Nuking Social Constructionism {3/3}
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- Опубликовано: 13 сен 2024
- Presenting the long-awaited finale to the Nuking Social Constructionism series! In this video, we’ll be evaluating five common social constructionist arguments as expressed by Kristi Winters. This presentation concludes the introduction of the Naturalist Nuke, as well as my interactions with the aforementioned actor; moving forward, we’ll be developing and applying the Nuke in more advanced ways than has been covered so far. Expect videos on foundherentism, “lived experiences,” facts and feelings, and “the scientific method.”
Animations by the lovely Warm Horizons, whose tweets and art can be found here:
Animations by the lovely Warm Horizons, whose art and tweets can be found here:
/ warm_horizons
/ @yinvara9876
"Nuking Social Constructionism" playlist:
• Nuking Social Construc...
Videos being responded to:
• WKND WNTRS: Re-educati...
• Kristi dunks on King C...
• WKND WNTRS: Re-educati...
**References, in order of appearance:**
Hansson, Sven Ove. (2020). Social constructionism and climate science denial. European Journal for Philosophy of Science.
plato.stanford...
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Longino, Helen E. "Can there be a feminist science?." Hypatia 2, no. 3 (1987): 51-64.
McGrew, Roderick E. (1985). Encyclopedia of Medical History. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. p260
Brandt, Allan M. 1978. "Racism and research: The case of the Tuskegee Syphilis study." The Hastings Center Report 8(6): 21-29.
Bruusgaard, E. "Über das Schicksal der nicht spezifisch behandelten Luetiker." Archiv für Dermatologie und Syphilis 157, no. 2 (1929): 309-332.
A math teacher makes a mistake while showing how to solve a problem and realizes it after a few minutes. "I'm sorry, this should be a three, not a two over here". Kristie Winters: The social construction has been changed, do you see how arbitrary all this is? This patriarch changes his mind on what the facts are all the time just to oppress me! This proves that math is a social construct! HA!
This kind of radical epistemic relativism/subjectivism is so obviously self-refuting that only a moron (however academically accredited) could seriously believe it.
Accurate!
If the teacher makes an honest mistake and shows HOW it was an honest mistake, then one would expect to continue following the steps that would eventually reveal a solution to the math problem that you're discussing. There is no social construct here. At least not in the way you mention it.
@@Sanguillen39ify Pretty sure that was sarcasm.
The way Winters is talking about capital T truth reminded me of something... She is talking like a Intelligent design person.
Coincidence? I think not!
That's because her cadre of post-modernists are in fact a religious group. They have rejected the organised religions of the world, then found themselves with a big hole that they feel compelled to fill. They do so with pseudoscience.
Well she is speaking her religion
@@TheMonk72 It's not so much a big hole they're filling as it is about exchanging one dogmatic community divorced from reality for yet another one. Both systems supply them with the same kind of man-made product: a cookie cutter 'Truth' about reality that satisfies their need for ready-made answers, without having to discipline themselves out of their intellectual laziness.
Seems like all of that energy spent arguing with Creationists has paid off.
Oh my god, Fistie actually used the “but the dictionary though!”.
It’s somewhat comforting that people with PhDs are human enough to use a tactic that even a scientific layman like myself knows will get you laughed at.
Have you read her PHD paper? Please do, it's amazing. By amazing I mean it's amazing what garbage warrants a PHD in the social sciences these days.
@@gnosgrajab2468 Well, are we knowledgeable enough to reliably establish that prior PhD earning theses weren't as much garbage in the past? Or even worse for that matter. I'm certainly not, and I prefer withholding judgement for now. 😁
@@lucofparis4819 Fair enough. Out of curiosity, was that statement made in general, or have you actually read her PhD. I'm asking because there's a difference between knowing that poop smells and smelling it.
Her hypocrisy is as amusing as it is disheartening and predictable.
