I just signed up and am impressed by the wealth of information available, all thoughtfully categorized. It appears I’ll be engaged over the next few weeks exploring everything.
@@gilgamecha Yes, it's my own project! I've done some minor software development things before, but this is the biggest one yet. I thought that other people might find it useful, too.
u know, if u could separate politics from science (at least in the content) u'd be trusted much more than u are (and come over more professional) - esp when u step outside of ur area of 'expertise' PS: not necessarily this video, but plenty others. PPS: and I think u do it for the same reasons.. money (which I understand, but well)..
A quote I like a lot comes from Feynman, "Science is belief in the ignorance of experts." This assumes, of course, that those who have that belief are willing to try to expose that ignorance by either demonstrating that their own, new ideas explain phenomenon better, and that others can replicate them with a higher degree of accuracy than the ideas of prior experts, or exposing a flaw in expert methodology.
So, how is a normal taxpayer going to NOT blindly trust science when Big Science has captured the process in the country like the Japanese nuclear industry captured the nuclear regulatory industry?! Should we be running our own labs to do confirmatory experiments and the like? When the whole system, including the checks-and-balances, is fraught with issues, how does the normal person work back up the line to Trust But Verify?
And the point of hell is that you are going there only because god loves you so much. It is to make a point. He is very passive aggressive. With emphasis on aggressive.
She should have titled it "I don't believe scientists." Because it's not about belief, it's about accumulating evidence that makes a particular mechanism the most likely.
When I was going to grad school in chemistry, my major professor handed me a paper to peer review. I was not that kind, pointing out some logical flaws as well as where I thought more information was needed (or at least citations to relevant literature). I recommended that the paper should be published, but with minor revisions. My major professor pushed back with the question: "How would you react to this review?" I thought about it for a minute and said, "With thanks and grace. I would have learned something." He shook his head and asked me to rewrite the review. I realized at that point that pursuing physical organic chemistry research was probably not going to end well.
Geesus, yes; when I was younger [at one of the "top 20" uni's in the world] I got into hot water for scribing this. If the world's academia were in the hands of those like Hossenfelder and Chalmers I would sleep a lot better.
I went to a top university in Canada. For psych there is one stats course. The lectures were 100% powerpoint. The prof did ZERO examples the entire semester. I know what you are thinking, she was a last minute replacement, right? Nope! She had been teaching the course for years, absolutely zero controversy, nothing to see here. Later when a disease, ME/CFS came back, my disgust turned into grave personal harm and hey no blinding, no placebo, readjusting stats so that patients that got worse in the study criteria were considered recovered. And yet it took years for any professionals to listen and accept the obvious. Mind you nothing happened to these frauds. They still hold high positions while many patients remain (permanently?) harmed. Its the normalization of deviance. I really wish there was a solution, but its seems much of this is rotten to the core.
For my MS degree, I did research for petroleum companies and worked with PhD students doing other, related research projects. I saw false data published and more. But, none of it was malicious. It was just due to sloppy practices being bent around biases and due to students trying to meet unrealistic expectations by department heads. If that was the corruption without malice, I can only imagine what happens when strong financial incentives and such are involved.
There are no social sciences. I was part of the bubble for many years in Europe! Its just ideology! Most of these people are brainwashed and dont dare to speak up because they would lose the job when not being a left wing puppet! Very sad and dangerous nowadays! These universities should be demonetized!
The whole point of science is to question things, not blindly believe. I always make sure to understand the logic behind any scientific advancement that is revealed, because even if I can't understand the maths or what the data means with a highschool level education, I can make sure what I believe in doesn't use an unrealistic leaps of logic.
The problem is that none of us are able to investigate the arguments fully. When a climate denier offers an argument that looks good, how is the lay-person to respond? Just trust the argument? Although it is almost certainly cherry picked and ignores most of the relevant data, the argument looks OK to someone who is not an expert, or at least very familiar with the field. Trusting arguments is OK for experts, but fails for lay people. Scientists should absolutely trust the argument in their field. Lay people absolutely should not.
@@cainaoliveira789 Maybe someone using logic to maybe tell how religion is wrong or how climate change isn't real but inside they are just intrested in pushing certain ideology or selling certain product.
Then I guess the first thing to teach is to stop compartmentalizing it as specifically "scientific". "Scientific thinking" is just everyday rational thinking with more data and more math.
@@lockwood1976 Perhaps, but a lot of the same people that say that are the same ones who listens to everything that agrees with them and ignores everything that doesn't.
@@40yearoldman That's why this other ways of knowing thing is kinda dangerous though. They get to question the scientific method. They get to say they proved it wrong. Why? Because they get to use their other ways to confirm it. If you question the scientific method using the scientific method then you are presupposing it.
The best thing about science and those that practice it: You are NOT SUPPOSED to 'believe' or 'trust'! You hypothesize, predict, and CHECK, TEST, and CHECK AGAIN. A Scientist's worst enemy will eventually be (if honest) his (and everyone's) best friend.
This is why I don't understand why people are so against people being skeptical about all conclusion's sciences have, this includes climate science, nuclear, human studies. The problem is science has become political, it has become like a religion and has made anyone questioning the results a heretic. If it's true, then it will stand up to the criticism if it's not it will be proven to be wrong.
"Publish or perish" to keep university tenure. I knew a retired Stanford theoretical physicist and professor who told me, "If you live in the physical world and have a theory, you are a theoretical physicist". In his later years, he made the most amazing pottery I've ever seen.
Or how the "Cure for Cancer" (and Virus and all disease) was discovered in the 1930's and it was John D. Rockefeller and "other" surgeons that made sure the results from human patients and them being cured of their cancer in 6 months or less, and without invasive procedures using "Resonant Frequency" was taken and made to be lies by the surgeon who discovered it and stripping him of his medical license and destroying him financially so that today millions and billions of dollars are spent on "Cancer Research" when the cure has already been known for 90 years? I can certainly see how you have "Lost Trust" in Scientists. Smart girl.
Science is the application of reason to data to gain insight, using the scientific method. When the data, e.g. the velocity of stars in the outer reaches of a spiral galaxy, required explanation, scientists came up with dark matter, but have yet to find any. If we never do, will the hypothesis of its existence continue? Is belief in a phenomenon which fits your model enough, or is that a faith-based enterprise, so, like a religion?
That's terrible advice. There are too many smart people who are afraid of speaking out against dumb people, out of fear of appearing arrogant - but the world would be so much better, if they spoke out, to correct those around them.
@@highdefinist9697 You make the assumption that stupid people are capable of being corrected. In practice convincing anybody of anything is the hardest thing to do of it. And when you accomplished that difficult task you'll be confronted with a harder one: Convincing the next person.
I was confronted with a very mild form of corruption in the scientific publishing process over a decade ago; We wanted to get our work published in Nature, but they refused to publish our work because our results contradicted a previous paper that they had published years earlier and they didn't wanna look stupid. And that's just an extremely mild case of their image being in danger of being ever so slightly tainted, and that already prompted them to refuse a publication. No money was involved and no politics. Now IMAGINE just how much bs gets published while good work gets swept under the rug IF money and politics are involved!
When I entered a PhD program and saw how obsessed most of my professors were with their h-index score and “prestige” I decided to leave. I wanted to help people, not be famous
Having gone through graduate school, you become the ultimate skeptic (or you sell your soul and join the club). Firstly, you realize the incredible financial risk you are taking considering that you could lose a decade of earnings as you pursue your degree(s), post docs, part time teaching before you land a proper job...and the odds are that you won't find a faculty position. People can't comprehend the pressure and fear, unless you are faced with it. When I see that someone is caught committing some academic fraud, I don't really judge. I would say that 95% of researchers WILL need to massage their results in some papers, if they have any hope of landing a job. The remaining 1% are true geniuses and the other 4% are people who lucked out and just happened to have studied the subject du jour and belong to the correct demographic.
It also leads to a lot of very useless research, because wanting to publish a lot (and acquiring funding!) leads to professors overpromising and underdelivering all the time, and chasing trends and buzzwords instead of being open and curious.
I have made enemies reviewing tenure track applications and poining out pseudoscience papers in the candidate's CV. But I am not sorry. Doing that was my duty.
As a scientist, I see my colleagues regularly producing results and spinning data to please their funding body and continue the funding through to the next project. It is clear conflict of interest that underpins the funding model. The model is broken.
Well than maybe the problem is not the scientific method but as alway effin money. I know of a thesis in pharmacology that was not published because the results didn't please the effin company who funded the research. THIS is rigged.
Agreed. The funding model is an issue. Especially if it means adding bias to the results in order to gain more funding. Or publishing something, anything to get continued funding. I don't know what the solution is, but the current funding model is part of the problem.
The best quote I heard about science is that science is the truth for now. By its empirical - based on observation - so your discoveries and conclusions are only ever as good as your observations and measurements. When better observations and measurements are made you can make more accurate or even different conclusions. For example, JWST, a more powerful instrument than Hubble, keeps making discoveries that change accepted views of the early universe.
Yes, I could not agree more. And yet, again and again when I quote some good argument from a controversial source, people will dismiss it by (correctly) pointing out that that person has said many crazy things before and is not trustworthy.
Bad solution, it optimizes for who can trick the audience better. Good advice for scientist- to- scientist communication. Still, will scientist let science get in the way of their careers? 😂
Unless the argument, as logically correct and tight as it can be, is based on flawed axioms/assumptions - then it's all wrong. That's why it's so important to first establish a common basis for the argument and only then proceed with the argument itself.
@@vaakdemandante8772 - If the axiom is wrong then arguments based on it are also wrong. Still back to the same issue. Focus on the argument and evidence, not the person delivering the argument or evidence.
It's actually worse. It's a horrible echo chamber, as well. Almost anything you want can be proven to be true over time, if you throw loads of research dollars into it. 1. Poor research dollars into research investigating Mice and their parenting skills into top research skills. 2. Funnel top graduate students into these fields who will be used as (sorry), somewhat as lab rats to help research faculty get published. 3. Fill peer-reviewed journals with reviewers and editors predisposed to support the theories at hand. 4. Provide no research dollars, approve no peer-review journals, provide tenure to no faculty etc. for articles or research that suggest Mice don't make great parents. 5. Minimize and discredit (after all they have no grants or A+ peer-reviewed journal articles) any researcher that suggests something besides what SCIENCE ALL agrees is true. 6. Hire ONLY those students from the top research schools (yep, the same ones that have been guzzling research dollars and will eventually sit on tenure committees, peer-reviewed journals, be invited on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc as experts) It's an incestuous relationship like few others...
For CS, narrow focus of public and private grant money has a been a problem since GW Bush presidency. Public funding was drastically cut, and when it gradually returned it was more focused. STEM education, big data, cybersecurity, AI - whatever are the top few hot areas at any given time get almost all the funding. I work on practical software visualization, so there are always opportunities to "adapt" the work to other areas to get funding. Before 2001, available funding was much more broad-based, and I think that on the whole the work was more productive because of that.
@@jmodified Too much political control of budgets, worldwide. We have to allow and encourage research that does not conform to the norms. This is how all the big breakthroughs happened.
My failing, of course, is ALWAYS another's fault. Seek ONLY what positively stimulates you; leave the rest behind. You will not die if you abandon excessive or unrelieved unpleasantness in your life.
Yet the Lower Tropical Troposphere is not warming faster than the surface, which falsifies the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis pushed by the UN (that happens to benefit Trillion of taxpayer dollars to unelected, totalitarian kleptocrats). Hence the alternative hypothesis by Shaviv and Svensmark (published in two papers in Nature) where solar magnetic variability affects terrestrial cloud formation currently is the best non-falsified hypothesis that agrees with all the data.
I second that. Especially when their solutions sound like "the climate is changing therefore let us sacrifice a hundred thousand oxen to the climate god".
No one is a climate change denier really. It's a strawman to discredit intellectual arguments. People deny the anthropogenic basis of climate change (with good reason) and then some people deny that even if those arguments were true, the "solutions" would not help and are even not designed to help but to enrich certain people. But so religious is the idea of "climate change" much like the rest of the progressive agenda (vaccines, gay sex etc) that anyone with any degree of skepticism is treated as a blasphemer. This is the "science" laypeople venerate.
The proposed "renewable energy" solution is utter nonsense bad enough that even the offenders are helping to promote it. The fear of nuclear is enough to have frightened Carter, Clinton, Sanders, and many others into the absurdity of wind "turbines" that are nowhere near as good at using the wind than sail is.
More than 60 years ago in high school, our science teacher said that science is all about doubt and critical thinking. So yes, don't believe someone just because they are a scientist. Consider the facts stated, motive behind what is proposed, and all other factors. Unbiased thoughtfulness is a good place to start.
And also realise that you are susceptible to many types of cognitive bias that unscrupulous people know how to use to manipulate your beliefs, opinions and decisions.
"all about doubt and critical thinking" Nonsense, it is primarily about evidence-based reasoning and causality, both absurdly hard concepts. Nothing "common sense" about science. Our world is incredibly complex and often crazy abstractions are required to make sense of it. "Unbiased thoughtfulness" is impossible because our brains are fundamentally subjective and biased. Bias is reduced at a systemic level when there is sufficient randomness and mutual criticism in the field, not at the individual level.
I studied the social "sciences" and I was so repelled that I have no intention of using anything I learned there. They completely deny existence of material reality, favoring a postmodernist subjective idealism. When asked the question, "if I tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?", literally ZERO of my peers and professors said yes. They are convinced nothing objectively measurable exists, only subjective narratives. The social sciences have ceased to be anything resembling a science. Almost all my papers were just talking about my feelings about what I was learning, just looking inward (because what is the point of studying something outward if nothing outward exists?). I learned virtually nothing at all (in fact, I'd say I was miseducated) by people who've written so many books and have so many letters after their names, but who can't even answer the basic question: "if there's no such thing as objective material reality, what are statistics measuring?". I was hoping "harder" sciences would be different but it seems this problems permeates all of academia. Intellectuals who only write for each other and who either quibble over meaningless minutiae or who inflate each other's egos all days. It bothers me because many of these social science professors consider themselves "social justice organizers" when I personally feel they have no idea what they're doing and think extremely narrowly, and basically have contempt for the majority of people (non-academics). Love your videos by the way Sabine!!
I don't know what "the social sciences" are supposed to be. Do you mean law? Absolutely nobody in the law department will tell you that reality does not exist. Quite the opposite. They will tell you that you will have a really, really bad time in jail if you break it. Kid, you aren't making any sense here. You sound outright mental, to be honest. ;-)
@@schmetterling4477 The idea of the self were you discover who you really are through emotions. It elevate the self to the highest authority were you can identify however you want. Other people, your own body and even God cannot tell you otherwise. The truth is not "out there" it is "in here". It creates a therapeutic view of life that seeks constant validation, because it is in conflict with external reality and demands. This create incentives to force other people to validate your identity (primarily sexual and gender), because the emotions and identity is so brittle.
@@NilsFredrikGjerull Which god? We invented so many of them. :-) Are you telling me I would be less horny if I just believed in Adult Santa? How old are you and what did you do to the intelligent child that you used to be? ;-)
Michael Mann refused to provide his raw tree ring data. That was Steve McIntyre's initial complaint. Editors of journals that required authors to archive raw data let Mann and his co-authors get away with it. Read _Climate Audit_. That's what the email leak from the University of East Anglia Hadley Center Climate Research Unit was all about. That's why Michael Mann lost his libel suit against Tim Ball; Mann refused to make his raw data available in the discovery phase of the trial. Michael Mann is to Climate Science as Trofim Lysenko is to Evolutionary Biology.
Or how the "Cure for Cancer" (and Virus and all disease) was discovered in the 1930's and it was John D. Rockefeller and "other" surgeons that made sure the results from human patients and them being cured of their cancer in 6 months or less, and without invasive procedures using "Resonant Frequency" was taken and made to be lies by the surgeon who discovered it and stripping him of his medical license and destroying him financially so that today millions and billions of dollars are spent on "Cancer Research" when the cure has already been known for 90 years? I can certainly see how you have "Lost Trust" in Scientists. Smart girl.
I worked as an equipment technician at University for 11 years. The driving force behind every researcher I met was 1) seek Tenure and 2) get Published. The research they were conducting wasn't as important as holding onto their Jobs. It was appalling to see Profs pretend to have expertise in just about every field just because they were considered an expert in one narrowly defined area.
I worked with a few PhDs, they were so narrow minded with blinders on and knew shit about practically everything except for their narrow minded specialty. What's the point in people like that?
Another huge problem that's more prevalent in the social sciences is unintentional p-hacking. You briefly touched on this, but most research that gets published has some kind of eye-catching result. A huge amount of research that didn't pan out gets shelved, and hypotheses that aren't appealing don't even get investigated. This causes results to be hugely skewed in favor of pre-existing biases. If a hypothesis has a 1% chance meeting the criteria for statistical significance but 100 research groups investigate it, you would expect about 1 group to find a statistically significant result. If the other 99 groups never publish their study because the results were disappointing, then that 1 result may well become the accepted truth. With tens of thousands of studies being done around the world at any given time, this is pretty likely to happen. That's without even going into the dangers of peer review, where all peers exist in the same bubble that becomes increasingly detached from reality.
In 1999 I left academia when I was told to do *intentional* p-hacking. It was, of course, because funding was dependent on a certain result having statistical significance. I left and never came back.
The growing practice of preregistration can help mitigate this. I've encountered papers published in reputable journals with unsupported hypotheses presumably because they were preregistered.
While this could be true, these studies generally dont hold up very long to scrutiny . For example when another set of variables need to be investigated and the infleunce of the factors previously found to be significant (the1 in 100 sample) needs to be controlled for, researcher will report their results on the issue.
