Malcolm in the middle (well, at the beginning)

The hook brings you back, I ain't tellin' you no lie

I went viral this week. Generally, this isn’t something academics tend to do. Often, it’s a bad sign, that some piece of research has been picked up and blown out of context by the mass media, or that remarks on a conference panel have made their way into the more excitable parts of the social media world. This wasn’t like that, but I’m still not 100% sure what I feel about it. However, I think it raises some interesting tips for science writing and communication, which I’d like to talk about here.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times here already, I gave a public lecture entitled Logging the World in Oxford on 14th February 2024. You’ll notice that’s the title of this newsletter (hey, cross-platform brand building!), and they produced a poster that I love:

Part of the arrangement for this lecture was that, as well as talking to the people in the room on the night, it would be recorded and put on YouTube. You may not be able to see, but that’s why I was wearing two microphones. As part of this, the Oxford Maths team (who are doing a great job of promoting the subject to a wider audience) produced a 45 second clip to advertise the full video, which they posted to Twitter and to Instagram.

At which point … things went a bit crazy. At the time of writing, the Instagram clip has had 6.4 million views and 113,620 likes in a couple days. That’s not normal for a maths video! I know it’s not a totally fair comparison, but in the week of the lecture there were only four TV programmes in the UK which gained more viewers than that. Looking at the Oxford Maths Instagram page, I’m not quite their record holder - there’s a really nice video about origami with just over 8 million views - but it’s not far off.

So, what was the secret? The answer is, I don’t know for sure. As I keep saying here, there’s always a huge element of luck in life, and you can’t guarantee what will work. But equally I don’t think it was a total coincidence. I’d deliberately put in what I hoped would be an interesting hook at the start of the talk, but to be honest I had the audience in the room in mind rather than anything wider than that. Here’s the slide:

It’s essentially an example of what Stian Westlake calls a Malcolm:

malcolm (n.) A folksy anecdote used to begin a chapter in a popular nonfiction book, in an attempt to draw in uninterested readers. (Named for Malcolm Gladwell (b. 1963), who popularised the technique and spawned many less sure-handed emulators)

To be honest, it’s probably the biggest difference that I had to take on when I started trying to write for a more general audience than I had in academic papers in the past. For example, when I wrote the very first draft of Numbercrunch, here’s how I started the chapter on conditional probability:

Few statistical topics around the pandemic have created as much speculation and misunderstanding as the issue of false positive test results. Most coronavirus tests are carried out using PCR testing, which amplifies DNA samples and looks for particular sequences of genetic material associated with the COVID genome. This form of testing is not perfect – indeed it might be reasonable to assume that no test is perfect …

It’s fine, but it’s kind of an academic writing style. I’m leaning into the idea of writing for the general public (it’s not like a maths paper that starts “Consider a probability measure P supported on an uncountable measure space X”) but I’m not doing it fully. Whereas, thanks to advice from my agent and publisher, but the time the book was published the chapter started like this:

On 4 June 2022, journalist and contrarian Toby Young tweeted: ‘Since vaccination in Iceland began, 91% of Covid deaths have been in the vaccinated, but only 90% of the country is vaccinated. Age may play a part here.’ In fact, perhaps surprisingly, he was right. Age plays a huge part, but from a mathematical point of view, so does dependence of events. Understanding probabilities in scenarios with dependence is a key skill in making sense of the modern world.

You can hopefully see that it’s different. There’s an explicit hook, an anecdote, something to tie the maths into, and it tries to sell why you should be interested in the rest of the chapter. You might even notice that the newsletter you are reading now started with a similar kind of rhetorical trick.

As Stian Westlake says in the piece I linked to above, these Malcolms can be overdone and deadened by repetition. It’s a bit like when every single burger restaurant simultaneously started using brioche buns: when you went to the first few places that did it, it was a great novelty, but once brioche buns became the standard then by definition they became less interesting.

And for people who are used to a more ‘academic’ style of writing, it can feel jolting. In particular I got some pushback from more serious mathematicians about the example in the Oxford video. And of course, it’s a trick!

The point is that these aren’t any old 17 and 19 digit numbers that I’m multiplying. They are carefully chosen to be 2-to-the-power-35 (2 multiplied by itself 35 times) and 2-to-the-power-42 (2 multiplied by itself 42 times), so multiplying them together gives 2 multiplied by itself 77 times. I can look these up in lists of powers of 2 on the Internet. But it’s a way of advertising the rest of the talk, and the key message that the logarithm of a product is the sum of the logarithms.

Of course, most numbers won’t be of this special form, so this trick won’t generally work. But it’s worth noticing that you can use similar tricks to approximate the answer to a high degree of precision on a calculator: writing the numbers in standard form pulls out powers of 10 that you can combine together easily, while dealing with the leading digits using the calculator itself. And really it was just a way to start people thinking.

So, definitely I think it’s worth considering the use of Malcolms when you try to communicate with a general audience. Obviously they need to be based on something - you can’t just lie! And perhaps if I’d known that the example would be seen by 6 million people I might have had second thoughts (I’d certainly have tried to “um” and “ah” less in speaking, and tried to make my shirt look less crumpled!).

But I don’t think we should apologise for trying to make our subject more interesting. If some small percentage of the Instagram viewers go on to watch parts of a maths lecture they would never have touched with a bargepole then I think that’s a reasonable result.

Anyway, there’s only one way for you to decide: you’ll need to watch the YouTube video yourself.