where it's basically what majors have to take over the course of a year, their first year, but synthesize [00:03:00] down to the super light approach in a semester.
And. I really try to make that class work. I think I, over the course of probably 12 years or so, I probably used at least a half a dozen books and then no book. I used issues and problem-based learning and every which way I could think of and finally decided it just wasn't working. The goal of non-majors science courses is science literacy.
And so was I teaching science literacy, and I didn't think that I was. And so I went to the department and I said, you know, ask these big questions. Why do we teach these courses? Or the courses that we're teaching, addressing those issues. And I propose getting rid of that course and replacing it with something else and to their credit, they let me do this.
We took it off the books altogether, intro bio and I created a course instead that I call science for life and it. [00:04:00] What I imagined the average person needing for science, literacy, critical thinking and information literacy. For the rest of their life. So when teaching them, instead of teaching them a bunch of facts that they'd have to memorize and regurgitate on an exam, and honestly they didn't want to take science to begin with and they would probably leave hating science just as much as when they came to me.
I wanted to focus instead on the kinds of skills that we know as scientists are useful in making better decisions. So. Enter science for life. And then thinking his power came from that. It was my attempt at providing them resources, but also I thought maybe. Normal people would want this kind of place forces.
I affectionately call my audience the normals I'm air quoting here that you can't see. But you know, like the one side of the bell curve does not need me and the other side is not reachable. So the middle, the, the normals are who I am [00:05:00] after. Can I reach them with this kind of content
Kevin Folta: it's much nicer than I call them the ordinary ans so, you know, you're, you're much more, much, much nicer than I am, but I love this idea and you know, what's really funny.
This is what resonates so well when I read about your work and the things that you've done and seen interviews with you is that I've had the same revelation. I used to teach molecular biology and graduate level, like their biology. And it used to be memorize all the enzymes in the pathway and and understand the gene expression patterns in tissue specific compartments.
And I realized every year for 15 years, I had to review that stuff before I taught it, which meant I didn't memorize it. Why am I making everyone else memorize it? When really I need to be talking to them about the big picture ideas of how. Behave in think in the developmental programs it moves between in and what are the events that orchestrate this.
And then if we wanted to [00:06:00] find the information to understand this process, where would we get it? And it, it completely flipped the way I teach and the students. And they get tests questions where they'll say Dr. Folta, what was the right answer? And I'll say, I don't know. I just wanted to see how you think.
I don't know if there's a right answer. You know, yours was pretty good.
Melanie Trecek-King: Oh, the students that, oh, my students want to know what the end, what the right answer is. I actually have an activity. One of the ones I start with and there is no right answer, but it's just killing them. They want to find what the solution is and we get to the end and they're like, well, what is it?
I don't know. I have the information that you can be like, well, isn't at the end of an experiment. It's not like you get to say, okay, science gods. Tell me what the real answer is. I mean, all you have is the evidence that you the best evidence that you have and the, the reasoning that you can use to come to.
You know, a reasonable conclusion and actually you said something [00:07:00] there, which is my fight so far has been for the non-science majors, but I think that there is we have a lot of progress that we could be making in how we teach science to even our majors. I think we, again, it's been way too much time focusing on facts and not enough on how do we know these.
Kevin Folta: No. You're exactly right. I think that was the first class I taught this year in graduate molecular biology. I was a team taught course. And my first lecture was, how do we know what we know? And what did this mutation tell us when we saw this plant not behave. And when we did this, what does that tell us?
And making people unravel. Peel the onion and it's the same thing I used to do with grade school kids. Oh, this is such a, this is kind of where I learned it. I would get invited to go teach a class and in local grade school and you know, kids in grade schools are regurgitators right there. They're getting, I mean, actually, no, they're really good hypothesis testers, but they're being taught to regard.
And, and so what I did is I said, here's the problem, Florida. [00:08:00] We got citrus trees that are dying from an insect that spreading a bacterium that blocks the transduction of a full stuff in the inside of the plant. And it can't feed itself. And that dies. How do we fix it? And then every kid has an idea. And some kids say, well, what if you had antibiotics that kill a bacteria?
