The twice-yearly Ratio meeting in Sofia, which lasts a day each time, is unique in my experience: a large, privately-organized meeting designed solely to address science and skepticism. (They stay away from atheism.) It’s largely organized by Liubomir (“Lubo”) Baburov, who solicits donations but, I think, winds up paying a lot of the expenses out of his own pocket. There is also an eager group of people who help Lubo put on the event, all out of love of science. Lubo’s partner, who does a large bit of organizing (and also acted as my tour guide around Sofia), is Vassilena (“Vassy”) Valchanova.
But each year the meeting grows larger, with this fall’s the largest yet: about 500 people. And nearly all those people are young; I barely saw anyone over 40 in the audience. It’s heartening that the young folk of Bulgaria are so interested in science (and this is genuine popular but hard-nosed science, not mere entertainment); but it’s sad that the local scientific organizations, the government, and companies like GlaxoSmithKline can’t cough up even a few bucks.
Anyway, I greatly enjoyed the meeting, even though three of the talks were in Bulgarian (I could make out some of the material from the slides). There were 3 45-minute talks and one 25-minute talk, with mine on mimicry and the others on exploration of Mars, the efficacy of vaccination, and general patterns of skepticism about issues like genetically modified organisms and the supposed dangers of marijuana. After the talks, all four speakers sat on stage and answered written questions submitted by the audience.
The website for the organization is above, the Ratio Facebook page is here; this year’s event Facebook page is here, and a gallery of photos from the event is here. I’ll post a few:
The hall (curiously, in a Russian-oriented shopping mall). Every seat was taken:
Lubo kicking it off:
Vassy giving other information; she also introduced the speakers (and translated the Bulgarian during the Q&A session for me):
A vanity picture, just to show my name and my topic (“Mimicry”) in Bulgarian characters):
Me aggressively wielding the clicker:
During the coffee breaks, Nikola Kerekov demonsrated the kind of Hazmat suit used by those who treat Ebola patients (this one lacks the respirator):
Julian Karadjov talked about how we should be skeptical in general about things that journalists (and the public) overblow about science, like the supposed dangers of GMOs:
The audience. See how young they are? Very heartening to see a group like this who turns out for a day of science talks. There’s a palpable hunger for science education in Bulgaria.
Vladimir Bozhilov, an astronomer, spoke about human exploration of Mars (and the possibility of settlement there).
Finally, Todor Kantardjiev, the Bulgarian equivalent of Francis Collins (head of U.S.’s National Institutes of Health), talked about vaccination and the dangers of anti-vaxers:
The Q&A, which went on for 40 minutes after all the talks. (Notice the two big-headed people, who freaked me out. The two screens for Powerpoint presentations were to the right and left):
Vassy translated the Bulgarian questions and answers of the other speakers for me. Here I’m demonstration how flatfishes develop (I talked about their mimicry), beginning vertically and then turning on their sides, with one eye migrating over the top of the head to the other side of the body:
The whole crew. Afterwards we repaired for a big Italian feed.
The event usually has one Anglophone speaker per year, and if you’re asked, I urge you to go. Besides getting to promulgate science education in a country where the budget for science is a pathetic 0.3% of the total budget, you get to interact with a group of eager and friendly folks. And there’s all that Bulgarian food and culture to absorb.
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Nice to see all the young people but it’s a bit of a shame older people aren’t there too.
Or maybe those are older people in Bulgaria – they just look really youthful because they have all that good food. 😀
Are you kidding? They’ll all be the size of a house end on a diet like that!
You’d think that but I’m always struck by how thin and fit people look in France and Italy with all those breads and pastas!
Breads and pastas are still healthier than hamburgers and potato chips.
People in Eastern/South-Eastern Europe tend to be pretty into their outdoor pursuits and just generally doing stuff. Lots of time spent outdoors!
Yes, but for Italians “outdoor pursuits” are mostly sitting at a cafe, sitting on the beach, etc. Northern Italy may be different, but they’re kinda German up in the Alps.
Unfortunately, older people in Bulgaria have no interest in thinking and listening about these kind of thing.
That’s the much more likely explanation
And, as somebody who’s over 40, it still seems strange to think of myself as, “older.” As the saying goes, inside of every old fart is a young person wondering, “What the fuck happened?”
b&
Indeed!! 🙂
I described a guy to my dad as “older, you know, my age”. LOL!
Still, it’s good to be alive to so wonder; not everyone gets to, as I remind (or is it inform?) the increasing number of “Don’t-Know-That-I-Don’t-Know” middle-schoolers who impertinently ask my age.