The problem with Kristi is that she has to say that science is only to be trusted by those with funny hats because half her views are only "supported" by those with the funny hats and not by the actual evidence.
while im not a scientist, i know quite a few people who are on their way to be scientists that loathe the funny hats, so it doesnt seem like a very fun club to be in.
Half? It's funny hats all the way down onto a replicability crisis.
There's sadly a lot of ppl that have absorbed the idealism of changing the world or overturning convention for the sake of their own egos, thinking they can be the next Einstein or Salk that way. It's not that ego is a bad thing, it's that ppl can easily be mistaken how to apply it properly without developing adequate personal boundaries.
26:51 “Imagine what kind of world we would be living in if scientists beliefs about the relevance of a scientific contribution was tied to the credentials of whoever was responsible.” Loved that
I face this myself. I have written some of the more important and best researched studies in a subject (a hobby, not in science) for which I do not hold a degree. All one has to do is check my sources and evaluate my assertions and analyses. Instead, the institutions involved dismiss my writing out of had due to the lack of letters behind my name. I'm fine with it, as I am not trying to make money from my research activity, but it does make you wonder. Especially when an obvious practitioner of sophistry as Kristi Winters is, supposedly, taken seriously by institutions.
@@mlovmo "Instead, the institutions involved dismiss my writing out of had due to the lack of letters behind my name."
I guess the problem is the limited time and resources these institutions have. You would probably wonder how many crackpots try to get their ideas published in scientific magazines. I don't say you're a crackpot but I understand why these institutions use academic degrees as filters.
@@hansmeiser32 Can't argue. I really don't blame them. However, shouldn't the research stand on its own? It smells of a kind of "laziness" for those gatekeepers in any field to not peruse a proposed paper and its sources to detect such crackpot B.S., which should be easily detected. Especially in my hobby, where original research is not conducted in too much of a volume that they can say they "don't have time." I mean, if the gatekeepers really know the field as well as they say they do, it shouldn't be hard. Oh, well. I've kind of stopped caring at this point. I just keep writing.... If I write enough, someone has to start noticing, but I'm more ambivalent about it now. I can't really complain: I enjoy what I'm doing. However, if the gatekeepers accepted my work more, then maybe more doors would open to primary documents that are currently kept from me. If I had access to those primary sources, I could write better and more accurate manuscripts. It also seems that they gatekeepers in my hobby are less than responsive to anyone who is not part of a clique which is known to the those in charge. The gatekeeping organization(s) in my hobby are mostly vehicles for businesses to further their private financial interests in the hobby. I also have to realize that, too.
But Kristi operates in precisely such a(n academic) world. Her mistake is thinking it’s science.
I only experience in yt comments because I have such little education in those kinds of fields. But even still, when someone goes off script and says something stupid or contradictory, the response is often the same when criticized. I've said many times rhat it doesn't matter who said it, as long as what they said is true.
Watching Winters be taken down this thoroughly is highly satisfying. Thanks for that. And for helping me hone my own ideas about science.
The bit at @5:40 really hits close to home for me. My entire metaphilosophy video was basically just a summary of various arguments being made by tenured professors of philosophy in peer-reviewed journals, and I had dozens of interlocutors (including Kristi Winters herself!) accuse me of being a dummy head that doesn't understand philosophy.
...just a heads up, I just found out that RUclips unsubscribed me from you...
And they are absolutely right. You do not.
@@SeekingApatheia You argue like a 5 year old.
@@SeekingApatheia And the point goes creaming right over your head, I see. :(
@@SeekingApatheia Does this comment have any content other than derision?
_"now that the first iteration of the nuke has been built and tested, were going to introduce some additional features to improve its efficiency and yield and once we're done we will have a properly robust philosophical basis from which we can draw when we apply the nuke more broadly_
_We will finally begin firing at the real targets"_
this is so wonderfully thematic and equally as purposful in your on-going effort to not only obviate the less impactful charlatans but also turn our attention to the more serious characters at play.
and I absolutely love this nuke theme. Fits like a glove.
Nuke 'em all!