And another one would say, well, what if you planted the trees in a dome under the ocean? And the, you know, there were so many crazy ideas and really good ideas, but it was jogging them to present a hypothesis. And then how would you test that? So, so this is what I started to do. I did it with kids in grade schools.
Why can't I do it with my students at the university level? And so that's when I really flipped it.
But I guess the, the real thinking is it's it's about this idea of you, you mentioned two things, you mentioned two things, you mentioned scientific literacy or science literacy, and you also mentioned information literacy. What's the difference?
Melanie Trecek-King: Yeah. I know there's a difference [00:09:00] between scientific and science literacy.
I tend to use those to basically the same, because I'm not sure for the average person that's really worth distinguishing between the two, but If I just defined that first. So I think most of our time when we talk about science literacy it's when I see like pew comes out with her measure of our American scientifically literate it's, which is smaller and electron or a molecule, or how long does it take the earth to go around the sun?
And those are. Absolutely worth knowing. And they're interesting factoids, but they're still factoids. So for me, science literacy is understanding how the process of science works to test ideas and come to reasonable conclusions. Information literacy is being a good consumer. You call it a connoisseur of information and I'm going to steal that because that's amazing.
The thing is like with the course with science, [00:10:00] for life, I've actually designed the entire course so that all of the assessments are open everything. And I do that because I know for the rest of their lives, the students have access to information, more information in the little machines they carry in their pocket.
Then any human in any time in history, the question is whether they can think about that information in a way that helps them arrive at a reasonable conclusion. And so when, when I talk about information literacy, it's understanding what sources are more reliable than others. For me in order to be able to do that, they have to understand their own biases and their own their own errors and thinking that would interfere with their ability to use that information.
Kevin Folta: No. You're exactly right. I think that that's always the first trick and this is what we learn in [00:11:00] higher education. If we're lucky, by the time we graduate with a bachelor's degree, but certainly, you know, as you go into graduate school, you really get conditioned to how do am I not? Self-defense. Right.
H how, how am I not making a mistake here in that involves, you know, what are my biases? What's the lens that I'm looking through and what mistake am I about to make in this interpretation? And how else can it be interpreted? And we spend all our time trying to prove ourselves wrong. When in a social media space, people are looking for data that are trying to prove their hypothesis.
Correct.
Melanie Trecek-King: Yeah. And interestingly, when I, when I talked to other faculty that teach gen ed science this is anecdotal. But a lot of them will say, oh, I, I teach science literacy and dig a bit further. And what they mean is I have students read primary literature and I'm [00:12:00] probably going to Take a lot of people off when I say this, but I don't think that's appropriate, especially for the non-major.
I mean, so my background is plant ecology, right? I specifically focused on how Prairie's succeed into force over time and the role of fire in plant diversity and succession. So. I Kevin, I probably wouldn't be able to understand your publications and your plants. So like enter M RNA vaccines. And like, I have a decent background in basic biology.
I've been teaching basic biology to even majors for a long time. That's not something that I, I not only don't have the background in that area. I don't, I don't know the methodologies that those types of researchers use. I don't know the body of evidence. I, I don't have the skills necessary to do that.
And the danger, I [00:13:00] think in teaching students that the primary literature is where you find the real scientific answers to your questions is that if you go to Google scholar and type in. Whatever it is that you want to type in, you're going to find something in the primary literature that confirms what you believe, just like you do on regular Google.
Kevin Folta: Yeah. Or at least a title that does. Right. And that's totally true. I mean, I know people who have made profound statements about glyphosate because there was a paper called assessment of glyphosate as an endocrine disruptor. Oh, see? It is right. Well, no, the assessment that.
Melanie Trecek-King: Well, right. But then you'd have to be able to understand what the study said enough and they probably don't.
And so yeah, your biases interfere with your ability to use that information in the primary literature. Just as much as they do in. The S the secondary and tertiary literature. So I teach my [00:14:00] students how to be better consumers of information. In general, I teach my students with the scientific consensus is, and the value of the consensus and how to find one, if there is one.
And to me that is much more valuable than, all right, you have a question. Let's go to Google scholar and type in your keywords. And now let's try to read primary literature. It's just not practical for every single question they might have for the rest of their lives.
Kevin Folta: And I agree with you. I think that it's really hard to use the primary literature that took me years to be able to be able to sit down and really correctly decipher the statistical treatments of a given paper.