It´s even worse: Not publishing negative results for fear of appearing unsuccessful in your next grant application / comitee meeting / progress report / evaluation means that hundreds, thousands of candidate´s biographies get burned in the bone mill with nothing to show for, because they were set up to re-re-re-re-investigate plausible, but wrong ideas that just don´t work, and it could have been known ages ago, but nobody published that it just doesn´t work. All that effort and, ultimately, tax money could have been spent on investigating new questions, instead of pushing hordes of lemmings over the same cliff because nobody put up a sign that reads "Stop. hard edge, don´t go further, there is no way."
I am also a researcher and I don't trust the quality of science. If only I could tell someone about the fraud done in my filed (pharmacology and toxicology).
Oh yes. The argument. Remember when google banned you for certain arguments? It still does do that. It's funny how a "conspiracy" theory regarding that topic becomes a reality about 12-18 months. And as always the world got FUCKED, somebody made billions of dollars on it and got to hide the data for 97 years.
We knew this in the 1970s. As an undergrad, I worked with a sociologist who modeled the spread of new information in particle physics research. He found that the diffusion and acceptance of new ideas was more influenced by department / program / school reputation and who knew whom, rather than the impact of the new idea. I should have stayed in sociology and studied information diffusion rather than going into chemistry (and then computing). Maybe I would have found some solution to this. Meanwhile, research into knowledge diffusion has devolved into how to create a better engagement algorithm in order to get you to buy more stuff. Blech.
That’s a pity because society’s biggest challenges are now social rather than technical. It was 9-11 that made me realize that, and the nihilism has only spread and gotten worse since then.
All humans problems are social problems, technicalities come later. If this can make you feel better, there is absolutely no chance you would have ever 'solved' this if you stayed in sociology. Not in a thousand years. How are you going to solve humans dishonesty? By writing a book about it?
@@selimhajali9007 I was hoping to one day create a curriculum along the lines of some of the media literacy courses that are starting to be taught in high school - a sort of informational "smell test". These would be backed by research (Tom Lehrer songs omitted). We used to have smell tests in both theoretical and experimental chemistry. Looking at calculational results and finding that they're off by an order of magnitude, deriving something on the white board that's contradicted by observable behavior, getting experimental results that completely defied expectation - all call out for more (and skeptical) investigation. It would be nice if we had similar tools for the media we consume. That way liars would get outed, and we can laugh at those who lie, and those who still believe them. Just a nascent thought.
@@aliannarodriguez1581 The problem is the social sciences have now all but discarded the evidence-based model so are victims of (and thus perpetuating) social/ideological problems rather than being the solution to them.
I am a PhD physicist, and never in my life have I trusted science less than I do now. Quite simply, I recognize the fraction of institutions that are deeply flawed, producing flawed work.
@@highdefinist9697 Because I was young and enthusiastic regarding the (real) science at the beginning. After an MSc., I figured I should complete that phase of my life. It was, as you suspect, not a worthwhile decision. But, it has given me an important perspective on the world - both physical and social.
I used to be a believer, but I lost faith when physicists coined the term dark matter a few decades ago and called it real. String theory didn't help my faith either.
@@freefall9832 hold on, „believer“, „faith“? Science has never been about faith and there is no reason to mistrust all science. But if you had to „believe“ in it that means you never really understood it which is another problem
@MisterK9739 One problem is physicists aren't scientists like chemists or biologists or even astronomers. Physicists use a Bible called mathematics and say they can predict the past and future.
When "science" starts acting like medieval organized religion and accuses people of "heresy" and finds way of punishing those who don't "follow the science" then yeah that's a problem.
Can you cite an example of a reputable scientist calling someone heretical for their beliefs, and then tell me the punishment that the individual recieved for their "heresy". I am not trying to antagonize you, I just wan't you to back up your specific claims since as you say they are "spot on".
@@davidplubell6674 Did you forget that about half the world, including many "reputable scientists", called people who refused to get a covid jab or questioned the logic of locking down and masking "science deniers" and in many cases took away their livelihood or used the power of the state to punish them?
Trump told us climate change is a hoax, he is president, he likely knows what's best. And not only that but Exxon Mobile ran experaments for years and they even proved that climate change isn't happening. I'm going to trust our supreme leader Trump and the experts on this one, sorry brother... TRUMP 2024 ✝️⛪🙏🦅🇺🇸🇺🇲🇺🇲
But we are most definitely required to trust "the science" on "Climate Change", otherwise we will be called "deniers" - a term once used exclusively for doubters of a religious cult.
What if I don't have a scientific degree and only a layman's understanding of physics and math? Is it okay for me to trust established scientific theories like evolution, gravity or spherical Earth? I ask because I don't have the time or the money to personally question, verify and test every scientific theory.
@@uzul42 If you don't want to dig into every little topic deeper you'll just have to trust your best judgement with who/what you trust, based on your own experience in the real world I guess. Nobody has the time or energy to re-invent every wheel
I’m not a scientist by any means but I do know that when “the experts” in anything begin name calling, you are arguing against their ego and not the subject matter
Flat earthers will never admit that they are wrong. As you say, you can't fix stupid as in educate stupid people. It's goes as far back as Galileo. When Galileo did the ball drop and proved that gravity is not a fundamental force of nature, his flat earth peers dismissed it a thought experiment. When nasa went the moon and replicated Galileo's experiment with a hammer&feather, once again, the flat earthers dismissed it as the Equivalence Principle. Galileo theorized that it's the Earth's motion around the sun that creates the tides but along comes flat earther Newton and says it's the moon's mass pulling on the water. Then flat earther Einstein comes along and instead of correcting Newton's gravitational attraction nonsense, he doubles down on it with - mass warps space nonsense. As you can see, the scientific community is composed of flat earthers who still treat Earth as a stationary frame with the universe revolving around it. How do you get rid of the entrenched flat earthers/relativists that refuse to accept the fact that they are the true science deniers?
No you don't. Believing that waves a red flag that you are a manipulative narcissist. If you gaslight what someone is saying and project your distortions into them, they will have no recourse left but anger. You can then use your neat little justification to dismiss them, self fulfilling your belligerent "scepticism". That thought pattern you just outlined, is pure evil.
@@crimsonchin1496 Well, we aren’t discussing general “peer-review”, we are discussing critical scientific review (as I keep saying, science is a review process). For example, Gender Studies academics also engage in “peer-review”. It is simply that those academics use peer-review to engage in back-slapping to create an echo chamber and consensus. “Consensus” is the pre-scientific way of analyzing the world. It is opinion-based and postulates that the majority-held view is the correct one. “Science” is an evidence-based methodology that removes opinion, which is why it is successful if applied correctly.
PhD Chemist here, thank you for this one!!! Been saying similar things for years only to be ignored and legitimately abused financially and worse by family, non-science friends, and ex in-laws trying to be open and explain this for their benefit and wellbeing. All fell on deaf ears due to my own country having massive cultural problems in modern times sadly. We should make a club of PhDs who actually know and want this to exposed!!! I really do wonder how many of us are out there…
@@TheRealSykx I can’t say I don’t agree it’s a true challenge for sure, but I can say there are some I can speak of working behind the scenes already on this, some not scientists, so I do see a path. That said, outcome is not a given by any means, but the group does at least connect back to the current GARM stuff the past few days and other “secret” projects going on related to saving the American Dream. When I am active I work in a circle that is pretty connected in this respect. Unfortunately, haven’t done much since November actively for health reasons. Hoping to get back to it soon though!!!About all I can say though at this point under my agreements and existing NDAs.
There’s no justification needed to question science. The whole enterprise is founded on questioning everything, even knowledge that has appeared settled for centuries! (Newton/Einstein)
well, the question is: has Mathematics been applied properly to the problem? If not your mathematical solution will only tell you BS. And if you ever have seen scientists almost punching each others on how to translate a problem into a formula u know that u probably cannot trust anyone of them claiming to have found the right approach
I lost a fair amount of trust working in an atomic force microscopy lab as an undergraduate. At this particular school, one guy was really hot shit. Students revered this guy for being so young and so heavily published. Come to find out, he was really good at academic editing. He would brush up your paper, format it for publishing and demand his name be put on the paper in return. He hardly ever set foot in a lab (not a scientist in other words). If academics was that much of an influencer game ten years ago, imagine where it is now. Don't ever get me started on the current state of peer "review."
That was one institution and not all institutions. There might be corruption in one place but not every place. And from the sound of your story he was eventually caught. Usually if somebody does something like that the news travels fast, and they can kiss their career in science goodbye.
@@OceanusHelios I am aware that not all schools or fields are equally corrupt. What exactly would this guy get caught doing? He isn't breaking any rule I'm aware of. He contributed to papers and received authorship credit. Are you denying that the quality of research is diminishing year over year for a plethora of reasons, including corruption and poor peer review? If not, why are the hard and soft sciences alike plagued by an inability to reproduce results?
And, while we are talking about the Nuclear Industry (actually, we are not) they say Fusion Power is just 30 years away. I looked into that and discovered it is just 8 minutes away.
It all depends on how much money is spent on developing it - we know fusion power works - the Sun is doing it, it's just about creating those conditions and keeping them stable.
As a computer scientist and AI engineer, I resonate deeply with your critique in “Lost in Math.” In the fast-paced, ever-evolving landscape of AI, we constantly grapple with the tension between theoretical elegance and practical application. The media often exacerbates this by hyping AI’s capabilities, leading to unrealistic expectations. We see this in various fields-from the premature promises of fully autonomous vehicles and flawless medical diagnostics to the overstated fears of widespread job displacement. While AI has indeed made significant strides, it’s crucial to maintain a balanced perspective, recognizing both its potential and its current limitations. Your work highlighting the need for empirical validation over aesthetic appeal in physics is incredibly relevant to our challenges in AI today
We also miss the greatest threat in AI: human power seeking. Centralization of AI power and regulatory capture will be the greater threats to humans, than AI themselves.
@@BooleanDisorder No, we don't... Human power seeking has kind of been the forefront of people's minds for hundreds of years... not sure how we are "missing" that threat? If There has been TONS upon TONS of discussion on how AI can be misused to gain power. You couldn't be more more... And no, human power seeking has happened for a LONG LONG time, and wont be a greater threat than the first potential GAI, because that one can be SPECIES destroying... Human power seeking wont lead to the potential extermination of humanity as a potential goal, that is like the opposite of what a power seeker wants... If you have no subject, you have no power.
@@BooleanDisorder No, we aren't missing that. There are tons of talks about how AI can be misused by power structures to centralize power. I'm not sure how you got to that conclusion?
9:21 I agree with the "Logic is your friend" statement, but most people are not trained in Logic inference so it is easy to fall for fallacies. Even scientists who do what Sabine is denouncing use fallacies very often. I think we need to include more logic and philosophy of science in schools, rather than just reciting what is in the science text books (which sometimes includes these theories that you often criticize). Thanks for your contribution! I appreciate a lot your effort to educate us non-physicists 😁
It's not that science in general is untrustworthy. The risk to good science comes when there is incredibly high overlap between science, self interest, greed, and power (politics).
I love how Sabine thinks out loud sometimes. She worried that some people may take her distrust to scientists as an reinforcement for their beliefs and she just says that, I feel like it's often missing in communication
She should have said those things in the beginning of the video. It's like an article with misleading title but with fair description deep in the paragraphs.
You shouldn't automatically trust the experts, but this doesn't mean you should automatically distrust them either. The irony is that so many who say "don't trust the experts" essentially expect that we should trust their uninformed, kooky opinion instead.
@@paulw5039 They only distrust those who come to a scientific conclusion they do not agree with at all. You can tell because they then are very willing to believe any grifting pseudoscience on their word, when it is in opposition of said scientific conclusion.
I’m 72 and have learned that I was never as smart as I thought. All the contradictions are extremely frustrating and yet, here I am trying to learn something.
I’m 72 and finally admitted to myself just how abysmally stupid the average human being is and as George Carlin said, half of the population is stupider than that.
Questioning science is a good thing, but...mainly (perhaps even only) by other scientists. What's the point for a layman to participate in scientific discussions without the accumulated knowledge (and skills) the science community has? It seems nice to say you can trust data, math and logic, but again, most people simply lack the skills to interpret data and handle math and logic. You just have to be a scientist (or at least very well educated) to do so.
One thing that hit me was how few scientists actually understand science epistemology. I was in a 600-level physics course, and the professor asked what the scientific process is, and no one knew other than me. All the other students gave answers like science is observing the natural world and then making theories based on those observations. That's not science, every epistemology does that. The key difference that distinguishes science from other epistemologies is that you must observe, make a hypothesis, then have that hypothesis make novel predictions about the world. That is the key difference. Your theories must make predictions that you haven't observed yet. Like how the general theory of relativity predicted that light would be bent around the sun, so stars behind the sun should be visible during a total solar eclipse. That had never been observed at the time the theory predicted that outcome, so when that observation occurred it constituted scientific evidence for the theory. Or how the violation of the bell inequalities was predicted by the theory of entanglement. Or time dilation was predicted by special relativity.
But the last step in the scientific method is to devise a test or experiments that will reveal whether the predictions that were made are actually observed. Such as light bending around the sun observed during the famous eclipse or the observation of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury which verified Einstein’s General Relativity “hypothesis” and turned it into a “theory”. Sabina also mentioned that if it is scientific there should be a test that would be capable of showing the hypothesis to be false (Popper’s criterion).
Then after you do all that, you make experiments explicitly designed to disprove your hypothesis, not the other way around. And only after your hypothesis survives all reasonable scrutiny does it become more than that.
Basically, you formulate a hypothesis like a juicy bait for the fish of truth in the universe : the more outlandish but coherently formulated the hypothesis is, the easier it is to disprove, the faster we get informations and answers that contributes to narrow down the truth ; each newly acquired datas that proves the hypothesis "wrong" contribute henceforth to it's crystallisation into practical and effective theory. Or to put it in another word, science epistemology is the art of making claims that looks forward being proven wrong in the most productive way possible.
Science: knowledge of any kind (archaic, but still good enough for me) We like robust scientific-modelling as science (your hypothesis with predictive potential), but for me that's not all science.
600 physics or not this is embarrassingly reductive. If someone wrote a theory that unified Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity which is able to make all of the same predictions of both but made no new predictions are you really suggesting that wouldn't have scientific value or merit?
In a fourth-year undergrad geography class, we talked about paradigms, i.e., the current approved theory, i.e., the the current approved way of thinking. Basically, if you're a scientist at a university and you don't go along with the reigning paradigm, you're not going to have an easy career, if you have a career at all. In such situations, "science" is no better than a cult.
I grew up loving science. I watched and read anything about scientific topics from discovery to national geographic and in between. To me, science is saying, "Ok. That is a... unique view and hypothesis. Prove it." Then the weird outside idea works to gain proof, and the other scientists in that area begin to debate and debunk. Not exile someone out of academia. If it's an idea is so easily disproven, then disprove it. I feel like exiling and ignoring someone is a lazy way to do things. Even idea's as dumb as flat earthers. I think it's our responsibility to help them come to the conclusion that their ideas are misguided, and show them why. Even if it's frustrating. Because it's always going to be a fight. Nothing in life is settled and done, it requires constant reinforcement for each new generation of people that come along. To see someone so lost they believe things that have been disproven should be a moment of empathy, not of mockery and dismissal. That is what Science means to me.
You are correct, I was in STEM, but in the T of STEM, so we didn't worry so much, but I served in searches, and it was amazing the degree to which they cut out anyone who even varied from the accepted theories. In one case... close to 20 years ago now, we failed to hire a very, very qualified physicist because he had written a published peer reviewed journal article suggesting that there MIGHT be life off earth. Now that's an accepted fact, then... well... he was refused for that reason and that reason only. It distressed me then and it still does.
@@off6848 I took that class 30 years ago. I didn't stay in geography long; life had other plans for me. But, ha! - seeing those names whiplashed me right back to '94!
The great thing about science is that anyone can do it. All you need do is become fluent in the subject you wish to study, and in the methods of discovery. Then you are free to study what you wish. Have a suspicion that a prior study contains an error? Go ahead and test it yourself! Get others in your field to agree that your test method is correct, and then repeat your results… That, folks, is the SCIENTIFIC METHOD. Because humans are imperfect and because knowledge is far from complete, science does not always get it right the first time. But in the long term, it does self-correct. Don’t trust science? Excellent! It’s not about trust/belief. It’s about process/testing. Science is not “Einstein said it so it must be true”. Science is “hmmm, what Einstein said about the curvature of space-time doesn’t work with what I’ve calculated; let’s revisit his math as well as my own and see where there might be errors”.
@@Raphael4722 That’s an excuse. It’s a cop-out. The average layperson can conduct plenty of studies for him/herself, and from there read other studies and grasp whether the results are possibly valid or not.
Yeah - the point is that it is more difficult to even properly describe the "bias" in the hard sciences. For example, string theory isn't exactly "wrong", and it is an actual "theory" according to the definition, but it is also mostly useless, hard to deal with, and overall producing very few useful results relative to the effort put into it... so, imho the real problem is a lack of a clear definition of the distinction between "good hard science" and "bad hard science" - whereas in the soft sciences, the problems are usually much simpler i.e. p-hacking etc...
I read "Lost in Math" and it made me realize two things: 1) I was right when I told myself that an advanced degree in physics was beyond my ability, and 2) not having the technical means to test its theories (insufficient accelerator energy), the "leading edge" of physics is not so much an edge as an incoherent tangle of math and imagination. Oh, and Sabine is wicked smart.
what she calls "physics" most people in physics call "mathematical physics" and it is branch of math, not physics. Nobody expects experimental proves from mathematical constructs.
