人们受够了专家,但为何仍然喜爱霍金

A few months ago, my teenage daughter and I went to see a lecture by Stephen Hawking at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute. The event had been postponed once because he was unwell; I worried that his body might finally give out, albeit five decades later than doctors had expected. Yet a new date was set and Hawking duly arrived, as if from another world, to deliver a spellbinding talk in his distinctive synthetic voice.

几个月前，我和十几岁的女儿去牛津大学数学研究所(Oxford’s Mathematical Institute)听斯蒂芬?霍金(Stephen Hawking)的讲座。讲座曾经因霍金身体欠佳而推迟过一次；我当时担心他的身体可能终于不行了，虽然他已经比医生预计的多坚持了50年。然而，讲座确定了一个新的日期，霍金准时抵达了会场，他就像来自另一个世界一样，用自己独特的合成声音做了一个充满魔力的演讲。

I had given a lecture myself at the same venue earlier, striking a pessimistic tone: it was easy to pollute the stream of conversation about science and statistics, I said, and simply intoning the facts would not dispel misinformation. Hawking, who died this week, went some way to restoring my hope. He showed that it was possible to communicate difficult ideas, if you went about it in the right way.

我自己早些时候曾在同一地点发表过演讲，我的演讲论调比较悲观：我说，关于科学和统计数据的谈话很容易被污染，而且只是陈述事实没法消除误解。上周去世的霍金生前所做的不少努力能让我这样的悲观者重燃希望。他向世界证明，如果方式正确，就有可能就艰深的思想与公众沟通。

What was his secret? He acknowledged that his disability attracted the spotlight, but there was much more going on than the spectacle of a brilliant mind in a malfunctioning body.

他的秘诀是什么？他承认自己的残疾吸引了人们的关注，但吸引人的远不止残疾身体中的睿智头脑。

First, he did not patronise his audience: presenting the most complicated ideas was a sign that he respected our intelligence. If we did not grasp everything, we would still be better off for having tried.

首先，他没有对听众摆出高人一等的派头：陈述最复杂的思想表明他尊重我们的智力。即便我们没有完全理解，尝试的过程还是对我们有好处。

“I know the book is difficult,” he commented after his A Brief History of Time had become a bestseller. “It does not matter too much if people can’t follow all the arguments. They can still get the flavour of the intellectual quest.”

他在他的《时间简史》(A Brief History of Time)成为畅销书后评论道：“我知道这本书很难懂。如果理解不了全部内容，也没有太大关系。他们仍然能体会到智力求索的感觉。”

That instinct was right. His talk demanded concentration. Most of it was beyond my daughter. Much of it was beyond me. Then Hawking would crack a joke about hairy black holes, and the audience would all be back on the same page, laughing, and ready for another attempt to scale the intellectual heights.

这种直觉是对的。听他的演讲需要全神贯注。其中大部分内容都超出了我女儿的理解范畴，有许多也超出了我的理解范畴。然后霍金会开个关于可怕的黑洞的玩笑，这是所有观众都能理解的，大家大笑一阵，准备好再次尝试攀登智力的高峰。

Second, he was immensely curious. “My goal is simple, “ he said. “It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

其次，他非常好奇。他说：“我的目??标很简单，那就是完全理解宇宙，它为什么是现在这个样子，又到底为什么存在。”

That sort of curiosity is contagious. It makes us want to join his hunt for answers, rather than passively receiving (or rejecting) information from an expert who claims to know them already.

这种好奇心具有感染力。它让我们想要跟他一起去寻找答案，而不是从宣称已经知道答案的专家那里被动地接受（或拒绝）信息。

The third quality followed from the first two: unlike some public intellectuals, Hawking was not very interested in conflict for the sake of it. The economist Paul Krugman and the biologist Richard Dawkins are instructive contrasts to Hawking: both are brilliant communicators, but they often present their ideas as a battle between good and evil, wisdom and stupidity.

第三个品质源于前两个特质：与一些公共知识分子不同，霍金不太喜欢单纯为了冲突而营造冲突。将经济学家保罗?克鲁格曼(Paul Krugman)和生物学家理查德?道金斯(Richard Dawkins)与霍金对比一下就能明白这一点：这两人都是杰出的沟通者，但他们在介绍自己的思想时呈现出来的往往是善与恶、智慧与愚昧之间的战斗。

When you have a noble cause it can be tempting to pursue it in an antagonistic way: Economy, a charity that aims to improve economics literacy, has been fundraising with an endorsement from writer George Monbiot saying that economists are “a pox on the planet”.