And even today I read some of the things in meta analysis and I have no idea how they got to. The data into this. So how can I possibly draw conclusion from it? And so that, that really is a formidable issue. The thing that you really touch on there as a really important issue, though, when you talk about, well, you know, we're looking at the primary literature, here's my area of expertise.
How does somebody who is a scientist who wants to [00:15:00] critically evaluate information, have that kind of. Yes. Humility is the word to say, I don't know.
Melanie Trecek-King: Yeah, I mean, I suppose humility is, is the key there. It's funny. I, with my social media accounts post things about critical thinking. A key aspect of critical thinking is knowing your limits.
And whenever I post about anything to do with intellectual humility, there's always a certain type of person that gets really offended and defensive. You know, the
Kevin Folta: type I've danced with them for years.
Melanie Trecek-King: Really hard to get them to recognize like, come down a peg or two, like you probably know things that I don't know. And that's okay.
Kevin Folta: But that was one of the hardest things to learn is that it's okay to not know things and coming up through education, you know, the smartest I was. When I left my bachelor's degree in 1989, you know, I [00:16:00] graduated with my bachelor's.
That was the smartest I ever was that ever since then, I've really been, I've gained so much more information and knowledge and better at interpreting it to be able to understand that I really don't know much. But, but I've also had the humility to admit that. And what's so important about that is that anybody who's listened to 330, some podcast episodes knows that I can be conversant in a pretty broad swatch of science from medicine through molecular biology and a plant biology will pro procure attic, biology, whatever, but I still consider myself a.
Expert in most things. And that's why we have a podcast because I can lean on the experts to help me understand. And that kind of approach of help me understand is so powerful because you're automatically listening to what someone else is saying. Right. I mean, is that kind of the idea behind intellectual humil?
Melanie Trecek-King: Yeah. I mean, to me, it's just basically there's a metacognitive [00:17:00] aspect of being aware of knowing what you don't know. And I know with my students, which is tangent here every, at the beginning of every semester it will come up and I will say, I don't know. And they look at me like they have never seen an educator say that before.
And it's really a shame. I think we need to do a better job of modeling that because then I, I, I worry that when When scientists say, I don't know. Or they place limits on what they know. Right. There's the, the certainty, there's the, the, the language that to many people looks awfully wishy-washy. And I will, they don't know anything like they're not being really certain in how they word things.
There's an aspect of not understanding the nature of knowledge. And so. I would hope that we would do a better job. The earlier we can start to model this to our students [00:18:00] of, I don't know, let's find out together, or, you know, let's ask someone who does know this and seek, you know, where knowledge is.
That's something else with my students is that one of the most important aspects of knowledge is knowing. Who to trust or knowing where knowledge lives. And so we can't all be experts in everything. So understand what you know, and don't know in any particular area who knows more about this particular place, where can I find that knowledge?
Kevin Folta: Oh, very good. And that's one of the things I always emphasize is. When I talk to experts who in farming and agriculture just did a talk the other day in St. Louis about this, you know, how do you become trusted and how, where do you earn trust and how do you build trust? Especially in the cesspool of social media space.
And most of the people I spoke to in that audience many of them afterwards said, well, I agree with you, [00:19:00] but I'm not going on Twitter because I was sick of it. I'm going over to parlor and it's all right. They want to yell in the echo chamber rather than engage the people who don't know these answers, who are looking for you.
And that's one big problem. So how important is that idea of identifying trusted sources and how do you teach that to students?
Melanie Trecek-King: Yeah, I mean, the trustworthy. Really important and unfortunately in short supply right now I wish I had a good answer. I mean, we all We all like to think that we've arrived at conclusions using evidence.
And that science is on our thought side and that we are critical thinkers. And we don't trust those who disagree with us and those who are not on our team or in our tribe. And those tend to overlap. And this is really a problem. You know, any [00:20:00] time any particular issue gets associated with a tribal identity, then I really don't know how to solve that.
Because trust is essential for knowledge. Oh. All the time and we don't recognize it, but I trust that the roads are developed to a certain standard of safety. I trust my drinking water. I trust my food supply. I D I trust all the time. It's just when a conclusion does not align with deeply held beliefs, worldview, or tribal identity.
