This week I’m back with one of my absolute favorite science communicators! If this is your first read, I’ve been interviewing TikTokers to learn more about how the platform is revolutionizing science communication and science education, from the power of livestreaming to the virality of eco-rap music videos. You can read the previous interview in this series here.
Scitimewithtracy is a self-proclaimed “data-driven diva.” She runs an exceedingly popular TikTok account, which has garnered her 260,000+ followers. You may remember I wrote about her briefly in my article, “Science’s TikTok Revolution.” Tracy broadcasts directly from her whiteboard, dismantling misinformation without demeaning people. She’s open with her faults and those of scientific research as a whole.
Because of this casual and honest approach, her videos have collectively received 4.1 million likes. As a former college professor with a PhD in Microbiology and Immunology, she cares deeply about education and the development of critical thinking skills. Tracy joined me for an insightful conversation about why her videos resonate with so many people, her addiction to livestreaming, and the best ways to battle misinformation.
**This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity**
Tracy: I approach everyone as if they are misinformed. They’ve been lied to, and they’re simply repeating what they have heard or what they interpret. All I’m trying to do is provide them with better information that they can make decisions about. So I started off very early on with that mindset, which is: I’m not going to tell anybody what to think or what to do. That’s their choice, but you have to have better information, if you’re going to make these decisions.
It was very clear from my very first video that the amount of just sheer ignorance--and I mean that in the purest form of that word--the sheer ignorance of people, of their knowledge of biology. It’s not their fault. It’s not something I expect of everybody, but recognizing that in order to make informed decisions about your healthcare, you have to have a basic understanding of the biology so that you’re not making that decision out of fear.
Matthew: There are definitely some people who have their doctorate, they might be professors, and they put that in their handle--put it out there. They stream with their white coat on. I wanted to ask you about the conscious decision to just use your first name, and not Dr. Tracy. Keeping that an informal relationship, or a non-hierarchical one.
T: Yeah. Once you have established that there is an authority differential in a conversation, then people will either defer or defend. What I mean by that is, if you think that somebody’s telling you what to think because they have special powers, like a police officer or a judge or a college professor or your parent, any of those people have automatic authority. If they tell you to do something, you either acquiesce without thinking about it, or you dig in your heels and you just defy immediately.
There’s no reason to set that boundary up ahead of time. If I immediately put up barriers that I am superior in some way, then who is listening to me? They can just scroll past. What I don’t want to do is put [up] barriers to people getting the information because of how I present myself, so I do nothing fancy. I’m embarrassed when someone says, “Oh, you’re a TikTok influencer!” And I’m like, “Yeah. Go watch my videos because they’re super boring.”
“I approach everyone as if they are misinformed. They’ve been lied to, and they’re simply repeating what they have heard or what they interpret. All I’m trying to do is provide them with better information that they can make decisions about.”
M: I think there’s a beauty in that bare bones aspect of it. When you’re going to edit or do transitions or you’re doing all this stuff, it’s not serving your purpose to do that. You’re having a direct dialogue with whoever’s on the other side of that screen, which I think is really important. Really open and honest.
You do spend a lot of time livestreaming. I wanted to talk about how you feel about that livestream interaction. I see that you get a lot of comments that continuously scroll throughout your entire stream. People ask a wide array of questions. From covid to--I think someone yesterday asked about nanoparticles.
Are people putting the entire breadth of scientific knowledge on your shoulders?
T: *laughs*. Sometimes. But I try really hard to recognize where I have some information. I’ll tell you about the livestream first because I think the livestream platform is fascinating.
M: I agree.
T: I’m trying to answer thoroughly, which is different than a lot of creators. They won’t look at the comments at all, or they’ll look at them like, “Oh, hey!” Just very briefly. Or they’re answering questions like, “Yes. No.” Very short answers to the questions to try to get a lot of questions or answers out. I kind of live in the middle where I want to give a thorough discussion but also get to as many questions as I can in the live stream.
Once I start a live, it’s almost impossible for me to get off. I really do suffer from staying on a live. And not understanding how long it’s been. The other day--it was probably a couple weeks ago--I was on a live, and I started feeling like I had been sitting for a while. But I didn’t pay attention to it. I got off the live and my boyfriend goes, “You know you’ve been on that live for 3 hours.” I was on the live for 3 hours, and I had no idea. I thought maybe an hour, an hour and 15 minutes.
M: Constant content. Constant stimulation. Just time goes by.
T: It’s great for my ADHD. The dopamine hit is awesome! *laughs*
M: How is TikTok--speaking of that experience--how has TikTok consumed your life, in a way? I feel like it’s taken up a significant amount of your time, and has affected you emotionally in any way? There’s a lot of adversarial content that you see, that you’re probably getting tagged in, disinformation, things like that.
T: I do get tagged in a lot of videos of people who are very misinformed or pushing disinformation. Sometimes that’s discouraging. Here’s mentally where I live in the scitime channel. I am very confident in the information that I’m putting out there, the content that I’m putting out there. I know that as a scientist, if new information comes out, I have the opportunity to change my mind and acknowledge I’m changing my mind based on new data. I’m comfortable in that space. I generally get people who say that I’m wrong or that I’m lying. That I’m a corporate shill. Whatever. All kinds of things.
But people don’t come after me personally and don’t talk about how I look or my age. I don’t get personal attacks. Because I’m not getting personal attacks and this is all about science, scientists have really thick skins. You put out an idea and that idea is not your identity. That idea is just an idea based on your best interpretation in the moment given the information that you have. And it’s subject to change, and we’re okay with changing our minds.