当你有一个崇高的事业时，可能会忍不住以一种对抗性的方式去追求它：旨在提高人们的经济学常识的慈善机构“经济”(Economy)一直在筹款，并得到作家乔治?蒙比奥特(George Monbiot)的支持，他说，经济学家是“这个星球上的天花”。

These insults seem to work, at first. If you call out your opponents as fools, knaves, or even transmissible diseases, you enthuse your own supporters. But you will win few new converts when every issue becomes a matter of tribal loyalty.

起初，这些侮辱似乎奏效了。如果你把你的对手称作傻瓜、无赖，甚至是传染病，你会让你的支持者欢欣鼓舞。但是，当每个问题都变成是否忠于自己人的问题时，你将不会赢得新的支持者。

We humans are social creatures. Given a choice between being right on a partisan question (abortion, guns, Brexit, globalisation, climate change) and having mistaken views that our friends and neighbours support, we would rather be wrong and stay in the tribe. This becomes clear in surveys of views on climate change: college-educated Republicans and Democrats are further apart on the topic than those who are less educated.

我们人类是社会性生物。如果要在如下两种情况中做出选择——是在存在党派分歧的问题上（堕胎、枪支、英国退欧、全球化和气候变化）站在正确的一方，还是认同我们的朋友和邻居所支持的错误观点，我们宁愿站在错误的一方、留在自己人当中。在对气候变化看法的调查中，这一点变得很清楚：受过大学教育的共和党人和民主党人在这个问题上的分歧，比受教育程度较低的人还要大。

If our goal is to persuade, the curiosity-driven approach works better than the conflict-driven one: the evidence suggests that curious people are less subject to the temptations of partisanship. When the national conversation becomes polarised, we need to encourage curiosity about how things work rather than them-and-us tribalism.

如果我们的目标是说服，那么用好奇心来实现目标比用冲突更好：有证据表明，好奇的人不太容易受到党派倾向的影响。当全国的对话变得两极化的时候，我们需要鼓励深究事物运作的好奇心，而不是势不两立的部落主义。

Hawking, of course, did have robust political views. He criticised the UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt for cherry-picking evidence on the National Health Service and spoke out against Brexit. But after the referendum went the other way, he continued to argue in favour of mutual understanding and solving problems together, rather than dismissing voters as ignorant.

当然，霍金确实有鲜明的政治观点。霍金批评英国卫生大臣杰里米?亨特(Jeremy Hunt)在英国国家医疗服务体系(National Health Service)的问题上有倾向性地挑选证据，霍金还公开反对英国退欧。但在全民公投结束后，他继续主张相互理解并共同解决问题，而不是称选民是愚昧的并轻视他们。

If experts want to persuade us to wrap our minds around a complex issue, they need to get us to abandon our cynicism towards unwelcome information. It does no harm to be the most recognisable scientist on the planet, but Hawking also understood that insults do not work. Instead, he treated us with respect and fired our enthusiasm.

如果专家们想要说服我们思考一个复杂的问题，他们需要说服我们抛弃对不合己意的信息的怀疑。地球上最知名科学家的身份当然有助于霍金说服别人，但同样有帮助的是，霍金明白辱骂是没用的。霍金尊重我们，并激发了我们的热情。

Towards the end of his lecture, after a difficult discussion of quantum effects near the boundary of a black hole, Hawking offered a simpler idea: “If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There is a way out.”

讲座接近尾声时，在一段关于黑洞边界附近量子效应的艰深讨论结束后，霍金贡献了一个更简单的想法：“如果你觉得自己处于黑洞中，不要放弃。出路是有的。“

It was a message any teenager could hold on to. I sat next to my daughter and thought about how Hawking had lived such a rich life under the burden of an apparently unbeatable illness.

这是任何青少年都可以牢记的讯息。我坐在女儿旁边，思考着霍金是如何面对明显无法战胜的病魔度过了如此丰富的一生。

We have been told that people have had enough of experts. That is true for some experts. It wasn’t true for Stephen Hawking.

我们被告知，人们受够了专家。对一些专家来说的确如此，但对斯蒂芬?霍金来说却并非这样。