That we decide that they can't be trusted and we deny their conclusion. How do we reign that back in? Just don't
Kevin Folta: know. Yeah, I got it. I got an idea anyway, but it's impossible. It'll never happen. The, the big trick is, as you say, overcoming tribal [00:21:00] identities and tribal identities, meaning it being strictly in the social tribe parlance here is so the idea of everybody going into a conversation when they hear something, they disagree with the first question you should ask you.
Maybe I'm wrong. That's not really a question. Am I wrong? So if it's something I disagree with, am I wrong? Is my disagreement. Am I seeing this incorrectly? And the second question should be to somebody, help me understand. Y I don't align with your viewpoint. And that idea kind of falls in with that intellectual humility that this is something I don't agree with.
Am I being deceived to my self deceiving into my biases? Clouding inappropriate interpretation of this question.
Melanie Trecek-King: Yeah. So that opens the door for them to provide justifications and also potentially because you've modeled it to have them question their own beliefs. Yes. [00:22:00]
Kevin Folta: And then that it happens. And it's hard for them to sometimes articulate. Why would they blew by what they believe is true? Other than it's something they heard from somebody they trust.
Melanie Trecek-King: When I start class the, the first thing that I address is what we believe and why and how that's different than knowing. And I use the example of witchcraft. So No during the witch trials people were so convinced that, which is where the cause of, you know, birth defects or storms or whatever it was that ailed them, that, you know, they tortured and killed them.
And so most of my students don't believe in witches. And so it's a non triggering belief that they're able to step back from. And to assess in a way that while they really believe this, why did they believe that, you know, what was their evidence? How did they come to that belief? And it's really easy to see.
I mean, they came to it [00:23:00] through, they couldn't explain what they were seeing. So they relied on supernatural explanations, people around them believed it. So they accepted that. The thing that was a scary time, they needed a. Sense of control. So they're able to step back and analyze those. And I try to walk them to then applying that to their own beliefs and getting them to assess why you think most of us do.
That we have arrived at our beliefs through evaluating the evidence, but that's simply not true. Most of our beliefs come from people we trust and it honestly has to be that way. We don't have the time or the space to evaluate all of our beliefs. So the question is, are you placing your trust in sources that deserve.
And so that's how I try to get at it. And I walk them through then, you know, metacognition and analyzing their biases [00:24:00] and understanding the limits of, you know, their own experiences to tell them about the world. I have the privilege, I suppose, in my class that my students are captive for four months and they want a grade.
So they have to at least stick with me during this period of time. But I think it's a valuable. I don't know how to deal with this. You know, I follow you on Kevin on social media and I love following you because you do such a great job with commentators. But it's really difficult when you were interfacing with someone who is coming at it from a different point of view.
You don't know what they know. You don't know what brought them there and how do you engage with them? In the social media comments to to get them to question their own beliefs. Well, I just put that question back at you. So can I interview you now?
Kevin Folta: No, that's fine. I, you know, th th but this is something that I always do try to do in social media.
But let's cover that on the other side of the break. We're [00:25:00] speaking with Melanie Theresa King, and we're talking about critical thinking and analysis. And how we can know if we're being deceived. How do we know good information when we see it, this is a talking biotech podcast by collabora. We'll be back in.
Now we're back on the talking biotech podcast by collabora. We're speaking with Melanie Theresa King and she's an instructor at right. I've got the soil. I, I, you know, I don't, I don't live there. It's really tough in in Brockton, Massachusetts, and she's really just been so much on my radar with the beautiful work she does in social media.
Yeah on websites and Twitter with educating the general public as an extension of her classes. And one of the things that we've discussed, I guess, before the break we talked about how do you engage people who are really. Do you have far out ideas in our, in our really [00:26:00] succumbing to their own biases? Is that where we were?
Yeah, I believe so. So I guess the thing I always do, I rely on three words and three words I flip out there are helped me understand, and I make somebody, as I mentioned before, make somebody articulate their position. And what you find out is that they rely on so many bad. Sources of information or bad habits, it's always posting a website or a horrible predatory journal article or you know, th th the, the quality of the data that they use to defend their positions are really poor.