@@inevespace The idea behind mathematics being a part of physics is that the math can be a shortcut to find valid avenues of study cheaply and then follow through with the actual Science. Physics started out being the study for the understanding of they physical world. Today it is a fantasy (existing only in the mind) validated and carried out with chalk on a chalkboard.
@@elonever.2.071 mathematics is just a general way to construct models. It is not shortcut. Most of mathematical models are not applicable to physics. There are infinite number of formal systems and only few of them found experimental support in physics.
@@anonphil Probably Buddhism, Ajivikism, Charvaks (Though I only speak for Indian religions). What I mean is not that they don't have dogma, however; unlike Abrahamic religions, fundamentalism is not an arbitrary part of them.
The important thing to spot and identify when it comes to science is this: CONFLICT OF INTEREST That's the problem with science being pushed in the mainstream media today. Their catch phrases are designed to shut down anyone questioning them. Examples: "Trust the science;" "The science discussion is ended;" "I AM the science;" "The science is settled." When anything is put out there as "science" and these buzz words are included, there's a conflict of interest EVERY TIME. You're likely being conned.
I remember that campaign of just a couple years ago to "sign the pledge to trust science". Of course science is the polar opposite of "trust" and was designed in part to be an antidote to it. So I'm one of the people who vilified that entire "trust science" mantra on the rare times I encountered it.
In Germany I often hear the claim: We do not have a deficiency in knowledge, we only have a deficiency in acting. Whenever this claim is made, it is pretty sure that there is a big deficiency in knowledge.
@@LeoStaley Not a bad policy to follow the money, but we have to interpret carefully. AGW has been used as an excuse for wealth redistribution via developed countries funding the greening of more primitive countries. (Are they still trying this? AGW is not on my too-long list of issues to personally track.) In which case following the money means that AGW is the scam and "big oil" is not, or at least is no worse. And that's been without mentioning the "green industry" scam, where the money trail also leads.
A professor in Language during my first year of study in university told me that experts are the least trustworthy because only they know while you don't. Words of wisdom to me.
You have a point. I see this in my own field where intuitive arguments (without evidence) are treated as reasonable theories. That isn't how real science is done and has led to a lack of progress for decades.
I agree with you. I've been an academic for 28 years, and things have steadily deteriorated as far as both science and 'scientific' articles are concerned. It's long past time for a shakeup and a return to proper science and scientific method.
If you were an academic for 28 years, you would have enough time to act again this trend. Why didn't you do it? Edit: but to be honest, I don't trust you. :)
Even if someone is respectable scientist doesn't mean he can't cave in to pressure/ accept money to lie. And considering how bad the money is generally in research, and how smart the people in it are, taking bribes is smart thing to do.
It isn't smart when you're later found out to have accepted the bribe. There goes your credibility. Certainly isn't ethical nor is it science if you're faking and fudging it. Hence, it's actually the stupidest thing you could do.
Smart people often have integrity. Stupid people think they won't be found out. That said, even smart people make mistakes. People with integrity admit their mistakes. People without integrity double down on their mistakes. In my experience, scientists are intelligent and have integrity. Granted there are exceptions.
If you are a competent scientist yourself, that may be true. For the rest who aren't (the majority), science is there to provide a trustworthy establishment of resources as-of-the-moment, and not using its findings for practical applications would make science completely useless.
@@mepds9 it's just wise to take scientific findings with a grain of salt. Not ignore them and refuse to make use of them. But don't trust them blindly. If science develops a new material you can use, don't trust the first test claiming that it's stronger than anything we used before it. Depending on how sure you want to be, wait until there's 10 tests, 100 tests, or see what happens when others try using it in real world conditions first. But don't jump on bandwagons of scientific novelties, blindly trusting the scientists who just developed something new, unless you can afford to be disappointed and to potentially lose your investment.
Some random guy isn't going to arrive at anything useful by questioning science, that's how you arrive at hollow earth shit. He's not gonna bootstrap into becoming the new Einstein, he's gonna literally make stuff up. The scientific community has to police the output that gets to that guy, and that guy has the choice of doing a truly staggering amount of reading and some light experimentation, or accept the results.
@@jacksimpson-rogers1069 Bethe and Feynman-strange pair, some of their colleagues thought, a pedantic-seeming German professor and a budding quicksilver genius. Someone coined the nicknames “Battleship” and “Mosquito Boat.” Their collaborative method was for Bethe to plow solidly ahead, a determined giant, while Feynman buzzed back and forth across his bow, gesticulating, yelling in his scabrous New York accent, “You’re crazy” and “That’s nuts.” Bethe would respond calmly in his slow professorial way, working his way through the problem analytically and explaining that he was not crazy, Feynman was crazy. Feynman would consider and pace back and forth, and finally through the partitions the other scientists would hear him shout back, “No, no, you’re wrong.” He was reckless where Bethe was careful,and he was just what Bethe was looking for, someone who would perform the severest and most imaginative criticism, who would find flaws before an idea went too far. Challenges and fresh insights came easily from Feynman. He did not wait, as Bethe did, to double-check every intuitive leap. His first idea did not always work. His cannier colleagues developed a rule of thumb: If Feynman says it three times, it’s right. [Excerpt from "Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" by James Gleick] My description is Oppenheimer and Peter Sellers rolled into one. Best to you~
I was originally interested in theoretical astrophysics. I eventually settled on electrical engineering because even if it is “wrong”, it’s still good enough to actually do things with.
I don't have a problem with scientists choosing to research extremely fringe or theoretical topics, because you never know what breakthroughs might come from it. The problem is when too many scientists get tunnel visioned into some of these ideas and decide it's a good idea to spend billions of tax dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours on it.
A decent hypothesis is based on an observation. Fringe refers to the conflation of rumor with observation. If for example you hear of someone who correctly guesses a random event, that might be taken as an observation to investigate the system generating randomness or to offer it to a test subject, but it is not reasonable to ask if an unseen force, mystical process or God has given someone extraordinary powers. To motivate an experiment of that nature, multiple independent observations by independent observers are needed. If the duty of a scientist is to strive to falsify their own hypothesis, it is inherent on the scientist to form hypotheses that are well founded on observational fact. I think that is what Sabine is trying to say here, among other things. Or to paraphrase Carl Sagan, who I think is Sabine's kindred spirit, extraordinary hypotheses require extraordinary support.
There is no man-made global warming. "Global warming", however, is entirely man-made. Your last sentence describes the consequences thereof perfectly. Gödel is smiling in his grave.
I find it very hard to believe that most climate scientists are greatly afraid of being called alarmist, since scarier headlines will generally result in them getting more funding, not less - and there are a few big names who are well known to always give the most extreme interpretation possible. On the other hand, there is huge social/academic pressure to avoid being called a denier (e.g. you will likely become isolated & loose all funding, assuming you can even get your paper publishes, which is very unlikely), so anything that might possibly be interpreted as that is either not published, or written in a way to downplay it as much as possible. And there are lots of scientific papers outside of climate science that try to add a climate change connection, since it increases their chances of being published & getting future funding. Generally the only scientists who can manage to get away saying things against the climate change paradigm are those who have either (1) retired, or (2) have a very secure tenure/position, or occasionally (3) have scientific jobs well outside climate science.
Bringing this up wouldn't fit the narrative that Sabine prefers on climate, so she modified and re-framed her observations to support her narrative. Sabine can't imagine that climate change could possibly be over exaggerated by climate scientists, therefore she must argue that it's unexaggerated. Sadly, if the subject involves climate change or Elon Musk (and probably a few others), you can't expect a factual representation of the given topic from Sabine.
I did find that part a bit strange. One of the UN’s agenda items is hyperventilating over climate change. Politics is very friendly over climate alarmism so I don’t know where she got that from
Climate scientists are "alarmist" because the facts are alarming. You are just indulging in conjecture about the motivations of climate scientists. You make it sound as if there is an institutional desire for climate change to be a thing, when the reality is that industry and a lot of governments would be shoveling money at any credible research showing it is less of a problem than currently thought. Global warming is HIGHLY inconvenient for governments and industry.
@@kazwalker764 I don't think we can expect a factual representation of Elon Musk, climate science or Sabine from you. You are obviously, rather ironically, basing your conclusions on those three subjects on what you would prefer to be true.
It's not necessarily being afraid but that the more they're attacked, the more they're incentivized to make airtight arguments. This sounds good but it does leave too little room to communicate more speculative worries. There is less they can say as a result of model uncertainty. Meanwhile in the public, it's convenient to assume that uncertainty equals things are better than models suggest, instead of the opposite.
I have worked with several physicist (applied) all really nice people. I was 16 when the first one explained that theoretical science was more of an ongoing conversation or argument. I never herd a better description for a layman like myself. Be a skeptic and always follow the money
You get the same thing in Business where rather than introduce new ideas, people invent new buzzwords and slather everything in hyperbole. When there is no new information but you are expected to be innovative, you have little other choice.
My undergrad was mathematical statistics, so I entered my research career (in primary care medicine) with a strong quantitative bias. I quickly realized that all the important problems were mixed methods problems, requiring both quantitative and qualitative approaches combined. One thing the qualitative community gets right, that the quantitative community desperately needs, is the explicit consideration of reflexivity. Qualitative research that doesn’t include specific methods for exploring and declaring the biases and expectations of the researchers is essentially not fundable or publishable. It’s time quantitative research adopted the same self-discipline. In the case of climate science, that bias is to commit Type II error: understate what the data are really saying. There is both more uncertainty (apologies if you’ve already done this, but a discussion of complexity/chaos theory would be helpful sometime in re the inherent and irreducible uncertainty of climate) and a worse likeliest-scenario than is being put out there for the public. But getting climate scientists to act on that will be pretty tough when (in the US at least) they’re facing literal death threats. So don’t be too harsh on them; being emailed pictures of yourself in cross hairs, in a country with more guns than people, can be pretty intimidating.
I like this take. I am undergoing graduate training in epidemiology and public health, and in the research space on clinical interventions, a large and growing focus is on doing mixed method research. It would be interesting to have explicit statements on the qualitative research and the underlying biases that may sway analysis.
Not quite understanding what you are getting at with regard to bias and the difference between qualitative and quantitative research. Honestly, I can't see how a "qualitative approach" can be considered scientific. I can see a qualitative conclusion from a quantitative approach, however. I can't see a scientific research paper not having numbers and thus it must be quantitative. Climate change and specifically climate modeling is an entirely different kettle of fish, because you can't scientifically model the climate because there is only one earth. All modelling requires three systems. One to observe and determine parameters and functions, one to validate the model, and the actual system your are interested in. Therefore, climate models are not scientific they are 100% pure bias with the modeler creating the model to produce the output he FEELS will be right. Considering that obviously his research grants and possible future hiring is dependent on him creating a model that shows increase temperatures in the future, he WILL produce such a model either consciously or unconsciously.
The scientific consensus was that it's not a good idea to overload hospitals with patients dying on respirators. The average hospital has just about enough intensive care equipment to take care of the average number of accident victims and people with severe cardiovascular events etc.. What is it that you are disagreeing with here? ;-)
Science is precisely about not trusting anything, not even yourself; always double-check everything, even your own beliefs and observations. Science is the best method method we got to avoid getting stuck away from the truth, and to, on average, ensures you're moving closer and closer to the truth; nothing else has been demonstrated to inherently have such guarantees,
Universities teach students about Eisenhower's speech warning us on the military-industrial complex. They don't teach you about the other half of that speech warning about the scientific-technological elite.
They also don't mention that Eisenhower described it as the congressional military industrial complex but was persuaded to drop congressional from the final form of the speech.
Blindly trusting anyone is a dangerous course to follow. Many say "Trust, but verify." I say "Verify." If you can't verify, then looking at the "track record" of the previous claims from the same source is often a good indicator of whether or not any trust is warranted. And even then, trust is not knowledge.
Yeah, I hate that saying. If you genuinely trust someone, then why would you waste time verifying? Really they mean to say "don't trust", except that people are too timid to admit that they don't trust you, even if they have no reason to trust you.
"Trust but verify" was political weasel-speak that Reagan used to negotiate with the USSR over nuclear weapons. I had to google it to get the long-forgotten details - it's actually a Russian phrase, and it's bullsht in Russia too. (Gee, there's a shock.) I always hated the phrase and am sad to learn that a movie brought it back. In all cases it means: "I'm too cowardly to say that I don't trust you."
I'm glad I'm not the only person who feels this way. My skepticism of science stems from the 7th grade. I had spent months developing an experiment to measure the optimal color combinations for a computer display. I had written a program in BASIC, subjected countless classmates, friends, and family to the battery of tests, and was still actively compiling the report the night before the science fair. I had decided to finish the report, and skimp on the backboard. So my little spot on the table was a report of the ideal color combinations, and a fat stack of data to back it up. But no backboard. I got a failing grade. The year before I had slapped something together using brine shrimp an having them swim towards the lighted end of a tray of water. That had gotten me honorable mention. Moral of the story: it's the presentation, not the material, that sells an idea. Even (and perhaps most especially) in "Science".
I judged a science fair once and was a co-judge. I chose the winner. The student had expounded upon an experiment he had done the previous year, doing a followup on the antibacterial properties of coconut milk. It turned out that the milk increased bacterial growth and didn't decrease it. Another student the other judge wanted to win had a huge display, a cute body, and her display looked more like a pseudoscience mumbo jumbo mash of herbal remedies in use in cosmetics, and was all over the place rather than trying to address a single isolated question. The other judge was smitten with her and was "impressed" by her "display." I pushed to make sure the kid that had all of the proper requirements for a good experiment won. He had a control, an experiment, a singular thing he was testing for in microbiology. The girl had one for "microbiology" too but was an obvious kind of snake oil salesman kind of display. I think the right person one on that science fair. It was tough to do. I was chosen to judge it based on recommendations from my past science professors...and I had a reputation for not falling for a bunch of BS.
Ha, maybe it's not that bad in science, but certainly presentation = money = research = science. All Universities now have something akin to a PR department to push scientific research done at the University into the public domain. I view it kinda like those prescription drug commercials. The doctors really make the decision, but the patient could probably influence the physician. In the same way, the exposure could influence the politicians and those handing out grants.
If you look at the history of science, breakthroughs were often achieved by building a set of robust and repeatable experiments. In those days, there was no overreliance on statistical verification. Nowadays, we have 'models', and sometimes we forget to validate our models with observations in the field. Case in point: during the pandemic, I remember reading about a study from Finland that had modeled the air flows (therefore risk of being contaminated) in a grocery store. The media gave a lot of space to that study. All the while, the Chinese, had already published a study of passengers from a bus with infected passengers. So, the actual results from observations in the field were ignored, and scientists were obsessing over models. It took a long time for officials and scientists to use actual data from the field instead of models.
My favorite cautionary tale about this was the insistence by "experts", when HIV first arrived, that condoms were useless for protection against HIV because the virus was small enough to get through the interstices in the latex. The lay public assumed this advice was science-based, and it led to a lot of unprotected sex, which led to a lot of HIV infections and deaths that could have been prevented by condom use. Then, after about 10 years of this officially sanctioned advice, a research team looked into the claim, found that it was purely guesswork, and performed simple tests to see what actually happened during condom use by men with HIV. And they showed that yes, viruses can penetrate latex, but the viruses are so tiny that even the thinnest condom is too thick for them to move through in less than a couple of hours, at a minimum. So condoms protect against HIV if you replace them every couple of hours, based on actual scientific research. The guesses by "experts" who were too certain of themselves to bother with actual research were deadly. Way too often, pseudo science and replacing data with guesses (which are much cheaper and quicker to produce) causes great misery and even death.
The study of passengers on a bus tells you very little other than the passengers on a bus became infected. It does not tell you whether the virus airborne or the result of physical contact with other passengers or even if the physical bus itself had been infected before those passenger boarded. Without knowing one is actually dealing with a disease in advance, that doesn't even tell you if the symptoms were cause by a pathogen or a toxic substance. The purpose of models is to quantify how infectious a disease is and how easily it can be transmitted. Knowing the details is important for deciding how to keep people from becoming infected. Look up SIR and SEIR models, for example. COVID is the latter. Knowing something about the airflow tells you something about the probabilty of becoming infected by the proximity to an infected person. What you said about not using data is simply not true. The data are direct inputs to the models.
I'm a retired scientist and I agree. I'm a strict Popperian (if it can't be empirically disproved, it's not science). My problem with the climate models is that although they are in theory disprovable, by the time it's apparent that they are wrong (or have no predictive power whatsoever), it's too late. They constantly "tweak" the models as every years' worth of fresh data comes in (a relatively minor adjustment), so that the model perfectly matches the historical data, yet still might have zero predictive power. I found this in a project I was involved in, we were trying to model a relationship individual flavor compounds and taste using principal component analysis. It took a long time for the penny to drop, the model had no predictive power at all. Later research showed we were looking at the wrong compounds and had completely missed a couple of important ones.
Climate "science" based on ever shifting base years, ever shifting methodology, with max a few 100 years of dicey temperature readings and some ice cores with huge uncertainty around them. And totally ignoring all the times in earth's history when the temperature changed fast and drastically before the start of the industrial revolution. Yes I don't trust climate "science" or climate "scientists" who are in an incredibly politicized field and can only get funding if they have the "right" opinions.
Popperisnism is too restrictive in what it permits. Theories that describe complex systems are not easily disproven. Their utility simply changes. What would a Popperian climate model even look like?