When somebody comes after my ideas, you’re not showing me anything that’s going to change my mind, so I’m not going to change my mind. I don’t get mentally or emotionally invested in that argument because, in my mind, it’s a scientific argument.
“And that is the fundamental problem with the internet is that everything feels present and timely and temporal.”
T: I get irritated that I still have to have conversations about the people who have been debunked months and months ago, and we’re still talking about it. The fundamental problem with the internet is that everything feels present and timely and temporal. Whereas, in science, if something was published 10 years ago, and nothing’s been published since, then that paper stands as the most recent information, but if something’s been published more recently, subsequently, we go with the most recent published information. And we’re okay with that! Science evolves. I think because the internet doesn’t evolve, that’s the piece that I’ve had real problems with. Because somebody can take a meme from somewhere--it’s not date stamped, it’s not regulated in any way the way scientific information is--so that’s been frustrating because I have to keep talking about it.
M: I would also say that from my own observations, people like you and other people do a really good job of addressing misinformation when it comes across your feed by stitching it or acknowledging it, and I think that helps trickle information down. But, again, I’m not an algorithm scientist.*Laughs*. Whether that’s getting to people who need to see it or not is another question.
T: I know people who don’t agree with me see my content because I get a lot of back and forth in my comment section. But stitching other people--it’s a really interesting thing that you bring up because when you stitch somebody, that hits their algorithm, and I don’t want to hit their algorithm. I don’t want to give them more air. So I still acknowledge the person, but I don’t connect that particular video. For misinformation, it’s a double-edged sword. The minute I acknowledge it, I give it air. Because I have a following, that air has some weight behind it.
M: Are you optimistic about the battle against misinformation? What are your hopes for the future of accessibility to information?
T: It’s not one that I can answer, but I think education has to change. I’m just going to put that out there. Education has to change. We have to stop shoving information down students’ throats and start teaching students how to think about information.
It is no longer appropriate for a teacher to talk to students sitting in a classroom. It is no longer appropriate for us to have standardized tests. It is no longer appropriate for us to assume there is a base amount of knowledge. Every single person in the western and developed world has access to the vast array of information, and what is killing us right now is our inability as a whole--as a society--to vet that information appropriately and to make actionable decisions based on that information.
In my mind, I’m not worried about social media or information or anything like that. I’m going to bring it right back to: people don’t know how to think about information. They don’t know how to have arguments. They don’t know how to read the information that’s available to them. They don’t know how to prioritize that information. And they certainly don’t know how to use that information in making decisions. Until we get to a place where that’s what education does, we’re going to continue to have this problem.
When I go to the web and I look something up, I can get information and I--because of my experience as a scientist--can vet through and prioritize what information is the most recent, what information is the most credible, and then from that use that as a jumping off point for the rest of my research.
What I find with students, particularly, is that if they do the same Google search that I do--first of all they don’t know how to make keyword searches. And I know that sounds terrible, but it’s true. Most of the time, when they search, whatever that is, even if they use the same keywords that I do, they always think that the first thing they read is the most important. Or they think everything they read is equally weighted. They don’t have a way of eliminating things that don’t make sense or things that are irrelevant.
The human brain is really, really, really good at making patterns and trying to categorize things and trying to come to conclusions based on the data that’s around. They’ll take all these things, and what the brain loves to do is to take exceptions to the rule and pay attention to exceptions--and also things that are potentially dangerous. Instead of understanding the statistics that underlie exceptions, the risk management that one has to go through in order to make decisions about--the J&J vaccine being the perfect example of something where, “I’ll take my chances with the virus, thank you very much because this vaccine is not safe.” But it’s 1,000 times safer. Thousand! Maybe even a million times safer. I’m not even sure you understand how much safer this is. So we’re terrible at risk assessment, we’re terrible at thinking about the norm, thinking about the usual, thinking about the average. We don’t know how to apply math and apply logic to this information and it absolutely has to be something that is practiced in the education system, And we need to move away from content and developing information because we can get information however we want.
“Every single person in the western and developed world has access to the vast array of information, and what is killing us right now is our inability as a whole--as a society--to vet that information appropriately and to make actionable decisions based on that information.”
M: There’s so much content. It’s got me thinking a lot about the way we teach what scientific information is. Because people either think it’s true or it’s false. And they don’t see it as a process of investigation. It’s an established truth in their mind.
T: I think the hardest part from my perspective is it’s really hard to explain my intellectual process in making decisions about what I’m going to talk about. Or what’s interesting or why I think the way that I do. Somebody asked me a question about obesity and the vaccine. So I looked up *on the Google* obesity and the vaccine. As I was looking, I found this paper that talked about a lower efficiency of the vaccine in obese people. And so then I looked to see if there was a reason why--because I care about mechanisms. So then I started thinking about where the mechanisms in that are. How does that work? I can’t just take their word for it. The data says--but why? Why is this working this way? So now I’m digging into that. And now that I find out why it’s like, “Oh, it turns out that adipose tissue doesn’t do the vaccine as well or whatever the thing is.”
And that process, that’s happening in milliseconds, and I might not even be aware my thought process is doing that. So when somebody says “does obesity impact the vaccine?” I’m like: “Oh, I read that it does and here’s why.” But what happened in between is the important piece. That’s the piece that we need to teach. That’s the piece that we need to practice. And that’s the piece that’s missing.
You can hear more from Tracy by following her @scitimewithtracy on TikTok!
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