And probably the best thing I can do. You know, provide for me the one most convincing piece of information that will convince me that I'm wrong. If you had to reach in your quiver of scientific weirdness and, and, and pull out one piece of information to convince me that ivermectin is a, is a powerful therapeutic for COVID-19.[00:27:00]
Let me see what that is. And you know what, I usually, it usually ends the conversation, unfortunately, but as you mentioned, it illuminates it very strongly for the folks in the middle of the curve who don't know who to trust. And then they trust me over, you know COVID sham 90 nine.com. So you know, one of the other things I'd really like to talk to you about, because I know time is short is your toolkits that you've designed on your websites that are just fantastic.
And I've kind of fallen in love with the idea of floater the, your life preserver in a sea of false information. And this was highlighted in this once a skeptical Inquirer, right? Yeah. So tell me a little bit more.
Melanie Trecek-King: Well, so when I designed the science for life course I had been using James let in his 1990 article field guide to critical thinking, had a toolkit that he summarized basically critical thinking and the process [00:28:00] of science in a toolkit.
And I've been using this for years. It's a great toolkit. But. This is where I start to feel really old because you know, most of my students obviously weren't even alive at that time. They born after the year 2000. So it's a little dated. His examples are a little dated and also you know, it focused on paranormal and supernatural.
So through my, using it over the years I started to see what my students need. And think about how I could better provide them with something. And you know, when I when I talk about teaching my students, like critical thinking and critical thinking is actually really difficult to define.
And what does it mean to think critically? You could talk about that forever. And so. I think it's important helpful to provide students with a structured tool kit that they can use to evaluate claims, which is where flutter came in. So [00:29:00] floater stands for falsifiability logical objectivity.
Alternative explanations tentative explanations evidence and reproducibility. And the general idea is so I presented early in the semester. And I give my students plenty of practice during this semester. I use a lot of pseudoscience in class. I'm in science denial, and I have them evaluate you know, good science, bad science, et cetera, with the toolkit, the idea being that you're presented with a claim.
How can I think through this claim?
Kevin Folta: Yeah, that's really good. I love that progression. It almost spells Folta in a way. If we could get rid of evidence, replicability, I just thought, wow, how do I, how do I, how do I rejigger this to work for me? Or get a tattoo I've been waiting for the right one, but I love this kind of idea because it highlights all of these steps that we really have to think about when we consider.
[00:30:00] Thinking because critical thinking is like dancing drunk. Everybody thinks they're good at it, but when everyone starts doing it, you can pick out the ones who have no idea. And, and so this is the this, this is kind of the where we're at with this. You see so many people in social media space saying, well, I'm a profound, critical thinker.
That's why I've come to the conclusion that hydroxy chloroquine is clearly a therapeutic for there. There are people who still are playing. Our buzzwords now in pseudo-scientific space and that's really become more of a.
Melanie Trecek-King: Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm stealing that as well because perfect. Yeah. So I actually call that pseudo critical thinking.
And I don't know if that's an original idea or not, but it's like pseudoscience. So, I mean, nobody thinks they're a pseudo scientist. They just use what they think is science to support their conclusion. And so pseudo, critical thinking. Is using what they think is critical thinking to arrive at the conclusion that they [00:31:00] want to arrive at.
And the problem is that if you think that you have used critical thinking to arrive at your conclusion, why would you change? And you know, conspiracy theorists are obviously like the best at this pseudo critical thinking. They think that they have used all of the methods of critical thinking and they have seriously misled themselves.
And unfortunately they've inoculated themselves against good information as opposed to the other way around.
Kevin Folta: All of this is really great. And maybe there's a last thing we could talk about is some strategies for operating in social media to build trust, and maybe be able to communicate science a little more effectively.
So here's some things that we commonly hear. I've got a list of them, and I would like to hear your opinion as to how you would respond to it. So, first one is do your own research.
Melanie Trecek-King: What you just went right in with a triggering. The language is wow. Yeah. So [00:32:00] I was seeing that going around. I don't know, it must've been a year or so ago and I just like, it was so ubiquitous and the, the common denominators seem to be.
People who think they have done good research to arrive at a good conclusion. And if you just did the same, you would see the same thing arrive at the same conclusion that they did. And so I actually wrote an article in response to that. The essence is the people who were doing their own research.