Totally agree. It's hard to validate these models. If we try to stick to Sabines 'Trust arguments not people": How to trust arguments based on models, which are simply a blackbox with quite some complexity. (As a software engineer for nearly 30 years, if it's not tested it's not working 😀)
@@MandragaraI can't speak to the wider science, but I am an expert in dynamic simulation modeling, and I've seen numerous climate models built using one of the methods of DSM, system dynamics. The concern I have with those models is that, of all the DSM methods, it has the easiest (and therefore the highest) ability to succumb to confirmation bias. Partially, this is due to it being a deterministic method rather than probabilistic (i.e., it has no first-order stochastics), but also due to the very skill of system dynamicists. A good person in SD will know the general shape of output graphs before the model ever runs, through structural analysis. This has the unfortunate corollary that it is very easy for unscrupulous modelers to generate the shape of output curves that they want to see. There are known safeguards to use, but most papers do not go into whether those are used. The other issue, of course, is that the other DSM methods are not conducive to climate models (SD is the clear choice) so it's not like there's a lot of alternatives. ABMs might work with a sufficiently powerful computer, and properly designed, avoid the confirmation bias issue entirely, but you lose some ability to validate the model as a consequence.
The university I got my post grad degree from is now overrun with climate clowns. I was describing some modeling work I was doing, on electronic systems to one of these creatures. So, said I, I made observations, proposed a model, checked how it fit with the observations, and then I had to collect many new sets of data and tried the model against new data repetitively before I was satisfied. The idiot wanted to know why I collected new data when I had data. Well, I'm not a dirty HARKer - Hypothesis After Results Known. That is corrupted science. The climate clowns are all HARKers by definition.
I would not say that just because science presenters need to be careful with the public that we should not trust what they say. It is no substitute for being able to follow the current research on your own but the best way to figure things out is by following graduate seminars, where they usually talk freely as it's not something they say to the public directly which needs to be 'sanitized'. For a different example, notice that there is tremendous good research going on in medicine (try e.g. to listen to Dr. Neil Love's podcast series) but during the COVID-19 main outbreak era there was a lot of sanitized information due to the political and public pressure (e.g.). This does not mean we do not trust science or scientists; it means we follow the scientific method and learn to read in between the lines when needed. We live in a world full of misinformation and ignorance; the fact we still have scientists, and people willing to do science, is in itself, a small miracle.
Agreed. I find it astounding that scientists trained when I was were not required to take even an introductory course on the philosophy of science, the course meant to address this very subject.
That!! I was missing that in my undergraduate years, and keep mentioning it and mentioning it, but no one wants to hear that. Students need to be pressure-fuelled with applicable information as fast as possible. That´s the new normal. maximising number of graduates per term, that´s efficiency. Yeah, right.
It's one of the reasons I left my graduate program in Theoretical Physics: They were obsessed with String Theory and extensions of the Standard Model. Now I focus on pedagogy and unification of the formalisms of physics (not unifying forces etc, but the way we learn it and talk about it)
I get a feeling when I hear "scientists" talk about the multiverse! Absolutely no evidence for such things, there's too much speculation going with some theoretical physicists!
I can't thank you enough for posting here, because your comment about formalisms of physics caught my attention, made me look for your YT channel and got me excited beyond belief about what I found there! I've been fascinated by GA for many years but never really got into it. Finally, your channel seems to be the missing piece for me, linking the maths to the real world, a.k.a physics. Exactly what I was hoping for. Thank you!!! (I am not a mathematician or physicist, but I guess this is the best chance I'll ever get to give GA a serious try)
I thought ESP was statistically real… It’s one of the crises in psychology They use the same methodology as everything else and they can show statistically significant amounts of ESP… Or we used to say intuition Not to mention, there is a preposterous predominance of evidence verifying the existence of UAP’s
Hey Sabine, thank you so much for being bluntly honest. I have seen every word you say happen in front of me, and unfortunately am still seeing it every day. But I hope I will bring a change. Hats off to you!
If you can't question it it's not science, that's the problem with a lot of modern "ideas" that can't be questioned or even point at the limitations and flaws.
Lots of questions leeds nowere and meanengles but to go to phantasies. nothing forbids intelligent questions, only sometimes you need to understand the situation
I've been a scientist for 35 years. I don't care now, got 20 years left to enjoy life, ignoring the idiots around me, just doing my own thing 'til I'm gone.
@@helloukw Are you CheshireTomcat168? Or at least have you been a scientist for 38 years, with 20 years left to do your own things? Do you think your answer had any strike force in it? Is your answer reflecting on the similiraties or the difference?
I hate it when people treat 'Science' as a kinda religion. I mean, the whole point of Science is to think for yourself and try to find improvements upon the existing paradigm; never assume something is 100% completely correct, always try to falsify things.
Excellent article. Bears out my own experience exactly. I'm my younger years, I spent a lot of time in government/military research labs in the 1970s when they actually funded and supported basic research. My first post was to the ionospheric physics electro magnetic lab. I began to notice how almost all the research done by our PhDs was deemed classified until it was ready to take to a symposium or for peer review, then suddenly if was in the open. It seems they were hiding their research behind classification to make sure they didn't have to share credit until they were ready to present and bask in glory and prestige. The other thing I have became aware is how some people replace religious belief with belief in "Science" while knowing practically nothing of science. The most they do is read a layman magazine or internet article, repeat it over and over to make them selves seem smart and sophisticated while looking smugly down on others. I like your thought and analysis. We do have a slight convergence on the climate issue. My opinion is that most real climate research has been stifled by those that wish use the fear of catastrophe for gaining political power. Al Gore's carbon credit comes to mind.
>>> how some people replace religious belief with belief in "Science" Exactly. Science is a tool, not perfect but the best we have for understanding reality. Like any tool, it can be twisted to fit an agenda. But reality doesn't change.
It feels like there's an important part missing from this video - the part where you explain in what way exactly climate scientist are wrong? You said you think they're underestimating the problem, but you did not explain anything about why you think that, and what you think would be correct instead? Without that point explained, this video seems quite confusing, like it's missing an important part.
She already did several videos on the topic: ruclips.net/video/MaaJqPCjNr4/видео.html ruclips.net/video/4S9sDyooxf4/видео.html ruclips.net/video/J1KGnCj_cfM/видео.html ruclips.net/video/_kGiCUiOMyQ/видео.html
Most scientists seem to think that doing something about climate change means scolding the general public for not doing anything about climate change. We're all just waiting for someone to show us what to do, by doing it.
I have never met a scientist who was scolding the public for climate change. There is nothing "the public" can do about it. It's not a problem that can be solved at the level of the individual. So what are you really telling me then? That you want attention by mentioning the words scientist, climate and public in the same sentence. ;-)
@@schmetterling4477 Perhaps the term "scolding" was not the best choice of words. I also realize that I may have made it seem as though 'scientists' are not members of the general public, when they most certainly are. In fact, I consider myself among their number. While I no longer describe it as scolding, there are many scientists (in many fields) who rattle off data on CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels etc. in a rather accusitory manner. They say things like, "I don't know how else I can convince you...", or, "the average American uses more energy than this or that..." My point is, if the most well informed climatologist has no practical means of altering their behavior to reduce their enviornmental impact, then what hope do we have of avoiding this oncoming climate disaster. If anything, I believe the climate change alarm has not been sounded loud enough.
@@mylittleelectron6606 I have never met a scientist who was trying to convince you of anything. We are generally asking you to pay attention in science class so that you don't end up uneducated about nature. If you don't follow our advice we generally consider you as hopeless and stop talking to you. ;-)
I don't think that research into ESP was unscientific per se. The methods of science are themselves subject to trial and error. This means that we sometimes discover that old methods have serious flaws. But that doesn't make the old science was pseudo science. It becomes pseudo science when people keep using methods which we already know don't work.
It makes old science basic experimentalism. Not even worthy the name of science. It was just trying to find out things. Which has its place, but it's not good enough to call it science.
There was a time when it was a reasonable scientific experiment to send a party up to the top of Mount Olympus to check if there are actually gods cavorting up there. So why have we stopped doing it, but still have 'a science' investigating ESP, ghosts, aliens etc
I'd add that news outlets relying on press releases to fill time didn't help much either. In the 80s there was a rash of "new research shows..." announcements that were followed months later by "oops, turns out that's not true."
This is why so many people make claims like "You know, in the 80s they told us we were about to descend into an ice age - and yet now they expect us to believe that the earth is warming!" It's because some paper got read by a non-scientist, was interpreted incorrectly (or without the context of the hundreds of papers saying the opposite), and sensationalized before being put in some news magazine like Newsweek. The result is that many in the general public thinks science may pivot at any moment to an opposite conclusion, so people are convinced that it's all just opinion. It's potentially worse now, with the flood of social media influencers who are actively and purposely misleading people.
Yeah, articles routinely say that something is associated with heart disease or cancer. Then you see that they studied a population of ten people, and/or studied an effect on cell cultures. It shouldn’t even be published outside of a journal.
Thank you very much for this video! I am currently an undergrad in physics, and this has given me a lot to think about in terms of what I want to specialize in. I had a question about the point of physics chasing almost undetectable particles. The information in this video is probably very condensed, so I was hoping someone could clear this up for me. My understanding was that physics somewhat naturally evolved in this direction and there is nothing to really course correct about it. For example, the Higgs boson wasn't found until the 21st century but was widely regarded as true even before its definitive discovery, which allowed this area to develop earlier. In the list at 3:35, I thought it was noticeable that dark energy and dark matter were also left out. They are much more studied and measured than any of the other points, but still something we cannot detect directly, only measure their impact. From what I have seen of dark matter/energy research (which is admittedly not a lot), there seem to be many papers about the issue from all possible angles of consideration. New theories of spacetime try to incorporate it as a natural occurrence, papers map its interactions and describe its behavior, and some use approaches from different fields of study, etc. So I was wondering how this point is meant to be interpreted. Is there a way for modern physics to exist without considering these currently undetectable particles?
I have a Master's Degree in Analytical Chemistry. As part of a written exam about Analytical Chemistry 4, our professor asked us to search a few articles in literature discussing the same topic and compare them. I chose a few talking about paracetamol and cold flu (can't remember exactly why). I noticed several mistakes: wrong math, biased sampling, conflict of interest (the same guy was behind 3 articles which promoted miracle results, but no one else was able to replicate them). Not to mention when I spot a mistake in a reaction and a wrongly named molecule. How could the peer reviewers miss that? One should also question the source material. Much like when we compare a news appearing on a Facebook post and the same news from a reliable outlet. One thing is reading a paper from, say Nature, another from your school newspaper.
You remind of climate change extremist scientists. They replicate results that can' t be duplicated without adjusting the data. Its easy to produce computer models that fit your desired outcome.
Systems result from incentives & disincentives. "Follow the money" includes career advancement & prestige. Scientists are arguably very susceptible to this.
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I didn't realise this was your own product Sabine!
@@gilgamecha Yes, it's my own project! I've done some minor software development things before, but this is the biggest one yet. I thought that other people might find it useful, too.
I'll use it if you promise to take my quiz.
u know, if u could separate politics from science (at least in the content) u'd be trusted much more than u are (and come over more professional) - esp when u step outside of ur area of 'expertise'
PS: not necessarily this video, but plenty others.
PPS: and I think u do it for the same reasons.. money (which I understand, but well)..
Not questioning what science says is the most unscientific thing you could do actually
Did you get the Vax ??
No, most unscientific thing is to not question yourself in the first place.
I would say it's the most anti-intellectual thing you could do.
A quote I like a lot comes from Feynman, "Science is belief in the ignorance of experts." This assumes, of course, that those who have that belief are willing to try to expose that ignorance by either demonstrating that their own, new ideas explain phenomenon better, and that others can replicate them with a higher degree of accuracy than the ideas of prior experts, or exposing a flaw in expert methodology.
Questioning science, is literally what science is, duh.
It's called 'the scientific method'.
You should not blindly trust science. That's the point of science.
blind trust is manipulatable trust
I'll bet you do.
So, how is a normal taxpayer going to NOT blindly trust science when Big Science has captured the process in the country like the Japanese nuclear industry captured the nuclear regulatory industry?!
Should we be running our own labs to do confirmatory experiments and the like?
When the whole system, including the checks-and-balances, is fraught with issues, how does the normal person work back up the line to Trust But Verify?
And the point of hell is that you are going there only because god loves you so much. It is to make a point. He is very passive aggressive. With emphasis on aggressive.
She should have titled it "I don't believe scientists." Because it's not about belief, it's about accumulating evidence that makes a particular mechanism the most likely.
I am a professor in one of the social sciences. You wouldn't believe the fraud committed by some to get prestige and grant money. I am disgusted.
When I was going to grad school in chemistry, my major professor handed me a paper to peer review.
I was not that kind, pointing out some logical flaws as well as where I thought more information was needed (or at least citations to relevant literature).
I recommended that the paper should be published, but with minor revisions.
My major professor pushed back with the question: "How would you react to this review?" I thought about it for a minute and said, "With thanks and grace. I would have learned something." He shook his head and asked me to rewrite the review.
I realized at that point that pursuing physical organic chemistry research was probably not going to end well.
Geesus, yes; when I was younger [at one of the "top 20" uni's in the world] I got into hot water for scribing this. If the world's academia were in the hands of those like Hossenfelder and Chalmers I would sleep a lot better.
I went to a top university in Canada. For psych there is one stats course. The lectures were 100% powerpoint. The prof did ZERO examples the entire semester. I know what you are thinking, she was a last minute replacement, right?
Nope! She had been teaching the course for years, absolutely zero controversy, nothing to see here. Later when a disease, ME/CFS came back, my disgust turned into grave personal harm and hey no blinding, no placebo, readjusting stats so that patients that got worse in the study criteria were considered recovered. And yet it took years for any professionals to listen and accept the obvious. Mind you nothing happened to these frauds. They still hold high positions while many patients remain (permanently?) harmed. Its the normalization of deviance. I really wish there was a solution, but its seems much of this is rotten to the core.
For my MS degree, I did research for petroleum companies and worked with PhD students doing other, related research projects. I saw false data published and more. But, none of it was malicious. It was just due to sloppy practices being bent around biases and due to students trying to meet unrealistic expectations by department heads.
If that was the corruption without malice, I can only imagine what happens when strong financial incentives and such are involved.
There are no social sciences. I was part of the bubble for many years in Europe! Its just ideology! Most of these people are brainwashed and dont dare to speak up because they would lose the job when not being a left wing puppet! Very sad and dangerous nowadays! These universities should be demonetized!
The whole point of science is to question things, not blindly believe. I always make sure to understand the logic behind any scientific advancement that is revealed, because even if I can't understand the maths or what the data means with a highschool level education, I can make sure what I believe in doesn't use an unrealistic leaps of logic.
"Trust arguments, not people" this phrase is so much more important and impactfull than it's screen time, awesome video!
Because greta knows best. Haha
The problem is that none of us are able to investigate the arguments fully. When a climate denier offers an argument that looks good, how is the lay-person to respond? Just trust the argument? Although it is almost certainly cherry picked and ignores most of the relevant data, the argument looks OK to someone who is not an expert, or at least very familiar with the field. Trusting arguments is OK for experts, but fails for lay people. Scientists should absolutely trust the argument in their field. Lay people absolutely should not.
What if someone's argument is right but intentions are wrong?
@@Prabhu108. elaborate
@@cainaoliveira789 Maybe someone using logic to maybe tell how religion is wrong or how climate change isn't real but inside they are just intrested in pushing certain ideology or selling certain product.
Scientific thinking is what we should trust. That’s why it needs to be explicitly taught in schools.
Yes,💯
And scientific thinking is limited. Cant see the forest from the tress.
Then I guess the first thing to teach is to stop compartmentalizing it as specifically "scientific". "Scientific thinking" is just everyday rational thinking with more data and more math.
@@lockwood1976 humans are limited
@@lockwood1976 Perhaps, but a lot of the same people that say that are the same ones who listens to everything that agrees with them and ignores everything that doesn't.
Questioning science, IS science.
That is a key point! Thank-you
Rather, scientifically question scientists' intentions
@@alexxx4434 You have to question all of it, processes and people.
... unless Science becomes flesh and dwells among us, and is the highest-paid government employee, at the NIH. That science should not be questioned.
@@40yearoldman That's why this other ways of knowing thing is kinda dangerous though. They get to question the scientific method. They get to say they proved it wrong. Why? Because they get to use their other ways to confirm it. If you question the scientific method using the scientific method then you are presupposing it.
Blindly trusting scientists is very unscientific
That's why nobody asked you to. What we did ask you to do is to pay attention in science class, which you obviously didn't do. ;-)
The best thing about science and those that practice it: You are NOT SUPPOSED to 'believe' or 'trust'!
You hypothesize, predict, and CHECK, TEST, and CHECK AGAIN. A Scientist's worst enemy will eventually be (if honest) his (and everyone's) best friend.
This is why I don't understand why people are so against people being skeptical about all conclusion's sciences have, this includes climate science, nuclear, human studies.
The problem is science has become political, it has become like a religion and has made anyone questioning the results a heretic.
If it's true, then it will stand up to the criticism if it's not it will be proven to be wrong.
It’s common in media for the smart character to say “trust the science” and they’re invincible.
I think that influences people’s thinking
If its based on Trust its not science
I personally go for observe first if don't observe anything dont make shit up
70s the ice Caps were growing and carbon dioxide doesn't increase tempurater
"Publish or perish" to keep university tenure. I knew a retired Stanford theoretical physicist and professor who told me, "If you live in the physical world and have a theory, you are a theoretical physicist". In his later years, he made the most amazing pottery I've ever seen.
Or how the "Cure for Cancer" (and Virus and all disease) was discovered in the 1930's and it was John D. Rockefeller and "other" surgeons that made sure the results from human patients and them being cured of their cancer in 6 months or less, and without invasive procedures using "Resonant Frequency" was taken and made to be lies by the surgeon who discovered it and stripping him of his medical license and destroying him financially so that today millions and billions of dollars are spent on "Cancer Research" when the cure has already been known for 90 years? I can certainly see how you have "Lost Trust" in Scientists. Smart girl.
