It may have come to your attention that scientific questions explored in an academic context have ramifications that aren’t so academic.  Try the following ideas on for size:

• If you eat XXX, YYY malady will befall you, just look at this website…
• If a politician wants to spend money on ABC, oppose it because [insert famous person] said it isn’t a good idea…
• If you do PQX your children might [bad thing Q].  A consortium of doctors has said…

We, the board at FGSU have spent a good deal of our careers working to answer complex questions and get those answers to the widest audience possible. As you may notice from the list above, this isn’t an academic pursuit either.  For each of these points, there exists an entire set of folks dedicated to (and in many cases a cottage industry that profits from) ensuring you believe both sides of the debate.  You didn’t read that wrong, I said both sides. Each with “experts,” each with convincing-sounding rhetoric, each with merchandise and memes and books.  So…..what do you do?  You’re almost certainly a smart person who wants to make a correspondingly smart decision.  If every “convincing argument” is matched, every expert and so on, there’s only one thing left to do, start digging into the actual, peer-reviewed scientific papers and performing meta-analyses and lit reviews until you’re satisfied.  But there’s a problem with that.

As smart as you are, you may not remember just how a “p-value” works.  Or if you do, maybe your organic biochemistry is rusty.  Maybe both are good but once you arrive at your fully-researched authoritative answer you find yourself unable to talk to anyone else because that answer is still full of jargon and assumes your audience is also conversant with those things.

Imagine a world where a, concise, jargon-free answer that is still not lacking completeness was available.  A clear way to begin from “what we have measured and how” and go all the way through “this is the most likely reality we live in” without needing to put “just trust this expert” anywhere.  Something to be convincing without requiring allegiance to anything but reason.  This is our mission in a nutshell.  We will find the questions of zeitgeist, the things people want to know, the things that could change the world for better or worse, and provide analysis leading to concrete conclusions with nothing left out and also completely understandable to the layperson.  It’s a tall order, but as we hope you’ll agree, it’s hardly an academic question.