Oh, no doubt. I hope to still be wondering for at least as long as it’s taken me to make it this far….
b&
What, no boots? … Is that really Jerry Coyne? … or a mimic?
Did you ask your guides if creationism/ID is popular in Bulgaria?
I say that because flatfish is a good example of IDiotic design. Their developmental plasticity is fascinating but for what purpose a designer would build something like these misshapen fishes?
Desnes
Creationism does not appear to be a huge issue in Bulgaria from what I see. Answers in Genesis provides one now-broken link to one Bulgarian creationist site. Objections to evolution in the Orthodox Church seem to come from believers in the U.S.
Of course, the minute I say this, some Bulgarian version of Ken Ham will probably rear his head.
The Orthodox church in Bulgaria is most definitely creationist. I can give you links to videos where priests condemn it with almost the same passion that protestant preachers do it in the US. But they are in Bulgarian so you want understand anything unless you know the language
The good news is that the church has very little credibility in Bulgaria so nobody pays them any attention. The bad news is that science has no credibility either so it is not as if people know much or have given much though about evolution. The question just does not figure in most people’s minds. And that’s actually not a good thing because it means they are very receptive to anti-scientific ideas, it’s just that this particular strain of anti-scientific thinking has not received much exposure in the media.
And this is why astrology and all other sorts of pseudoscientific BS are very big. And the media is unilaterally pro-christian – there is a constant parade of reports about miracle-working icons and other artifacts, about the sacredness of orthodox holidays and rituals, etc., completely uncritical and as if it is true. And Christianity is widely seen and portrayed as something people should go back to because it would improve their lives (it’s the usual thing – you need religion as a foundation of morality, and morality has been at a very low level in Bulgaria since 1989).
So far the place is still secular, but the same trends you see in Russia (where the church has colluded with the state and is gaining more and more influence) are playing out there too so the long-term outlook is negative.
It does not help that there is not a single pro-atheist pro-rationality voice in the public sphere (it is great that this meeting is happening but I did not see any reports about it in the media).
About the media outreach of the event I concur. We have a pretty decent online reach via facebook, online media and bloggers, but that doesn’t really reach much of the mass viewers. We did some promotion with radios, but unless it’s a barter, we really cannot afford it.
Television is kind of out of the question on the same grounds, though we’ve tried pretty much every event to get it publicized, but normally what happens, is they take an interview with one of our speakers and cut out everything to do with the event itself 🙂
Well yes, that’s what I was talking about – science and rationalism just do not feature in public life in Bulgaria.
It’s great that you’re doing what you’re doing but we have a serious problem and it’s going to take a lot more to fix it than this. I only became aware that this was happening through this blog.
What is really sad is that I think the academic community actually has a lot more access to the media in Bulgaria than it does in the US, yet it only uses it to talk about politics and irrelevant stuff, not to spread scientific literacy, and that’s in the best cases – they often are in fact doing real harm by actively promoting exactly the opposite. Which is because scientific rationalism is not really a part of their worldview, which in turn is because pretty much all of the good scientists have left the country a long time ago (and they have neither the access to the media nor the time and desire to try and fix it).
True, this by no means can be a solution to the issue in general.
About academia in Bulgaria (and universities at large), I honestly don’t think they have an active position on anything, even politics or what have you. I mean, I’ve mostly tried to get them involved in our event in some form or another, but it doesn’t seem they’re even remotely interested. It could be due to non-existent PR departments, but I can only guess.
I don’t think it has anything to do with PR departments, it’s more likely a consequence of the way people rose through the academic ranks back in the days (and still do today from what I hear; I am not in Bulgaria right now so I don’t have first-hand observations). Which selected primarily for people who were good at politicking rather than those focused on the science. As a result their worldview is political rather than scientific.
Creationism and intelligent design ain’t at all big here, though that’s mostly due to the fact that people really aren’t really religious in the classical sense of the word. They’re more superstitious (X causes bad luck) and are into holidays/rituals (e.g. Easter). Then there’s stuff like astrology and the regular types of bullshit people believe in.
Our local patriarchy is, however, kind of vocally anti-gay and anti-abortion and the like – that does get traction with the lot who are into nationalism (since nationalism=christianity=The Good Thing).
GM and Ransom,
Thanks for your feedback.
Desnes
Nice to have the honour to go, then, Jerry. (re: the English-speaker).
I got the impression from my colleague from CMU and others that Bulgaria has long had good mathematics and physics education, for example, so branching out might be the next step.