This is my favorite anecdote here...🥰
Amazing in a good way or?
Science is the application of reason to data to gain insight, using the scientific method. When the data, e.g. the velocity of stars in the outer reaches of a spiral galaxy, required explanation, scientists came up with dark matter, but have yet to find any. If we never do, will the hypothesis of its existence continue? Is belief in a phenomenon which fits your model enough, or is that a faith-based enterprise, so, like a religion?
he searched the answer to the why and found it in pottery, not bad.
I never trust anyone that is not bold enough to admit they were wrong. Humility is the jewel of wisdom.
That's terrible advice.
There are too many smart people who are afraid of speaking out against dumb people, out of fear of appearing arrogant - but the world would be so much better, if they spoke out, to correct those around them.
@@highdefinist9697that didnt look like advice, and your assertion is a clear non sequitur.
@@highdefinist9697What?
I never trust anyone that isn't bald enough
@@highdefinist9697 You make the assumption that stupid people are capable of being corrected. In practice convincing anybody of anything is the hardest thing to do of it. And when you accomplished that difficult task you'll be confronted with a harder one: Convincing the next person.
I was confronted with a very mild form of corruption in the scientific publishing process over a decade ago; We wanted to get our work published in Nature, but they refused to publish our work because our results contradicted a previous paper that they had published years earlier and they didn't wanna look stupid.
And that's just an extremely mild case of their image being in danger of being ever so slightly tainted, and that already prompted them to refuse a publication. No money was involved and no politics.
Now IMAGINE just how much bs gets published while good work gets swept under the rug IF money and politics are involved!
When I entered a PhD program and saw how obsessed most of my professors were with their h-index score and “prestige” I decided to leave. I wanted to help people, not be famous
What do you do now?
Peer reviewed journals have been somewhat muddied from monetary and ego based pollution..
Having gone through graduate school, you become the ultimate skeptic (or you sell your soul and join the club). Firstly, you realize the incredible financial risk you are taking considering that you could lose a decade of earnings as you pursue your degree(s), post docs, part time teaching before you land a proper job...and the odds are that you won't find a faculty position. People can't comprehend the pressure and fear, unless you are faced with it. When I see that someone is caught committing some academic fraud, I don't really judge. I would say that 95% of researchers WILL need to massage their results in some papers, if they have any hope of landing a job. The remaining 1% are true geniuses and the other 4% are people who lucked out and just happened to have studied the subject du jour and belong to the correct demographic.
you could have still helped people... your sentence leads me to believe that none of it actually ever happened.
It also leads to a lot of very useless research, because wanting to publish a lot (and acquiring funding!) leads to professors overpromising and underdelivering all the time, and chasing trends and buzzwords instead of being open and curious.
I have made enemies reviewing tenure track applications and poining out pseudoscience papers in the candidate's CV. But I am not sorry. Doing that was my duty.
If its based on Trust its not science
In the 70s the ice Caps were growing. And carbon dioxide doesn't even increase tempurater
@@osmosisjones4912 How is it relevant to what I wrote? I did not mention climate at all.
as you should
@@osmosisjones4912 It does increase temperature, since it traps more energy
As a scientist, I see my colleagues regularly producing results and spinning data to please their funding body and continue the funding through to the next project. It is clear conflict of interest that underpins the funding model. The model is broken.
Well than maybe the problem is not the scientific method but as alway effin money. I know of a thesis in pharmacology that was not published because the results didn't please the effin company who funded the research. THIS is rigged.
Agreed. The funding model is an issue. Especially if it means adding bias to the results in order to gain more funding. Or publishing something, anything to get continued funding.
I don't know what the solution is, but the current funding model is part of the problem.
@@protonmaster76which university are you in? Which field?
@@bohanxu6125 I'm not a scientist, I'm an engineer in the private sector. But my father was a scientist in New Zealand some 40 years ago.
Haven't you heard? Capitalism innovates. (innovates new ways to con people out of their money)
The best quote I heard about science is that science is the truth for now. By its empirical - based on observation - so your discoveries and conclusions are only ever as good as your observations and measurements. When better observations and measurements are made you can make more accurate or even different conclusions. For example, JWST, a more powerful instrument than Hubble, keeps making discoveries that change accepted views of the early universe.
"Trust arguments, not people" - That might be the best advice I have ever heard from a scientist.
Trust data and the measurements. -It’s not my opinion, it’s an observation, look here with your own eyes.
Yes, I could not agree more. And yet, again and again when I quote some good argument from a controversial source, people will dismiss it by (correctly) pointing out that that person has said many crazy things before and is not trustworthy.
Bad solution, it optimizes for who can trick the audience better. Good advice for scientist- to- scientist communication. Still, will scientist let science get in the way of their careers? 😂
Unless the argument, as logically correct and tight as it can be, is based on flawed axioms/assumptions - then it's all wrong.
That's why it's so important to first establish a common basis for the argument and only then proceed with the argument itself.
@@vaakdemandante8772 - If the axiom is wrong then arguments based on it are also wrong. Still back to the same issue. Focus on the argument and evidence, not the person delivering the argument or evidence.
Exaggerating the relevance of one's research is REQUIRED to get funding. It's insane and probably why I'm failing in academia.
It's actually worse. It's a horrible echo chamber, as well. Almost anything you want can be proven to be true over time, if you throw loads of research dollars into it.
1. Poor research dollars into research investigating Mice and their parenting skills into top research skills.
2. Funnel top graduate students into these fields who will be used as (sorry), somewhat as lab rats to help research faculty get published.
3. Fill peer-reviewed journals with reviewers and editors predisposed to support the theories at hand.
4. Provide no research dollars, approve no peer-review journals, provide tenure to no faculty etc. for articles or research that suggest Mice don't make great parents.
5. Minimize and discredit (after all they have no grants or A+ peer-reviewed journal articles) any researcher that suggests something besides what SCIENCE ALL agrees is true.
6. Hire ONLY those students from the top research schools (yep, the same ones that have been guzzling research dollars and will eventually sit on tenure committees, peer-reviewed journals, be invited on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, etc as experts)
It's an incestuous relationship like few others...
Absolutely, and that's her point, not what many are talking about in the comment section.
For CS, narrow focus of public and private grant money has a been a problem since GW Bush presidency. Public funding was drastically cut, and when it gradually returned it was more focused. STEM education, big data, cybersecurity, AI - whatever are the top few hot areas at any given time get almost all the funding. I work on practical software visualization, so there are always opportunities to "adapt" the work to other areas to get funding. Before 2001, available funding was much more broad-based, and I think that on the whole the work was more productive because of that.
@@jmodified Too much political control of budgets, worldwide.
We have to allow and encourage research that does not conform to the norms.
This is how all the big breakthroughs happened.
My failing, of course, is ALWAYS another's fault. Seek ONLY what positively stimulates you; leave the rest behind. You will not die if you abandon excessive or unrelieved unpleasantness in your life.
"If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it."
- Richard Feynman
And yet string theory lives on despite the lack of predicted observations of super symmetry particle at the LHC
@@aneikei Yep, string theory is peak pseudo-science for sure.
Yet the Lower Tropical Troposphere is not warming faster than the surface, which falsifies the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis pushed by the UN (that happens to benefit Trillion of taxpayer dollars to unelected, totalitarian kleptocrats). Hence the alternative hypothesis by Shaviv and Svensmark (published in two papers in Nature) where solar magnetic variability affects terrestrial cloud formation currently is the best non-falsified hypothesis that agrees with all the data.
@@aneikeimoney laundering.
@@aneikei Is the simple sentence from Feynman to hard for ur brain or are you just misinformed?
I'm not a climate change denier. I am a climate change solution denier.
I second that.
Especially when their solutions sound like "the climate is changing therefore let us sacrifice a hundred thousand oxen to the climate god".
No one is a climate change denier really. It's a strawman to discredit intellectual arguments. People deny the anthropogenic basis of climate change (with good reason) and then some people deny that even if those arguments were true, the "solutions" would not help and are even not designed to help but to enrich certain people. But so religious is the idea of "climate change" much like the rest of the progressive agenda (vaccines, gay sex etc) that anyone with any degree of skepticism is treated as a blasphemer. This is the "science" laypeople venerate.
The proposed "renewable energy" solution is utter nonsense bad enough that even the offenders are helping to promote it. The fear of nuclear is enough to have frightened Carter, Clinton, Sanders, and many others into the absurdity of wind "turbines" that are nowhere near as good at using the wind than sail is.
@@matheusdardenne More like "Let us sacrifice all your freedoms (but not ours)."
@@Serjo777 juz eat ze bugs
Science + politics = politics.
Then😂 science = 0, at least with politics in the equation
the amount of people who know how money corrupts individuals but can't see it in those two areas is mind-blowing. Someone should do a study!
It’s like anything + poison = poison.
@@aank997 not necessarily (e.g. infinity + n = infinity)
@@aank997 I'd say, that the equation must be Science × Politics = Politics. Conclusively, Politics = 0.
More than 60 years ago in high school, our science teacher said that science is all about doubt and critical thinking. So yes, don't believe someone just because they are a scientist. Consider the facts stated, motive behind what is proposed, and all other factors. Unbiased thoughtfulness is a good place to start.
A degree doesn't a scientist make. It's a state of mind.
Exactly 💯
Yeah, but can you really believe that science teacher? :-[
And also realise that you are susceptible to many types of cognitive bias that unscrupulous people know how to use to manipulate your beliefs, opinions and decisions.
"all about doubt and critical thinking"
Nonsense, it is primarily about evidence-based reasoning and causality, both absurdly hard concepts. Nothing "common sense" about science. Our world is incredibly complex and often crazy abstractions are required to make sense of it.
"Unbiased thoughtfulness" is impossible because our brains are fundamentally subjective and biased. Bias is reduced at a systemic level when there is sufficient randomness and mutual criticism in the field, not at the individual level.
I think this all boils down to teaching people the difference between skepticism and cynicism.
Very good point. Most "climate skepticism" is really cynicism dressed up to sound credible.
BigRalph - I love that! Thank you.
I doubt it. ;)
Yes and calling the climate scare the climate scam is skepticism, not cynicism. Look at the banner of lies below the video.
@@arkaig1 I doubt your doubt.
I studied the social "sciences" and I was so repelled that I have no intention of using anything I learned there. They completely deny existence of material reality, favoring a postmodernist subjective idealism. When asked the question, "if I tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?", literally ZERO of my peers and professors said yes. They are convinced nothing objectively measurable exists, only subjective narratives. The social sciences have ceased to be anything resembling a science. Almost all my papers were just talking about my feelings about what I was learning, just looking inward (because what is the point of studying something outward if nothing outward exists?). I learned virtually nothing at all (in fact, I'd say I was miseducated) by people who've written so many books and have so many letters after their names, but who can't even answer the basic question: "if there's no such thing as objective material reality, what are statistics measuring?".
I was hoping "harder" sciences would be different but it seems this problems permeates all of academia. Intellectuals who only write for each other and who either quibble over meaningless minutiae or who inflate each other's egos all days. It bothers me because many of these social science professors consider themselves "social justice organizers" when I personally feel they have no idea what they're doing and think extremely narrowly, and basically have contempt for the majority of people (non-academics).
Love your videos by the way Sabine!!
I don't know what "the social sciences" are supposed to be. Do you mean law? Absolutely nobody in the law department will tell you that reality does not exist. Quite the opposite. They will tell you that you will have a really, really bad time in jail if you break it. Kid, you aren't making any sense here. You sound outright mental, to be honest. ;-)
I think postmodern thinking is responsible for many of the ills suffered by the modern world.
@@NilsFredrikGjerull Like what? ;-)
@@schmetterling4477 The idea of the self were you discover who you really are through emotions. It elevate the self to the highest authority were you can identify however you want. Other people, your own body and even God cannot tell you otherwise. The truth is not "out there" it is "in here".
It creates a therapeutic view of life that seeks constant validation, because it is in conflict with external reality and demands. This create incentives to force other people to validate your identity (primarily sexual and gender), because the emotions and identity is so brittle.
@@NilsFredrikGjerull Which god? We invented so many of them. :-)
Are you telling me I would be less horny if I just believed in Adult Santa? How old are you and what did you do to the intelligent child that you used to be? ;-)
In the lab they always used to say "please please please, don't tell us about your credentials. Only bring your data."
Michael Mann refused to provide his raw tree ring data. That was Steve McIntyre's initial complaint. Editors of journals that required authors to archive raw data let Mann and his co-authors get away with it. Read _Climate Audit_. That's what the email leak from the University of East Anglia Hadley Center Climate Research Unit was all about. That's why Michael Mann lost his libel suit against Tim Ball; Mann refused to make his raw data available in the discovery phase of the trial.
Michael Mann is to Climate Science as Trofim Lysenko is to Evolutionary Biology.
Or how the "Cure for Cancer" (and Virus and all disease) was discovered in the 1930's and it was John D. Rockefeller and "other" surgeons that made sure the results from human patients and them being cured of their cancer in 6 months or less, and without invasive procedures using "Resonant Frequency" was taken and made to be lies by the surgeon who discovered it and stripping him of his medical license and destroying him financially so that today millions and billions of dollars are spent on "Cancer Research" when the cure has already been known for 90 years? I can certainly see how you have "Lost Trust" in Scientists. Smart girl.
Tell that to the sycophants of Michael Mann.
They tell that to students, but it's not how they act in reality.
Data without interpretation are meaningless, that's why we need people with academic credentials and not some random cotton farmer.
I worked as an equipment technician at University for 11 years.
The driving force behind every researcher I met was 1) seek Tenure and 2) get Published.
The research they were conducting wasn't as important as holding onto their Jobs.
It was appalling to see Profs pretend to have expertise in just about every field just because they were considered an expert in one narrowly defined area.
I worked with a few PhDs, they were so narrow minded with blinders on and knew shit about practically everything except for their narrow minded specialty. What's the point in people like that?
100%
Saw this more than 30 yrs ago as a PhD student.
To a large degree their employers push that very agenda on them.
Sounds like you met Neil. lol
It’s way professors need to be forced out into the real world.
Another huge problem that's more prevalent in the social sciences is unintentional p-hacking. You briefly touched on this, but most research that gets published has some kind of eye-catching result. A huge amount of research that didn't pan out gets shelved, and hypotheses that aren't appealing don't even get investigated. This causes results to be hugely skewed in favor of pre-existing biases.
If a hypothesis has a 1% chance meeting the criteria for statistical significance but 100 research groups investigate it, you would expect about 1 group to find a statistically significant result. If the other 99 groups never publish their study because the results were disappointing, then that 1 result may well become the accepted truth. With tens of thousands of studies being done around the world at any given time, this is pretty likely to happen.
That's without even going into the dangers of peer review, where all peers exist in the same bubble that becomes increasingly detached from reality.
In 1999 I left academia when I was told to do *intentional* p-hacking. It was, of course, because funding was dependent on a certain result having statistical significance. I left and never came back.
*blinks in private contract research*
The growing practice of preregistration can help mitigate this.
I've encountered papers published in reputable journals with unsupported hypotheses presumably because they were preregistered.
While this could be true, these studies generally dont hold up very long to scrutiny . For example when another set of variables need to be investigated and the infleunce of the factors previously found to be significant (the1 in 100 sample) needs to be controlled for, researcher will report their results on the issue.
It´s even worse: Not publishing negative results for fear of appearing unsuccessful in your next grant application / comitee meeting / progress report / evaluation means that hundreds, thousands of candidate´s biographies get burned in the bone mill with nothing to show for, because they were set up to re-re-re-re-investigate plausible, but wrong ideas that just don´t work, and it could have been known ages ago, but nobody published that it just doesn´t work. All that effort and, ultimately, tax money could have been spent on investigating new questions, instead of pushing hordes of lemmings over the same cliff because nobody put up a sign that reads "Stop. hard edge, don´t go further, there is no way."
I am also a researcher and I don't trust the quality of science. If only I could tell someone about the fraud done in my filed (pharmacology and toxicology).
Oh,we already know
Which is?
@@Magnum_Opus827 "safe and effective" as proclaimed by Pfizer/Biontech...
What fraud? Why can't you tell?
9:23 “Trust arguments, not people.”
Powerful and relevant statement. 👍
This is cheap
The concept of trust is based 100% on humanity.
Oh yes. The argument. Remember when google banned you for certain arguments? It still does do that. It's funny how a "conspiracy" theory regarding that topic becomes a reality about 12-18 months. And as always the world got FUCKED, somebody made billions of dollars on it and got to hide the data for 97 years.
I trust you Sabine, because you're clearly smarter than me.
I prefer evidence.
We knew this in the 1970s. As an undergrad, I worked with a sociologist who modeled the spread of new information in particle physics research. He found that the diffusion and acceptance of new ideas was more influenced by department / program / school reputation and who knew whom, rather than the impact of the new idea.
I should have stayed in sociology and studied information diffusion rather than going into chemistry (and then computing). Maybe I would have found some solution to this.
Meanwhile, research into knowledge diffusion has devolved into how to create a better engagement algorithm in order to get you to buy more stuff.
Blech.
That’s a pity because society’s biggest challenges are now social rather than technical. It was 9-11 that made me realize that, and the nihilism has only spread and gotten worse since then.
All humans problems are social problems, technicalities come later. If this can make you feel better, there is absolutely no chance you would have ever 'solved' this if you stayed in sociology. Not in a thousand years. How are you going to solve humans dishonesty? By writing a book about it?
@@selimhajali9007 I was hoping to one day create a curriculum along the lines of some of the media literacy courses that are starting to be taught in high school - a sort of informational "smell test". These would be backed by research (Tom Lehrer songs omitted).
