It is IMPOSSIBLE to answer many of the things that the general public puts in front of social scientists and demands that we solve. Particularly when you work on social topics, people will ask you questions like: why is my boss mean, why doesn't government work, why am I sad.

When you build foundational theory it's too broad. When you do specific investigations it's too narrow. When you take some breather to talk technical shop you're accused of only talking to scientists and being unfeeling.

It's fine: I've known this for a long time and integrating this experience is a very familiar thing for me. When I worked in schools nothing was good enough. If we moved the needle by xx%, it didn't matter to people who were outside of that school.

But it mattered in those classrooms. The balance of it is that you simply cannot be enmeshed with the general audience when you are working on the most difficult social topics that impact that audience. You pull the curtain back on too much.

We do help. We are doing good. But I tell young scientists I talk to who want to share work and communicate science that they cannot expect positive regard from the general public and that it will be very hard and that there is a whole new skillset here to protect yourself

I do get tired of the Crowd, those happy to take a paycheck in silence in society criticizing those of us who have taken far lower paychecks for decades and spoken in public for years about social topics that make us targets

The anxious desire to have access to unquestionable authority makes even some of our allies -- who want to move the world towards real evidence and accurate knowledge of itself -- ignore the humanity of scientists in favor of a transactional relationship with us. This is one of the hardest lessons. Sometimes we get harangued for admitting an inch of doubt on society's most complicated social topics as if that makes us weak instead of careful. We need to center science as a process over findings.