Mathematics, yes, sort of, at the university level. Programming is really popular here and is one of the few ways to get into a decent european-style salary, and you normally get there with mathematics. School-level mathematics is disastrous though.
I’ve been into physics for a good chunk of time now – I’ve even been to the most prestigious physics faculty (the Sofia University one), and I think I can safely say that if Bulgaria has been doing well with physics at some point, that point is so far gone you need an archeologist to dig it up. Here’s two random facts about that:
– you can enlist in said physics faculty by literally just not failing at the entrance exam, grade irrelevant. Getting into the best physics place in Bulgaria is essentially easier than doing your driver’s exam.
– there’s roughly 150 people that go in each new year as freshman in about 7 disciplines (physics, medical physics, astrophysics, etc.) and by year two, they’re 50. By year 4 there is one or two.
Are “mathematical physics” methods taught to mathematicians there in great quantity? I’m thinking from analogoy with an old Soviet book I have (in translation, mind, but the content is this) things like solving differential equations with physical import (to speak elliptically) was a rather large part of what was labelled mathematics, where as here a lot of that would only be taught in physics proper, at least if “extrapolated backwards”. Maybe just disciplines are categorized differently. But maybe not if it is as bad as one says. Alternatively, it could because the folks I knew would have been taught in the 1990s, and it may have gotten worse.
Mathematics education in Bulgaria was completely gutted after 1989.
It’s not as if ever there was a time when all schools provided good education, but prior to that there were specialized mathematical high schools where math was studied extensively, and there were also technical high schools for engineers, which also provided quite good math education. Both of these still exist but standards have slipped dramatically, both on the ground and in terms of curriculum – the math curriculum was cut twice while I was a student in the 90s/early 00s, and I know for sure it was cut in the early 90s too (because I had access to old textbooks from the 1980s and could compare). And I would not be surprised if it was cut again after that.
It’s quite bad.
The even worse problem is that pretty much all the competent teachers left are going to retire in the next 5-10 years, and then it will be only the people who could not become anything else but teachers who will teach (being a teacher used to be a very prestigious occupation but now it’s exactly the opposite – only the losers go into that profession).
The disaster that is high school now then carries over into the university as it is just not possible to repair the damage that has been already done. You get a lot of students who are completely unprepared for the courses they are taking, however, because of the way universities are funded by the state (according to how many students they have enrolled) there is no incentive to fail anyone and so the level drops precipitously as classes often end up being taught according to the lowest common denominator.
And as mentioned above, nobody wants to study math and physics period, so they have to enroll everyone who has not failed the entrance test (and in some cases even those who have). And the tests are not at all that hard. The only reason those students even enroll is because they get to get away from their parents and live in the capital and party all the time (there is a notorious student ghetto there where most students live). Most of them don’t graduate so you end up with 1 or 2 students making it to graduation and they do not receive a very good education as the environment isn’t there (no competition from peers, demoralized professors who have long ago stopped giving a damn about what students learn as the vast majority of students have no desire to learn, etc.).
Given all this, the question of what and how is being taught is really irrelevant.
🙁 How unfortunate. I hope then that meetings like this Ratio one can bootstrap some changes.
Sounds like Bulgaria has adopted the predominant Western model for education. Depressing.
It’s not just education, it’s a lot of areas. In many aspects (though not in all) the policies in place are more right-wing than what has been possible to implement in the US.
There is a flat income tax, for example, and that was passed by the former communist part when it was in power 6 years ago…
Looking pretty slick in your jacket, Jerry!
The backdrop (giant heads being held by normal-sized people — or normal heads being held by tiny people) is cool!
What was that about?
Those visuals are the key visuals we do for each event – we do them with Ogilvy, our creative agency. These specifically were based on the tagline “Getting your heads filled with bullshit? Come to Ratio”. Not the most fascinating of slogans I must admit, but we decided to go with something simpler this time around. Usually we tend to go a bit abstract like these: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.479845082070173.1073741827.342231325831550&type=3
They were based on the “Unweave the mystery of …” premise. I don’t know, I liked those better, but apparently people loved the heads 🙂
Thanks for your reply.
I love the heads.
I think those heads are disturbing, mostly because they are like really tiny bodies more than really big heads. When I took medication for pain, I’d get a weird feeling that I had small hands or once when I had a massage it felt like the hands were wee and it was really freaky.
Great stuff. And LOOKING GOOD sir! What a great trip. Looks like heavenly (…er wonderful!) weather. Good company, good eats, good drink.