We used to have smell tests in both theoretical and experimental chemistry. Looking at calculational results and finding that they're off by an order of magnitude, deriving something on the white board that's contradicted by observable behavior, getting experimental results that completely defied expectation - all call out for more (and skeptical) investigation.
It would be nice if we had similar tools for the media we consume. That way liars would get outed, and we can laugh at those who lie, and those who still believe them.
Just a nascent thought.
@@aliannarodriguez1581 The problem is the social sciences have now all but discarded the evidence-based model so are victims of (and thus perpetuating) social/ideological problems rather than being the solution to them.
That's where the money is.
I am a PhD physicist, and never in my life have I trusted science less than I do now. Quite simply, I recognize the fraction of institutions that are deeply flawed, producing flawed work.
Why start a PhD at all, if you don't trust the institutions?
@@highdefinist9697 Because I was young and enthusiastic regarding the (real) science at the beginning. After an MSc., I figured I should complete that phase of my life. It was, as you suspect, not a worthwhile decision. But, it has given me an important perspective on the world - both physical and social.
I used to be a believer, but I lost faith when physicists coined the term dark matter a few decades ago and called it real. String theory didn't help my faith either.
@@freefall9832 hold on, „believer“, „faith“? Science has never been about faith and there is no reason to mistrust all science.
But if you had to „believe“ in it that means you never really understood it which is another problem
@MisterK9739 One problem is physicists aren't scientists like chemists or biologists or even astronomers. Physicists use a Bible called mathematics and say they can predict the past and future.
When "science" starts acting like medieval organized religion and accuses people of "heresy" and finds way of punishing those who don't "follow the science" then yeah that's a problem.
Not even remotely close.
@@axelnova123 actually spot on.
Can you cite an example of a reputable scientist calling someone heretical for their beliefs, and then tell me the punishment that the individual recieved for their "heresy". I am not trying to antagonize you, I just wan't you to back up your specific claims since as you say they are "spot on".
@@davidplubell6674 Yep, go look up Halton Arp and quasars,
@@davidplubell6674 Did you forget that about half the world, including many "reputable scientists", called people who refused to get a covid jab or questioned the logic of locking down and masking "science deniers" and in many cases took away their livelihood or used the power of the state to punish them?
Scientists need money. Some will do or say anything to get it.
We need to invent a shit test for scientists
'On their knees, behind the McDs, giving good sloppy for some stacks.'
Trump told us climate change is a hoax, he is president, he likely knows what's best. And not only that but Exxon Mobile ran experaments for years and they even proved that climate change isn't happening. I'm going to trust our supreme leader Trump and the experts on this one, sorry brother...
TRUMP 2024 ✝️⛪🙏🦅🇺🇸🇺🇲🇺🇲
You aren't supposed to "trust" science. Trust isn't part of the equation. Science should be questioned, if you can't then it's not science it's dogma.
But we are most definitely required to trust "the science" on "Climate Change", otherwise we will be called "deniers" - a term once used exclusively for doubters of a religious cult.
What if I don't have a scientific degree and only a layman's understanding of physics and math?
Is it okay for me to trust established scientific theories like evolution, gravity or spherical Earth?
I ask because I don't have the time or the money to personally question, verify and test every scientific theory.
@@uzul42 If you don't want to dig into every little topic deeper you'll just have to trust your best judgement with who/what you trust, based on your own experience in the real world I guess. Nobody has the time or energy to re-invent every wheel
@@uzul42 Questioning the paradigms are largely unhelpful, things don't easily become paradigms in the scientific community.
@@uzul42don't question everything. Just question the 'science' that coincidentally means you need to give lots of money and power to someone.
I’m not a scientist by any means but I do know that when “the experts” in anything begin name calling, you are arguing against their ego and not the subject matter
Flat earthers will never admit that they are wrong. As you say, you can't fix stupid as in educate stupid people.
It's goes as far back as Galileo. When Galileo did the ball drop and proved that gravity is not a fundamental force of nature, his flat earth peers dismissed it a thought experiment. When nasa went the moon and replicated Galileo's experiment with a hammer&feather, once again, the flat earthers dismissed it as the Equivalence Principle.
Galileo theorized that it's the Earth's motion around the sun that creates the tides but along comes flat earther Newton and says it's the moon's mass pulling on the water. Then flat earther Einstein comes along and instead of correcting Newton's gravitational attraction nonsense, he doubles down on it with - mass warps space nonsense.
As you can see, the scientific community is composed of flat earthers who still treat Earth as a stationary frame with the universe revolving around it.
How do you get rid of the entrenched flat earthers/relativists that refuse to accept the fact that they are the true science deniers?
No you don't. Believing that waves a red flag that you are a manipulative narcissist. If you gaslight what someone is saying and project your distortions into them, they will have no recourse left but anger. You can then use your neat little justification to dismiss them, self fulfilling your belligerent "scepticism". That thought pattern you just outlined, is pure evil.
Not just scientists...
That or their paying sponsors
It's on purpose watch everyone
qEUROPA@THE@LAST@BATTLE.
Blind trust has another name? Faith
Everyone loves peer review until their peers start reviewing.
@@crimsonchin1496 Well, we aren’t discussing general “peer-review”, we are discussing critical scientific review (as I keep saying, science is a review process). For example, Gender Studies academics also engage in “peer-review”. It is simply that those academics use peer-review to engage in back-slapping to create an echo chamber and consensus. “Consensus” is the pre-scientific way of analyzing the world. It is opinion-based and postulates that the majority-held view is the correct one. “Science” is an evidence-based methodology that removes opinion, which is why it is successful if applied correctly.
It's certainly bad news if you're not "in the club".
@@nickmiller76 you might hit the floor
@@dilvishpa5776You are making no sense.
@@MrDamojak Perhaps think about it a little harder. Do you want me to break it down for you?
PhD Chemist here, thank you for this one!!! Been saying similar things for years only to be ignored and legitimately abused financially and worse by family, non-science friends, and ex in-laws trying to be open and explain this for their benefit and wellbeing.
All fell on deaf ears due to my own country having massive cultural problems in modern times sadly.
We should make a club of PhDs who actually know and want this to exposed!!! I really do wonder how many of us are out there…
_So many_...
Maybe it can be arranged one day
@@Mallchad Let’s make it happen!!!
@@GreedosGoldmine I'm not holding my breath
F you don’t tow the line you won’t get funding
@@TheRealSykx I can’t say I don’t agree it’s a true challenge for sure, but I can say there are some I can speak of working behind the scenes already on this, some not scientists, so I do see a path.
That said, outcome is not a given by any means, but the group does at least connect back to the current GARM stuff the past few days and other “secret” projects going on related to saving the American Dream.
When I am active I work in a circle that is pretty connected in this respect. Unfortunately, haven’t done much since November actively for health reasons. Hoping to get back to it soon though!!!About all I can say though at this point under my agreements and existing NDAs.
There’s no justification needed to question science. The whole enterprise is founded on questioning everything, even knowledge that has appeared settled for centuries! (Newton/Einstein)
stfu youre out of question marks means its an abortion periodt.
MY HEAD IS ONLY MADE FOR SATAN AND FIGHTING. jnow youre done
Einstein does NOT contradict Newton.
Yeah but, come on - you need good reason to question long established theories. Let's not use the idea to encourage every kook out there.
@@eventcone Long established theories, are just that, theories!
Mathematics doesn't lie, the analysis of data often lies if it doesn't match your model 😊
well, the question is: has Mathematics been applied properly to the problem? If not your mathematical solution will only tell you BS. And if you ever have seen scientists almost punching each others on how to translate a problem into a formula u know that u probably cannot trust anyone of them claiming to have found the right approach
I lost a fair amount of trust working in an atomic force microscopy lab as an undergraduate.
At this particular school, one guy was really hot shit. Students revered this guy for being so young and so heavily published.
Come to find out, he was really good at academic editing. He would brush up your paper, format it for publishing and demand his name be put on the paper in return. He hardly ever set foot in a lab (not a scientist in other words).
If academics was that much of an influencer game ten years ago, imagine where it is now.
Don't ever get me started on the current state of peer "review."
That was one institution and not all institutions. There might be corruption in one place but not every place. And from the sound of your story he was eventually caught. Usually if somebody does something like that the news travels fast, and they can kiss their career in science goodbye.
So wordcel lib arts dominate the labs. 😎
and what was his religious/ethnic background I wonder?
@@aaronlandis7929 first comment deleted so fast I must be on a list
@@OceanusHelios I am aware that not all schools or fields are equally corrupt.
What exactly would this guy get caught doing? He isn't breaking any rule I'm aware of. He contributed to papers and received authorship credit.
Are you denying that the quality of research is diminishing year over year for a plethora of reasons, including corruption and poor peer review?
If not, why are the hard and soft sciences alike plagued by an inability to reproduce results?
And, while we are talking about the Nuclear Industry (actually, we are not) they say Fusion Power is just 30 years away. I looked into that and discovered it is just 8 minutes away.
8 minutes In fusion time, in normal time that's like 800 years...
Funny. Most youtubers won't get it.
If natural fusion power is so great, why do they turn the Sun off at night?
It all depends on how much money is spent on developing it - we know fusion power works - the Sun is doing it, it's just about creating those conditions and keeping them stable.
@@brentwhitson5653 hes talking about the sun lol
As a computer scientist and AI engineer, I resonate deeply with your critique in “Lost in Math.” In the fast-paced, ever-evolving landscape of AI, we constantly grapple with the tension between theoretical elegance and practical application. The media often exacerbates this by hyping AI’s capabilities, leading to unrealistic expectations. We see this in various fields-from the premature promises of fully autonomous vehicles and flawless medical diagnostics to the overstated fears of widespread job displacement. While AI has indeed made significant strides, it’s crucial to maintain a balanced perspective, recognizing both its potential and its current limitations. Your work highlighting the need for empirical validation over aesthetic appeal in physics is incredibly relevant to our challenges in AI today
We also miss the greatest threat in AI: human power seeking. Centralization of AI power and regulatory capture will be the greater threats to humans, than AI themselves.
@@BooleanDisorder No, we don't...
Human power seeking has kind of been the forefront of people's minds for hundreds of years... not sure how we are "missing" that threat? If There has been TONS upon TONS of discussion on how AI can be misused to gain power.
You couldn't be more more...
And no, human power seeking has happened for a LONG LONG time, and wont be a greater threat than the first potential GAI, because that one can be SPECIES destroying... Human power seeking wont lead to the potential extermination of humanity as a potential goal, that is like the opposite of what a power seeker wants... If you have no subject, you have no power.
Carbon dioxide doesn't increase tempurater and in the 70s the ice Caps were growing
@@BooleanDisorder No, we aren't missing that.
There are tons of talks about how AI can be misused by power structures to centralize power.
I'm not sure how you got to that conclusion?
As a computer scientist specialised in AI, I second this 💯
9:21 I agree with the "Logic is your friend" statement, but most people are not trained in Logic inference so it is easy to fall for fallacies. Even scientists who do what Sabine is denouncing use fallacies very often. I think we need to include more logic and philosophy of science in schools, rather than just reciting what is in the science text books (which sometimes includes these theories that you often criticize). Thanks for your contribution! I appreciate a lot your effort to educate us non-physicists 😁
I would be rich if you give me ten cents for every non-sequitur logic fail I see.
It's not that science in general is untrustworthy. The risk to good science comes when there is incredibly high overlap between science, self interest, greed, and power (politics).
Exactly it's not the science but the people behind it that aren't trustworthy.
Exactly.Money,greed (and self preservation, since Oil and gas industry famously "gets rid" of annoying scientists ,not in a good way...)
I love how Sabine thinks out loud sometimes. She worried that some people may take her distrust to scientists as an reinforcement for their beliefs and she just says that, I feel like it's often missing in communication
She should have said those things in the beginning of the video. It's like an article with misleading title but with fair description deep in the paragraphs.
I wonder if that is deliberate. Attract the “science deniers” and then tell them that her point excludes climate science.
You shouldn't automatically trust the experts, but this doesn't mean you should automatically distrust them either.
The irony is that so many who say "don't trust the experts" essentially expect that we should trust their uninformed, kooky opinion instead.
@@paulw5039 They only distrust those who come to a scientific conclusion they do not agree with at all. You can tell because they then are very willing to believe any grifting pseudoscience on their word, when it is in opposition of said scientific conclusion.
@@WouterCloetensDoesn’t look like these people actually watch the video
I’m 72 and have learned that I was never as smart as I thought. All the contradictions are extremely frustrating and yet, here I am trying to learn something.
I love this comment!
what did you learn?
I’m 72 and finally admitted to myself just how abysmally stupid the average human being is and as George Carlin said, half of the population is stupider than that.
The more I learn, the less I know.
The only thing I know for sure is that I am retarded.
Questioning science is a good thing, but...mainly (perhaps even only) by other scientists. What's the point for a layman to participate in scientific discussions without the accumulated knowledge (and skills) the science community has? It seems nice to say you can trust data, math and logic, but again, most people simply lack the skills to interpret data and handle math and logic. You just have to be a scientist (or at least very well educated) to do so.
One thing that hit me was how few scientists actually understand science epistemology. I was in a 600-level physics course, and the professor asked what the scientific process is, and no one knew other than me.
All the other students gave answers like science is observing the natural world and then making theories based on those observations. That's not science, every epistemology does that. The key difference that distinguishes science from other epistemologies is that you must observe, make a hypothesis, then have that hypothesis make novel predictions about the world. That is the key difference. Your theories must make predictions that you haven't observed yet.
Like how the general theory of relativity predicted that light would be bent around the sun, so stars behind the sun should be visible during a total solar eclipse. That had never been observed at the time the theory predicted that outcome, so when that observation occurred it constituted scientific evidence for the theory.
Or how the violation of the bell inequalities was predicted by the theory of entanglement.
Or time dilation was predicted by special relativity.
But the last step in the scientific method is to devise a test or experiments that will reveal whether the predictions that were made are actually observed. Such as light bending around the sun observed during the famous eclipse or the observation of the precession of the perihelion of Mercury which verified Einstein’s General Relativity “hypothesis” and turned it into a “theory”. Sabina also mentioned that if it is scientific there should be a test that would be capable of showing the hypothesis to be false (Popper’s criterion).
Then after you do all that, you make experiments explicitly designed to disprove your hypothesis, not the other way around. And only after your hypothesis survives all reasonable scrutiny does it become more than that.
Basically, you formulate a hypothesis like a juicy bait for the fish of truth in the universe : the more outlandish but coherently formulated the hypothesis is, the easier it is to disprove, the faster we get informations and answers that contributes to narrow down the truth ; each newly acquired datas that proves the hypothesis "wrong" contribute henceforth to it's crystallisation into practical and effective theory.
Or to put it in another word, science epistemology is the art of making claims that looks forward being proven wrong in the most productive way possible.
Science: knowledge of any kind (archaic, but still good enough for me) We like robust scientific-modelling as science (your hypothesis with predictive potential), but for me that's not all science.
600 physics or not this is embarrassingly reductive. If someone wrote a theory that unified Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity which is able to make all of the same predictions of both but made no new predictions are you really suggesting that wouldn't have scientific value or merit?
Always have someone check your work and more importantly, check your assumptions.
WHAT.... Even THIS one:
"When you ASSUME, you make an "Ass" out of " u" and " me"????😳🙄🤣
In a fourth-year undergrad geography class, we talked about paradigms, i.e., the current approved theory, i.e., the the current approved way of thinking. Basically, if you're a scientist at a university and you don't go along with the reigning paradigm, you're not going to have an easy career, if you have a career at all. In such situations, "science" is no better than a cult.
This is true for almost everything, everywhere - not exclusive to science - any career
Kuhn, Quine and Popper talk about this. It should be required reading.
I grew up loving science. I watched and read anything about scientific topics from discovery to national geographic and in between. To me, science is saying, "Ok. That is a... unique view and hypothesis. Prove it." Then the weird outside idea works to gain proof, and the other scientists in that area begin to debate and debunk. Not exile someone out of academia. If it's an idea is so easily disproven, then disprove it. I feel like exiling and ignoring someone is a lazy way to do things. Even idea's as dumb as flat earthers. I think it's our responsibility to help them come to the conclusion that their ideas are misguided, and show them why. Even if it's frustrating. Because it's always going to be a fight. Nothing in life is settled and done, it requires constant reinforcement for each new generation of people that come along. To see someone so lost they believe things that have been disproven should be a moment of empathy, not of mockery and dismissal. That is what Science means to me.
You are correct, I was in STEM, but in the T of STEM, so we didn't worry so much, but I served in searches, and it was amazing the degree to which they cut out anyone who even varied from the accepted theories. In one case... close to 20 years ago now, we failed to hire a very, very qualified physicist because he had written a published peer reviewed journal article suggesting that there MIGHT be life off earth. Now that's an accepted fact, then... well... he was refused for that reason and that reason only. It distressed me then and it still does.
@@off6848 I took that class 30 years ago. I didn't stay in geography long; life had other plans for me. But, ha! - seeing those names whiplashed me right back to '94!
The great thing about science is that anyone can do it. All you need do is become fluent in the subject you wish to study, and in the methods of discovery. Then you are free to study what you wish. Have a suspicion that a prior study contains an error? Go ahead and test it yourself! Get others in your field to agree that your test method is correct, and then repeat your results… That, folks, is the SCIENTIFIC METHOD. Because humans are imperfect and because knowledge is far from complete, science does not always get it right the first time. But in the long term, it does self-correct.
Don’t trust science? Excellent! It’s not about trust/belief. It’s about process/testing. Science is not “Einstein said it so it must be true”. Science is “hmmm, what Einstein said about the curvature of space-time doesn’t work with what I’ve calculated; let’s revisit his math as well as my own and see where there might be errors”.
