I am chronically behind the times in terms of social media usage. Only recently did I expand beyond Reddit and actually begin to use Instagram. Originally it was so my wife could send me reels in a more streamlined manner. From there it naturally led me to explore what kind of content there is on there and I found everything there I expected to find. There are normal people doing trendy things and generally living normal lives, influencers spreading both information and misinformation, and science communicators doing their best to educate and combat misinformation. While I have been following people whose content I find engaging, I have also been focused on watching experts, how they present themselves, and how they engage with their audiences because I would like to do something similar, but have quickly run into issues of scope creep and potentially going beyond my expertise.
Combating Scope Creep
One thing I have noticed with all the Instagram reels I see is how many of the experts start their clips with
“Hi, I’m (their name), a (specialty name) focused on (general issue) and today I want to tell you about… )”
To see this in action you could check our Dr. Kevin Folta, or Dr. Emily Dow. Starting like this sends a clear message about who the person is and what they are qualified to talk about. Doing so is likely meant to build trust with the audience, but it can also provide methods for self-accountability and to prevent scope creep, where an expert keeps pushing the boundaries of their expertise until they are talking about something unrelated. In a recent reel, Dr. Dow explicitly restated that they are a dietician, not medical doctor qualified to discuss peptides like many people had been asking about. Dr. Dow even went further to encourage people to be more wary of “effective generalists” that talk about what feels like everything as a true expert dedicates considerable time and effort to remaining up to date in their field and are highly specialized. This reminded me of an experience I had where I almost veered (far) outside my expertise.
Trust me, I’m a doctor
Last year, I kept coming across sensational headlines on Reddit about differences between genders and their psychology. The headlines always grabbed my attention because they sounded just right enough to be science, but also, just wrong enough to be potentially manufactured. I followed the source to a science-based news outlet and found each one of these was written by the same person, one with no credentials beyond writing popular press articles about psychology.
I dug into the original papers they cited, drawing links between what the original authors wrote and what the journal had published. I wanted to show how they were slanting the presentation in a way that went against the scientific results and could be damaging by reinforcing negative stereotypes. After spending quite a few hours over the course of a couple weeks, the blog post I had been working on was scrapped halfway through. Despite my ability to read the papers and understand the methods, I realized I had no expertise in psychology. It didn’t matter how certain I was that they were wrong if I couldn’t be confident that I was right. After all, even with a Ph.D., I couldn’t start it with
“Hi, I’m Dr. Donald Coon, an agricultural engineer and plant physiologist, let’s talk about psychology.”
Narrowing my focus within agriculture
Fortunately, agriculture is a fairly popular topic and there is plenty to talk about. Unfortunately, it is quite broad and often intersects with other disciplines, especially when communicating about issues the public is focused on. Think about something as common as genetic engineering/modification. Sure, I could talk about it, people may value the way I present it and the facts I bring to them, but I am not geneticist and have not done genetic engineering/modification. The same is true for the intersection of agriculture and nutrition with topics like organics, pesticides, and fertilizers. I have lots of exposure to research and practices with those products, while I may understand some of the pathways they effect in a plant, I’m not a chemist or medical doctor who studies how those interact molecules with the human body. If I want to communicate about these topics, I should pick and choose the level of detail I go into carefully, and direct people who want more depth to the experts with it.
Conclusion
So that leaves me with nitty gritty details on how plants function, mathematical models of plants/farms, and bioregenerative life support systems. Which honestly still sounds pretty cool to me and it should be enough for me to conduct science communication without veering beyond my scope. If I can muster the incredible amount of effort to create and maintain regular short form video content I’ll keep all this in mind but for now I’ll stick to these blog posts.
Proudly written without large language models.
©Donald Coon 2026 available at
This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Donald S. Coon 