Having watched through all four parts to this series I must congratulate King Crocoduck on presenting one of the most thorough and wonderfully erudite of its kind. Not to mention the delightful humorous contempt
You my favorite physics boi out there. I used to be an applied physics major (before I dropped out during covid) and I love your vids. While I'm no longer perusing a job in the sciences, I am still always fascinated by your videos and your deconstruction of current anti-intellectual sentiments. Keep up the great work and I'm super excited to watch this when it comes out.
Deconstruction is postmodernist critique. Don't use that term outside of the context of critical theory, as it legitimizes critical theory by osmosis.
@@HenriFaust Deconstruction as used in that sentence has been used like that for a long time. It hasn't been an exclusively postmodernist word as long as I've spoken English. It's not just used in this meaning in English either. It's commonly used as a synonym for analysis or dissection.
@@HenriFaust I agree...destruction would've been a better choice of words, or obliteration lol
The entirely unwarranted arrogance of KW and her 'brain trust' leaves me both amused and irritated. But enough about them, thank you for this latest explanation - it really made my day!
Does anyone else notice that Social Constructionists sound *exactly* like Theocratic creationists.
"Science learns as it goes, therefore God" is the same as "Science learns as it goes, therefore Social Construction!"
Where do people get the idea of a science is about “the absolute truth”?
Science is and always has been about building the best models of reality supported by all of the relevant facts. Such models are always subject to revision specifically because scientists aren’t claiming absolute truth.
up to college...
@@rokadamlje5365
??
@@kratosGOW as in schooling up to college is basically just memorisation of facts
@@rokadamlje5365
Oh yeah… but she is in political science. She has indeed gone through university.
Truth (absolute truth) is just a pretext used to attack science (the pursuit of truth). It's intentionally using the perfect to denounce the good. It's a common tactic. For instance, the US is racist because racism still exists, despite it being the most diverse first world country in the world and all the progress towards racial equality we've made. It's an intellectually dishonest tactic used by ideologues who care little for truth.
Hogen, a Chinese Zen teacher, lived alone in a small temple in the country. One day four traveling monks appeared and asked if they might make a fire in his yard to warm themselves.
While they were building the fire, Hogen heard them arguing about subjectivity and objectivity. He joined them and said: "There is a big stone. Do you consider it to be inside or outside your mind?"
One of the monks replied: "From the Buddhist viewpoint everything is an objectification of mind, so I would say that the stone is inside my mind."
"Your head must feel very heavy," observed Hogen, "if you are carrying around a stone like that in your mind."
Lol, so many of those zen priest stories sound like they're ancient dad jokes.
"X is a social construct" is the "God moves in mysterious ways" of sophists.
The main problem with Kristi Winters is that she is very sloppy in her thinking and thus ignores reality as such.
You could boil down her argument to "science is based on words and words are a social construct." What she manages to ignore or forget to take into account is the facts and how they dont at all depends on what what social reality they are used in. It doesnt matter if the person is speaking swahili, german, russian or english, what sex the person has, what religion the person comes from or what politics they are in favor of the result is still the same when you use the scientific model. Everyone using Einsteins general relativity gets the same result regardless of their society, or language etc etc, if they are calculating the same thing with the same data. It doesnt matter if they ues metric or imperial units either, as long as the difference between them is corrected for.
It doesnt matter what they personally believe in, or think, or are, the results are still always the same if they adhere to the scientific method. It doesnt matter that the scientific method was born out of ideas themselves, because if we accept that everything instantly becomes a social construct by default. The definition is also meaningless because it is way to broad its a definition written to try to encapsulate everything probably in an attempt to make social sciences the number 1 science as all other sciences would have to rely on their decisions and interpretations. This is not what actual science does, it doesnt try to take the number 1 spot by standing above the other sciences by default, it does that because of the results we get from it.
She's all that. Also, she's also a snob.
She knows she's lying, but she thinks she's helping disadvantaged people, so she's able to justify anything she says or does in pursuit of that.