Lol. Many studies cannot be tested by a layperson without significant financial resources
@@Raphael4722 That’s an excuse. It’s a cop-out. The average layperson can conduct plenty of studies for him/herself, and from there read other studies and grasp whether the results are possibly valid or not.
There is plenty of flawed science that is debunked, but the apparatus maintains it as the truth. Can't fight money and politics.
If bias can be this difficult in the hard sciences, then just imagine how bad the soft sciences are.
Yeah - the point is that it is more difficult to even properly describe the "bias" in the hard sciences. For example, string theory isn't exactly "wrong", and it is an actual "theory" according to the definition, but it is also mostly useless, hard to deal with, and overall producing very few useful results relative to the effort put into it... so, imho the real problem is a lack of a clear definition of the distinction between "good hard science" and "bad hard science" - whereas in the soft sciences, the problems are usually much simpler i.e. p-hacking etc...
Well, the “soft” sciences aren’t science. That’s the primary issue there!!
Yeah it’s horrible in sociology lol
Or anything outside of science.
Most ideas are wrong. Being right is the exception not the rule.
Skepticism is good. It means you are thinking.
Not necessarily. I am even skeptical towards skepticism.
Are you sure skepticism is good, though?
@@ununun9995 Your question is skepticism.
@@MourningDove-bn4dk oh was it THAT obvious?
@@ununun9995 Yes.
I read "Lost in Math" and it made me realize two things: 1) I was right when I told myself that an advanced degree in physics was beyond my ability, and 2) not having the technical means to test its theories (insufficient accelerator energy), the "leading edge" of physics is not so much an edge as an incoherent tangle of math and imagination. Oh, and Sabine is wicked smart.
Her books are both brilliant.
what she calls "physics" most people in physics call "mathematical physics" and it is branch of math, not physics. Nobody expects experimental proves from mathematical constructs.
Except when it comes to her climate science blind spot…😅
@@inevespace
The idea behind mathematics being a part of physics is that the math can be a shortcut to find valid avenues of study cheaply and then follow through with the actual Science. Physics started out being the study for the understanding of they physical world. Today it is a fantasy (existing only in the mind) validated and carried out with chalk on a chalkboard.
@@elonever.2.071 mathematics is just a general way to construct models. It is not shortcut. Most of mathematical models are not applicable to physics. There are infinite number of formal systems and only few of them found experimental support in physics.
If you can't question it, it's not science. It's religion.
That sounds like mis or disinformation to me...
; )
I don't think every religion has that kind of dogma attached to it.
@@Prabhu108. What religions don't have dogma?
@@anonphil Probably Buddhism, Ajivikism, Charvaks (Though I only speak for Indian religions). What I mean is not that they don't have dogma, however; unlike Abrahamic religions, fundamentalism is not an arbitrary part of them.
Comparing apples to oranges because I resent oranges and apples don't judge my choices, is not a good way to then declare a better fruit.
The important thing to spot and identify when it comes to science is this:
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
That's the problem with science being pushed in the mainstream media today. Their catch phrases are designed to shut down anyone questioning them.
Examples: "Trust the science;" "The science discussion is ended;" "I AM the science;" "The science is settled."
When anything is put out there as "science" and these buzz words are included, there's a conflict of interest EVERY TIME. You're likely being conned.
I remember that campaign of just a couple years ago to "sign the pledge to trust science". Of course science is the polar opposite of "trust" and was designed in part to be an antidote to it. So I'm one of the people who vilified that entire "trust science" mantra on the rare times I encountered it.
In Germany I often hear the claim: We do not have a deficiency in knowledge, we only have a deficiency in acting. Whenever this claim is made, it is pretty sure that there is a big deficiency in knowledge.
Scientists always find what pleases their financers.
I always follow the money. When I do that, I end up skeptical of the covid vaccine, and convinced climate change is real and dangerous.
@@LeoStaley Not a bad policy to follow the money, but we have to interpret carefully. AGW has been used as an excuse for wealth redistribution via developed countries funding the greening of more primitive countries. (Are they still trying this? AGW is not on my too-long list of issues to personally track.) In which case following the money means that AGW is the scam and "big oil" is not, or at least is no worse. And that's been without mentioning the "green industry" scam, where the money trail also leads.
Marketing took over science many years ago. I hate being marketed.
Here! Here!
This puts a new spin on that "Without Data..." t-shirt maybe? "WITH DATA You're still just marketing me!" perhaps? Let's not encourage them. :)
I've seen it more as moralizing. Paid actors shaming people into destructive actions, via convincing lies.
Bernays and the "Social sciences". This stuff is a hundred years old, from the first prog movement pre WW1
@@arkaig1 I will be sure to target watchers of this video with this new shirt design. :)
A professor in Language during my first year of study in university told me that experts are the least trustworthy because only they know while you don't. Words of wisdom to me.
An expert is a person who has internalized skill and/or knowledge, which means they have stopped thinking.
You have a point. I see this in my own field where intuitive arguments (without evidence) are treated as reasonable theories. That isn't how real science is done and has led to a lack of progress for decades.
I agree with you. I've been an academic for 28 years, and things have steadily deteriorated as far as both science and 'scientific' articles are concerned. It's long past time for a shakeup and a return to proper science and scientific method.
You mean, based on actual observation? You radical!
Good luck with that.
If you were an academic for 28 years, you would have enough time to act again this trend. Why didn't you do it?
Edit: but to be honest, I don't trust you. :)
So what made the difference between now and then?
Even if someone is respectable scientist doesn't mean he can't cave in to pressure/ accept money to lie.
And considering how bad the money is generally in research, and how smart the people in it are, taking bribes is smart thing to do.
It isn't smart when you're later found out to have accepted the bribe. There goes your credibility. Certainly isn't ethical nor is it science if you're faking and fudging it. Hence, it's actually the stupidest thing you could do.
Smart people often have integrity. Stupid people think they won't be found out. That said, even smart people make mistakes. People with integrity admit their mistakes. People without integrity double down on their mistakes.
In my experience, scientists are intelligent and have integrity. Granted there are exceptions.
Read Merchants of Doubt. The fossil fuel industry spends $Billions on denial to protect their profits.
I don't think we should conflate intelligence with integrity. There are some very intelligent people out who are wholly morally bankrupt
If you are lying to take bribes for a living you are not a Scientist...you are a corporate shill.
"Trust the science" is a paradoxical statement. The whole point of science is to question everything.
If you are a competent scientist yourself, that may be true.
For the rest who aren't (the majority), science is there to provide a trustworthy establishment of resources as-of-the-moment, and not using its findings for practical applications would make science completely useless.
@@mepds9 it's just wise to take scientific findings with a grain of salt. Not ignore them and refuse to make use of them. But don't trust them blindly. If science develops a new material you can use, don't trust the first test claiming that it's stronger than anything we used before it. Depending on how sure you want to be, wait until there's 10 tests, 100 tests, or see what happens when others try using it in real world conditions first. But don't jump on bandwagons of scientific novelties, blindly trusting the scientists who just developed something new, unless you can afford to be disappointed and to potentially lose your investment.
Science != Scientist
Some random guy isn't going to arrive at anything useful by questioning science, that's how you arrive at hollow earth shit. He's not gonna bootstrap into becoming the new Einstein, he's gonna literally make stuff up. The scientific community has to police the output that gets to that guy, and that guy has the choice of doing a truly staggering amount of reading and some light experimentation, or accept the results.
The point of science isn't to be a cynic, or a skeptic, or a contrarian. The objective of science is to understand the universe.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” -Richard Feynman
Feynman is one of my heroes. Hans Bethe loved that Feynman would argue with him.
@@jacksimpson-rogers1069 Bethe and Feynman-strange pair, some of their colleagues thought, a pedantic-seeming German professor and a budding quicksilver genius. Someone coined the nicknames “Battleship” and “Mosquito Boat.” Their collaborative method was for Bethe to plow solidly ahead, a determined giant, while Feynman buzzed back and forth across his bow, gesticulating, yelling in his scabrous New York accent, “You’re crazy” and “That’s nuts.”
Bethe would respond calmly in his slow professorial way, working his way through the problem analytically and explaining that he was not crazy, Feynman was crazy. Feynman would consider and pace back and forth, and finally through the partitions the other scientists would hear him shout back, “No, no, you’re wrong.”
He was reckless where Bethe was careful,and he was just what Bethe was looking for, someone who would perform the severest and most imaginative criticism, who would find flaws before an idea went too far. Challenges and fresh insights came easily from Feynman. He did not wait, as Bethe did, to double-check every intuitive leap. His first idea did not always work. His cannier colleagues developed a rule of thumb: If Feynman says it three times, it’s right.
[Excerpt from "Genius - The Life and Science of Richard Feynman" by James Gleick]
My description is Oppenheimer and Peter Sellers rolled into one.
Best to you~
But experts are setting all policy because lawyers defer to them.
Religion is for ignorance and delusion
I was originally interested in theoretical astrophysics. I eventually settled on electrical engineering because even if it is “wrong”, it’s still good enough to actually do things with.
I don't have a problem with scientists choosing to research extremely fringe or theoretical topics, because you never know what breakthroughs might come from it. The problem is when too many scientists get tunnel visioned into some of these ideas and decide it's a good idea to spend billions of tax dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours on it.
A decent hypothesis is based on an observation. Fringe refers to the conflation of rumor with observation. If for example you hear of someone who correctly guesses a random event, that might be taken as an observation to investigate the system generating randomness or to offer it to a test subject, but it is not reasonable to ask if an unseen force, mystical process or God has given someone extraordinary powers. To motivate an experiment of that nature, multiple independent observations by independent observers are needed. If the duty of a scientist is to strive to falsify their own hypothesis, it is inherent on the scientist to form hypotheses that are well founded on observational fact. I think that is what Sabine is trying to say here, among other things. Or to paraphrase Carl Sagan, who I think is Sabine's kindred spirit, extraordinary hypotheses require extraordinary support.
@@donaldjohnston2179 paragraphs have you heard of them.
Billions of dollars that are fake, invented and created on the whim of a lender.
@@dennisestenson7820 - i think you guys mean TRILLIONS....
There is no man-made global warming. "Global warming", however, is entirely man-made.
Your last sentence describes the consequences thereof perfectly. Gödel is smiling in his grave.
0:18 - Better a "science denier" than a "blatant liar"...
She’s honest. It’s something we need. 😁
I find it very hard to believe that most climate scientists are greatly afraid of being called alarmist, since scarier headlines will generally result in them getting more funding, not less - and there are a few big names who are well known to always give the most extreme interpretation possible. On the other hand, there is huge social/academic pressure to avoid being called a denier (e.g. you will likely become isolated & loose all funding, assuming you can even get your paper publishes, which is very unlikely), so anything that might possibly be interpreted as that is either not published, or written in a way to downplay it as much as possible. And there are lots of scientific papers outside of climate science that try to add a climate change connection, since it increases their chances of being published & getting future funding. Generally the only scientists who can manage to get away saying things against the climate change paradigm are those who have either (1) retired, or (2) have a very secure tenure/position, or occasionally (3) have scientific jobs well outside climate science.
Bringing this up wouldn't fit the narrative that Sabine prefers on climate, so she modified and re-framed her observations to support her narrative. Sabine can't imagine that climate change could possibly be over exaggerated by climate scientists, therefore she must argue that it's unexaggerated.
Sadly, if the subject involves climate change or Elon Musk (and probably a few others), you can't expect a factual representation of the given topic from Sabine.
I did find that part a bit strange. One of the UN’s agenda items is hyperventilating over climate change. Politics is very friendly over climate alarmism so I don’t know where she got that from
Climate scientists are "alarmist" because the facts are alarming. You are just indulging in conjecture about the motivations of climate scientists. You make it sound as if there is an institutional desire for climate change to be a thing, when the reality is that industry and a lot of governments would be shoveling money at any credible research showing it is less of a problem than currently thought. Global warming is HIGHLY inconvenient for governments and industry.
@@kazwalker764 I don't think we can expect a factual representation of Elon Musk, climate science or Sabine from you. You are obviously, rather ironically, basing your conclusions on those three subjects on what you would prefer to be true.
It's not necessarily being afraid but that the more they're attacked, the more they're incentivized to make airtight arguments. This sounds good but it does leave too little room to communicate more speculative worries. There is less they can say as a result of model uncertainty. Meanwhile in the public, it's convenient to assume that uncertainty equals things are better than models suggest, instead of the opposite.
I'm convinced that only 5% of the population knows what they are doing. Doesn't matter the discipline.
I have worked with several physicist (applied) all really nice people. I was 16 when the first one explained that theoretical science was more of an ongoing conversation or argument. I never herd a better description for a layman like myself.
Be a skeptic and always follow the money
You get the same thing in Business where rather than introduce new ideas, people invent new buzzwords and slather everything in hyperbole. When there is no new information but you are expected to be innovative, you have little other choice.
My undergrad was mathematical statistics, so I entered my research career (in primary care medicine) with a strong quantitative bias. I quickly realized that all the important problems were mixed methods problems, requiring both quantitative and qualitative approaches combined. One thing the qualitative community gets right, that the quantitative community desperately needs, is the explicit consideration of reflexivity. Qualitative research that doesn’t include specific methods for exploring and declaring the biases and expectations of the researchers is essentially not fundable or publishable. It’s time quantitative research adopted the same self-discipline.
In the case of climate science, that bias is to commit Type II error: understate what the data are really saying. There is both more uncertainty (apologies if you’ve already done this, but a discussion of complexity/chaos theory would be helpful sometime in re the inherent and irreducible uncertainty of climate) and a worse likeliest-scenario than is being put out there for the public. But getting climate scientists to act on that will be pretty tough when (in the US at least) they’re facing literal death threats. So don’t be too harsh on them; being emailed pictures of yourself in cross hairs, in a country with more guns than people, can be pretty intimidating.
Climate scientist use psuedo science
@@osmosisjones4912 Such as thermodynamics, statistics and empirical measurements 😂
I like this take. I am undergoing graduate training in epidemiology and public health, and in the research space on clinical interventions, a large and growing focus is on doing mixed method research. It would be interesting to have explicit statements on the qualitative research and the underlying biases that may sway analysis.
@@IsomerSoma that disprove Climate change models. Why do You think its always phycist who argue against models that violate thermal dynamics
Not quite understanding what you are getting at with regard to bias and the difference between qualitative and quantitative research. Honestly, I can't see how a "qualitative approach" can be considered scientific. I can see a qualitative conclusion from a quantitative approach, however. I can't see a scientific research paper not having numbers and thus it must be quantitative.
Climate change and specifically climate modeling is an entirely different kettle of fish, because you can't scientifically model the climate because there is only one earth. All modelling requires three systems. One to observe and determine parameters and functions, one to validate the model, and the actual system your are interested in. Therefore, climate models are not scientific they are 100% pure bias with the modeler creating the model to produce the output he FEELS will be right. Considering that obviously his research grants and possible future hiring is dependent on him creating a model that shows increase temperatures in the future, he WILL produce such a model either consciously or unconsciously.
I lost trust during Covid. I realised how scared most of them are to deviate from the consensus.
The scientific consensus was that it's not a good idea to overload hospitals with patients dying on respirators. The average hospital has just about enough intensive care equipment to take care of the average number of accident victims and people with severe cardiovascular events etc.. What is it that you are disagreeing with here? ;-)
Science is precisely about not trusting anything, not even yourself; always double-check everything, even your own beliefs and observations. Science is the best method method we got to avoid getting stuck away from the truth, and to, on average, ensures you're moving closer and closer to the truth; nothing else has been demonstrated to inherently have such guarantees,
"The will to be wrong."
You are technically incorrect.
@@JohnnyTwoFingers Do elaborate
bla bla bla
@@scriptkiddy1492 And the meaning of what you wrote there would be...?
Universities teach students about Eisenhower's speech warning us on the military-industrial complex. They don't teach you about the other half of that speech warning about the scientific-technological elite.
Inconvenient truth that academia buried. Nifty. I now have something to read again. Thanks!
They also don't mention that Eisenhower described it as the congressional military industrial complex but was persuaded to drop congressional from the final form of the speech.
Blindly trusting anyone is a dangerous course to follow. Many say "Trust, but verify." I say "Verify." If you can't verify, then looking at the "track record" of the previous claims from the same source is often a good indicator of whether or not any trust is warranted. And even then, trust is not knowledge.
Yeah, I hate that saying. If you genuinely trust someone, then why would you waste time verifying? Really they mean to say "don't trust", except that people are too timid to admit that they don't trust you, even if they have no reason to trust you.
"Trust but verify" was political weasel-speak that Reagan used to negotiate with the USSR over nuclear weapons. I had to google it to get the long-forgotten details - it's actually a Russian phrase, and it's bullsht in Russia too. (Gee, there's a shock.) I always hated the phrase and am sad to learn that a movie brought it back. In all cases it means: "I'm too cowardly to say that I don't trust you."
Reading Spencer on the Knowable brought me here.
(I already love Sabine's humour, intelligence, humility, and sincerity.)
She therefore has a new member!
I'm glad I'm not the only person who feels this way.
My skepticism of science stems from the 7th grade. I had spent months developing an experiment to measure the optimal color combinations for a computer display. I had written a program in BASIC, subjected countless classmates, friends, and family to the battery of tests, and was still actively compiling the report the night before the science fair. I had decided to finish the report, and skimp on the backboard. So my little spot on the table was a report of the ideal color combinations, and a fat stack of data to back it up. But no backboard. I got a failing grade.
The year before I had slapped something together using brine shrimp an having them swim towards the lighted end of a tray of water. That had gotten me honorable mention.