Tend to have an inflated sense of their own abilities and missing that intellectual humility that we've been talking about. That's so important. Arriving at a better conclusion. They think that I'm sitting down to Google and typing in the, the loaded words and the leading language that gets them to the conclusion that they want to arrive at is doing research.
And I mean, of course there's a difference between [00:33:00] primary research and secondary research and there's value to secondary research. But really what they're doing is they have a conclusion in mind and they're trying to find evidence to say, And if you're going to Google looking for evidence that you're right, or you're going to find it.
So what I try to do is explain the difference there. And then that article is one of my most popular articles. I mean, it's still goes around. And then I realized I didn't help people actually do their own research because there is value to, okay. I have a question and I want to find the most reliable answer.
How do I do that?
Kevin Folta: So, what is, what is the answer to that? Like where do you, how do you start researching something objectively?
Melanie Trecek-King: Well, yeah. My response to that, right. Me and this was one of my most difficult ones to write because I was essentially trying to, I always go back to My audience being the [00:34:00] normals and my my students are the normals and my students have taught me so much over the years of how, what they know and how to help them.
And so what I did was I imagined, okay. So let's say that, I want to know does the MMR vaccine cause autism I've heard that. Maybe I'm at the point where I need to vaccinate my kids and I'm a little afraid. I want to do my own research. Now, one way, the way that a lot of people do is they go to Google and they'll like MMR vaccine causes autism.
And then they end up in a rabbit hole of misinformation. So what I did was I wrote a how to do your own research. And the first part is what a scientific consensus is how the process of science works and the value of the consensus, and then how to find a scientific consensus is there is one.
And so, okay. If I [00:35:00] have this question now, let's say, I want to know the, if there's a relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism I'm going to look for the consensus position of the American medical association. Or I'm going to look for meta analyses or something to that effect as opposed to even going to, like we talked about earlier, going to Google scholar and cherry picking individual studies that may say something misleading.
Kevin Folta: Yeah, very good. Cause it's cause you'll always find one. And then again, when you say that you went to the AMA website, they'll say, well, obviously they're just paid off by all the big pharma companies. So, you know, it's, it's such a difficult task for us to do what we do, but I really want people to visit your website and go through it.
And so where do they find the information that you've prepared? So wonderful.
Melanie Trecek-King: Oh, thank you. So my major social media channels are Facebook and Twitter at thinking powers at both of those. But [00:36:00] I I. On my website, it's thinking is power.com. And what I try to do on thinking is power.com. There's three major sections to the website.
One is what I call foundations, and that is my attempt at organizing information in a way that I do in my court. So if you were to take my science for life course and start at the beginning, the believing and knowing, and working through metacognition and skepticism, et cetera. The foundations page, we'll walk you through that.
I have a topics page. Explores various topics based on the critical thinking and science literacy and information literacy concepts explored on the foundations page. So for example, if you wanted to know about homeopathy or I do things like psychics and. What else is on there? Like various things about alternative medicine.
So that's on the topics page, and then if you're an educator and you want to use this kind of content in your classroom, I have various [00:37:00] assignments that I also use in my
Kevin Folta: class. Cool. I'll actually use those I'm I'm teaching a class this fall that will incorporate some of these tools. So pretty excited about that.
And where did they find you on Twitter? Can you say it one more time? Thinking powers. Okay. So I'll make sure it's in the show notes and we'll make sure we connect with you there. I just wanted to share really quickly my mic drop one of this week. Someone said to me, well, how do you know about vaccines?
You're not. And I said, I'm the guy who taught your doctor.
I said, no, I'm not a doctor. I'm the one who teaches your doctor. You know? So that was my mic. I got Al so I got all pre-meds, you know, so if they're learning something and reasoning and logic, it might be coming from me. Well, Melanie Theresa King, thank you so much for joining me today. You know, we're going to have to do this again soon and hope.
Maybe someday we can team up on a cool project somewhere and, and change a little [00:38:00] piece of the.
Melanie Trecek-King: I would love that out to save the world. Let's do it.
Kevin Folta: And for all you listeners, thank you for listening to the talking biotech podcast. Write us a review on Spotify, iTunes, or anywhere where you consume podcast media.
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