Moral of the story: it's the presentation, not the material, that sells an idea. Even (and perhaps most especially) in "Science".
Nowadays everything is about presentation. Not just science.
What was the favourite colour of the shrimp? Did they all have the same favourite colour?
And this channel is very big on clever presentation presumably to get more clicks and thus more $$$.
I judged a science fair once and was a co-judge. I chose the winner. The student had expounded upon an experiment he had done the previous year, doing a followup on the antibacterial properties of coconut milk. It turned out that the milk increased bacterial growth and didn't decrease it.
Another student the other judge wanted to win had a huge display, a cute body, and her display looked more like a pseudoscience mumbo jumbo mash of herbal remedies in use in cosmetics, and was all over the place rather than trying to address a single isolated question. The other judge was smitten with her and was "impressed" by her "display."
I pushed to make sure the kid that had all of the proper requirements for a good experiment won. He had a control, an experiment, a singular thing he was testing for in microbiology. The girl had one for "microbiology" too but was an obvious kind of snake oil salesman kind of display.
I think the right person one on that science fair. It was tough to do. I was chosen to judge it based on recommendations from my past science professors...and I had a reputation for not falling for a bunch of BS.
Ha, maybe it's not that bad in science, but certainly presentation = money = research = science. All Universities now have something akin to a PR department to push scientific research done at the University into the public domain. I view it kinda like those prescription drug commercials. The doctors really make the decision, but the patient could probably influence the physician. In the same way, the exposure could influence the politicians and those handing out grants.
If you look at the history of science, breakthroughs were often achieved by building a set of robust and repeatable experiments. In those days, there was no overreliance on statistical verification. Nowadays, we have 'models', and sometimes we forget to validate our models with observations in the field. Case in point: during the pandemic, I remember reading about a study from Finland that had modeled the air flows (therefore risk of being contaminated) in a grocery store. The media gave a lot of space to that study. All the while, the Chinese, had already published a study of passengers from a bus with infected passengers. So, the actual results from observations in the field were ignored, and scientists were obsessing over models. It took a long time for officials and scientists to use actual data from the field instead of models.
My favorite cautionary tale about this was the insistence by "experts", when HIV first arrived, that condoms were useless for protection against HIV because the virus was small enough to get through the interstices in the latex.
The lay public assumed this advice was science-based, and it led to a lot of unprotected sex, which led to a lot of HIV infections and deaths that could have been prevented by condom use. Then, after about 10 years of this officially sanctioned advice, a research team looked into the claim, found that it was purely guesswork, and performed simple tests to see what actually happened during condom use by men with HIV. And they showed that yes, viruses can penetrate latex, but the viruses are so tiny that even the thinnest condom is too thick for them to move through in less than a couple of hours, at a minimum. So condoms protect against HIV if you replace them every couple of hours, based on actual scientific research. The guesses by "experts" who were too certain of themselves to bother with actual research were deadly.
Way too often, pseudo science and replacing data with guesses (which are much cheaper and quicker to produce) causes great misery and even death.
The study of passengers on a bus tells you very little other than the passengers on a bus became infected. It does not tell you whether the virus airborne or the result of physical contact with other passengers or even if the physical bus itself had been infected before those passenger boarded. Without knowing one is actually dealing with a disease in advance, that doesn't even tell you if the symptoms were cause by a pathogen or a toxic substance. The purpose of models is to quantify how infectious a disease is and how easily it can be transmitted. Knowing the details is important for deciding how to keep people from becoming infected. Look up SIR and SEIR models, for example. COVID is the latter. Knowing something about the airflow tells you something about the probabilty of becoming infected by the proximity to an infected person.
What you said about not using data is simply not true. The data are direct inputs to the models.
I'm a retired scientist and I agree. I'm a strict Popperian (if it can't be empirically disproved, it's not science). My problem with the climate models is that although they are in theory disprovable, by the time it's apparent that they are wrong (or have no predictive power whatsoever), it's too late. They constantly "tweak" the models as every years' worth of fresh data comes in (a relatively minor adjustment), so that the model perfectly matches the historical data, yet still might have zero predictive power. I found this in a project I was involved in, we were trying to model a relationship individual flavor compounds and taste using principal component analysis. It took a long time for the penny to drop, the model had no predictive power at all. Later research showed we were looking at the wrong compounds and had completely missed a couple of important ones.
Climate "science" based on ever shifting base years, ever shifting methodology, with max a few 100 years of dicey temperature readings and some ice cores with huge uncertainty around them. And totally ignoring all the times in earth's history when the temperature changed fast and drastically before the start of the industrial revolution. Yes I don't trust climate "science" or climate "scientists" who are in an incredibly politicized field and can only get funding if they have the "right" opinions.
Popperisnism is too restrictive in what it permits. Theories that describe complex systems are not easily disproven. Their utility simply changes. What would a Popperian climate model even look like?
Totally agree. It's hard to validate these models.
If we try to stick to Sabines 'Trust arguments not people":
How to trust arguments based on models, which are simply a blackbox with quite some complexity.
(As a software engineer for nearly 30 years, if it's not tested it's not working 😀)
@@MandragaraI can't speak to the wider science, but I am an expert in dynamic simulation modeling, and I've seen numerous climate models built using one of the methods of DSM, system dynamics.
The concern I have with those models is that, of all the DSM methods, it has the easiest (and therefore the highest) ability to succumb to confirmation bias. Partially, this is due to it being a deterministic method rather than probabilistic (i.e., it has no first-order stochastics), but also due to the very skill of system dynamicists. A good person in SD will know the general shape of output graphs before the model ever runs, through structural analysis. This has the unfortunate corollary that it is very easy for unscrupulous modelers to generate the shape of output curves that they want to see.
There are known safeguards to use, but most papers do not go into whether those are used.
The other issue, of course, is that the other DSM methods are not conducive to climate models (SD is the clear choice) so it's not like there's a lot of alternatives. ABMs might work with a sufficiently powerful computer, and properly designed, avoid the confirmation bias issue entirely, but you lose some ability to validate the model as a consequence.
The university I got my post grad degree from is now overrun with climate clowns. I was describing some modeling work I was doing, on electronic systems to one of these creatures. So, said I, I made observations, proposed a model, checked how it fit with the observations, and then I had to collect many new sets of data and tried the model against new data repetitively before I was satisfied. The idiot wanted to know why I collected new data when I had data. Well, I'm not a dirty HARKer - Hypothesis After Results Known. That is corrupted science. The climate clowns are all HARKers by definition.
I would not say that just because science presenters need to be careful with the public that we should not trust what they say. It is no substitute for being able to follow the current research on your own but the best way to figure things out is by following graduate seminars, where they usually talk freely as it's not something they say to the public directly which needs to be 'sanitized'. For a different example, notice that there is tremendous good research going on in medicine (try e.g. to listen to Dr. Neil Love's podcast series) but during the COVID-19 main outbreak era there was a lot of sanitized information due to the political and public pressure (e.g.). This does not mean we do not trust science or scientists; it means we follow the scientific method and learn to read in between the lines when needed. We live in a world full of misinformation and ignorance; the fact we still have scientists, and people willing to do science, is in itself, a small miracle.
Agreed. I find it astounding that scientists trained when I was were not required to take even an introductory course on the philosophy of science, the course meant to address this very subject.
That!! I was missing that in my undergraduate years, and keep mentioning it and mentioning it, but no one wants to hear that. Students need to be pressure-fuelled with applicable information as fast as possible. That´s the new normal. maximising number of graduates per term, that´s efficiency. Yeah, right.
It's one of the reasons I left my graduate program in Theoretical Physics: They were obsessed with String Theory and extensions of the Standard Model. Now I focus on pedagogy and unification of the formalisms of physics (not unifying forces etc, but the way we learn it and talk about it)
Sheldon Cooper?
String theory is a multidimensional standard model. It is going nowhere...
I get a feeling when I hear "scientists" talk about the multiverse! Absolutely no evidence for such things, there's too much speculation going with some theoretical physicists!
I can't thank you enough for posting here, because your comment about formalisms of physics caught my attention, made me look for your YT channel and got me excited beyond belief about what I found there! I've been fascinated by GA for many years but never really got into it. Finally, your channel seems to be the missing piece for me, linking the maths to the real world, a.k.a physics. Exactly what I was hoping for. Thank you!!! (I am not a mathematician or physicist, but I guess this is the best chance I'll ever get to give GA a serious try)
@@itssoaztek4592 What is GA?
I can prove ESP exists, you just need to give me €100 billion to build an ESP detector the size of Switzerland. 😊
I thought ESP was statistically real… It’s one of the crises in psychology
They use the same methodology as everything else and they can show statistically significant amounts of ESP… Or we used to say intuition
Not to mention, there is a preposterous predominance of evidence verifying the existence of UAP’s
@@twoandahalfstars2987 I just knew you were going to say that...........
@@twoandahalfstars2987 Damn, you have the audacity to tell the truth? I bet you wouldn't do good in academia!
Hey Sabine, thank you so much for being bluntly honest. I have seen every word you say happen in front of me, and unfortunately am still seeing it every day. But I hope I will bring a change. Hats off to you!
0:29 I certainly wouldn't trust someone filling an Erlenmeyer flask to the brim, and not filling a Volumetric flask up to its mark.
Come on...steady...you can cross the room without spilling the contents....
If you can't question it it's not science, that's the problem with a lot of modern "ideas" that can't be questioned or even point at the limitations and flaws.
Lots of questions leeds nowere and meanengles but to go to phantasies. nothing forbids intelligent questions, only sometimes you need to understand the situation
If it's not science then what is it?
@@timothyrussell4445 dogma.
I've been a scientist for 35 years. I don't care now, got 20 years left to enjoy life, ignoring the idiots around me, just doing my own thing 'til I'm gone.
Then, I have a question to you. What's the difference between theology and geology?
@@KedvespatikusAbout four letters?
@@Kedvespatikus In theology you dig to bury and in geology vice versa. Ba dam ts!
@@Kedvespatikus Theology is make believe, Geology is real. Easiest question to answer.
@@helloukw Are you CheshireTomcat168? Or at least have you been a scientist for 38 years, with 20 years left to do your own things? Do you think your answer had any strike force in it? Is your answer reflecting on the similiraties or the difference?
I hate it when people treat 'Science' as a kinda religion. I mean, the whole point of Science is to think for yourself and try to find improvements upon the existing paradigm; never assume something is 100% completely correct, always try to falsify things.
Excellent article. Bears out my own experience exactly. I'm my younger years, I spent a lot of time in government/military research labs in the 1970s when they actually funded and supported basic research. My first post was to the ionospheric physics electro magnetic lab. I began to notice how almost all the research done by our PhDs was deemed classified until it was ready to take to a symposium or for peer review, then suddenly if was in the open. It seems they were hiding their research behind classification to make sure they didn't have to share credit until they were ready to present and bask in glory and prestige.
The other thing I have became aware is how some people replace religious belief with belief in "Science" while knowing practically nothing of science. The most they do is read a layman magazine or internet article, repeat it over and over to make them selves seem smart and sophisticated while looking smugly down on others.
I like your thought and analysis.
We do have a slight convergence on the climate issue. My opinion is that most real climate research has been stifled by those that wish use the fear of catastrophe for gaining political power. Al Gore's carbon credit comes to mind.
>>> how some people replace religious belief with belief in "Science" Exactly. Science is a tool, not perfect but the best we have for understanding reality. Like any tool, it can be twisted to fit an agenda. But reality doesn't change.
It feels like there's an important part missing from this video - the part where you explain in what way exactly climate scientist are wrong? You said you think they're underestimating the problem, but you did not explain anything about why you think that, and what you think would be correct instead? Without that point explained, this video seems quite confusing, like it's missing an important part.
She already did several videos on the topic: ruclips.net/video/MaaJqPCjNr4/видео.html ruclips.net/video/4S9sDyooxf4/видео.html ruclips.net/video/J1KGnCj_cfM/видео.html ruclips.net/video/_kGiCUiOMyQ/видео.html
Plenty of videos available about how most peer reviewed material simply flat out wrong.
there is very little science happening- just a lot of data processing & social engineering
Aye. I remember Half-Life 2...
"Social Engineering" is the other term for lack of freedom, and if pushed to that limit, slavery.
Most scientists seem to think that doing something about climate change means scolding the general public for not doing anything about climate change. We're all just waiting for someone to show us what to do, by doing it.
I have never met a scientist who was scolding the public for climate change. There is nothing "the public" can do about it. It's not a problem that can be solved at the level of the individual. So what are you really telling me then? That you want attention by mentioning the words scientist, climate and public in the same sentence. ;-)
@@schmetterling4477 Perhaps the term "scolding" was not the best choice of words. I also realize that I may have made it seem as though 'scientists' are not members of the general public, when they most certainly are. In fact, I consider myself among their number. While I no longer describe it as scolding, there are many scientists (in many fields) who rattle off data on CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels etc. in a rather accusitory manner. They say things like, "I don't know how else I can convince you...", or, "the average American uses more energy than this or that..." My point is, if the most well informed climatologist has no practical means of altering their behavior to reduce their enviornmental impact, then what hope do we have of avoiding this oncoming climate disaster. If anything, I believe the climate change alarm has not been sounded loud enough.
@@schmetterling4477Hehe, I don´think, he/she wanted to tell YOU anything
@@mylittleelectron6606 He´s just a troll
@@mylittleelectron6606 I have never met a scientist who was trying to convince you of anything. We are generally asking you to pay attention in science class so that you don't end up uneducated about nature. If you don't follow our advice we generally consider you as hopeless and stop talking to you. ;-)
I don't think that research into ESP was unscientific per se. The methods of science are themselves subject to trial and error. This means that we sometimes discover that old methods have serious flaws.
But that doesn't make the old science was pseudo science. It becomes pseudo science when people keep using methods which we already know don't work.
Which is the point she made...
I'm still waiting on the proper made ESP studies that show that nothing is happening or is above chance.
Yeah, people sometimes point out that Newton studied alchemy, as if he were a little nutty or something. But back then it was still science.
It makes old science basic experimentalism. Not even worthy the name of science. It was just trying to find out things. Which has its place, but it's not good enough to call it science.
There was a time when it was a reasonable scientific experiment to send a party up to the top of Mount Olympus to check if there are actually gods cavorting up there.
So why have we stopped doing it, but still have 'a science' investigating ESP, ghosts, aliens etc
I'd add that news outlets relying on press releases to fill time didn't help much either. In the 80s there was a rash of "new research shows..." announcements that were followed months later by "oops, turns out that's not true."
This is why so many people make claims like "You know, in the 80s they told us we were about to descend into an ice age - and yet now they expect us to believe that the earth is warming!" It's because some paper got read by a non-scientist, was interpreted incorrectly (or without the context of the hundreds of papers saying the opposite), and sensationalized before being put in some news magazine like Newsweek. The result is that many in the general public thinks science may pivot at any moment to an opposite conclusion, so people are convinced that it's all just opinion.
It's potentially worse now, with the flood of social media influencers who are actively and purposely misleading people.
In the ‘80s? Still is.
Yeah, articles routinely say that something is associated with heart disease or cancer. Then you see that they studied a population of ten people, and/or studied an effect on cell cultures. It shouldn’t even be published outside of a journal.
They caught the researchers faking data about the Ozone hole.
*satanic panic has entered the chat*
Same problem in medical science. Write a paper to say what you want and pay someone to peer review it
Thank you very much for this video! I am currently an undergrad in physics, and this has given me a lot to think about in terms of what I want to specialize in. I had a question about the point of physics chasing almost undetectable particles. The information in this video is probably very condensed, so I was hoping someone could clear this up for me. My understanding was that physics somewhat naturally evolved in this direction and there is nothing to really course correct about it. For example, the Higgs boson wasn't found until the 21st century but was widely regarded as true even before its definitive discovery, which allowed this area to develop earlier. In the list at 3:35, I thought it was noticeable that dark energy and dark matter were also left out. They are much more studied and measured than any of the other points, but still something we cannot detect directly, only measure their impact. From what I have seen of dark matter/energy research (which is admittedly not a lot), there seem to be many papers about the issue from all possible angles of consideration. New theories of spacetime try to incorporate it as a natural occurrence, papers map its interactions and describe its behavior, and some use approaches from different fields of study, etc. So I was wondering how this point is meant to be interpreted. Is there a way for modern physics to exist without considering these currently undetectable particles?
I have a Master's Degree in Analytical Chemistry. As part of a written exam about Analytical Chemistry 4, our professor asked us to search a few articles in literature discussing the same topic and compare them. I chose a few talking about paracetamol and cold flu (can't remember exactly why). I noticed several mistakes: wrong math, biased sampling, conflict of interest (the same guy was behind 3 articles which promoted miracle results, but no one else was able to replicate them). Not to mention when I spot a mistake in a reaction and a wrongly named molecule. How could the peer reviewers miss that?
One should also question the source material. Much like when we compare a news appearing on a Facebook post and the same news from a reliable outlet. One thing is reading a paper from, say Nature, another from your school newspaper.
You remind of climate change extremist scientists. They replicate results that can' t be duplicated without adjusting the data. Its easy to produce computer models that fit your desired outcome.
Bro, is the same thing, you told us in the first paragraph
Systems result from incentives & disincentives. "Follow the money" includes career advancement & prestige. Scientists are arguably very susceptible to this.
I trust you, in a funny note the Flat Earth Society ran a headline claiming they have followers around the globe??
🤣
That is a parody account...
r/Whooosh
@@ExistenceUniversityYou’re not wrong, but please don’t relegate RUclips comments to Reddit comments. RUclips hasn’t got that bad yet..
@@CosmicBrain21 lol I felt so dirty doing that
If 3D space is a projection of a 2D holographic universe, then everything is.... flat?