The worst kind of tyrant.
Wouldn't the worst kind of tyrant be one who justifies anything to harm disadvantaged people
@@cablecar10 Harming people while gaslighting them seems worse than just harming them, in my opinion ;)
It’s ironic that people like that talk about the biases of scientists don’t seem to understand much about cognitive biases and logical fallacies in their own arguments.
BEAUTIFULLY summarized!
I listened to Christie's explaination about how "white men changed the knowledge that there were only 8 planets" dribble. I am not dumber for having heard it.
Did she miss the fact that one of the big public proponents of changing the definition of planet to not include Pluto was Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Also it was just a change in definition it didn’t change any of the observed properties of Pluto.
> "I am not dumber for having heard it"
But many will be.
Wow, this Crocoduck guy doesn't even believe in the sky canoe. He must be a kook.
Don't pretend you understand half of what was said Carl. Sigh
"Those that cannot believe in God will believe in anything" only applies to people unwilling to question their own stance on issues or will not break from them for the sake of conformity.
Aren't you just a garbage peddler now?
@@ThomasStClair-zr2lb you consume a great deal of garbage yourself, we can see your subscriptions ; )
+Sargon Akkad And you don't even take animal rights veganism seriously. You must be a kook.
She seems to be projecting the practices of her political "science" into actual science 🤔
@@HorkSupreme Don't insult mysticists like that ;)
Pseudoscience has to drag down every other endeavour to its own level.
@@HorkSupreme EXACTLY!!
It's a common sin of leftard "intellectuals" - equivocation fallacy - to use big words in an ambiguous way, without specifying the exact sense in which the word is being used, to manipulate their way into a pre-determined ideological conclusion. "Science" is one such big word, which, if one looked into any dictionary, has many meanings, all very different, including vague layman definitions where you can argue it's a social construct.
@@spectralisation if you think only leftards do that often, think again. And search for criticism (yes, search for criticism) of of other groups and movements. Hell, maybe your favorite people do it too :)
Could it be? A KC series that actually reaches its final episode? Oh happy days!
You’re thinking of Anita sarkesian
@@almcdonald8676 well, her projects are just horrendously expensive. I'm still waiting for the next Quantum Physics episode though😭
Indeed. I'm waiting for the next episode of Science Wars. Not with bated breath, because if I were I'd be dead from either lack of oxygen or CO2 toxicity.
She wasn't even a real target. She was just a practice target 🎯 😂😅🤣
I'm excited to hear that you are going to cover the pseudointellectual "flavor of the month": Insistence on informing policy with lived experiences instead of scientific study. It's nice to know that scientific realism isn't dead, merely unfashionable.
What is pseudointellectual about listening to one's constituency in politics? Yes, science matters and where we have good science we should rely on it; but _ignoring_ anything we don't have science to back up is just the McNamara fallacy. Hearing about the lived experiences of people absolutely _does_ help inform good policy - especially in areas that are either difficult to study (be that because it is ethically difficult to study, legally difficult or statistically difficult)
There are plenty of areas of public policy that don't and can't have good science to use to create policy around. For example, it is difficult to have comprehensive studies around illegal drug use, because it is obviously unethical and often impossible to create double blind studies. Think about it; test subjects would _obviously know_ if you really gave them a high dose of heroin or not. So the kinds of studies we _do have_ about long term drug use and the general population come from populations with massive numbers of compounding factors. If you do a study on, for example, a prison population of people serving drug-related sentences, you're not going to get data that applies well to the larger body of "functioning" drug users out in the wild.
@@DampeS8N And when those lived experiences are not representative of the population as a whole? Not everyone has Guillan-Barre, so should we not give anyone a vaccine because of the lived experiences of those who had negative effects from it due to Guillan-Barre?
@@DampeS8N Actually my anecdotes are true and yours are false.
@@therealfriday13th You've ignored everything I said. We have good science around Guillan-Barre. You're committing the McNamara fallacy. What do you suggest politicians do when there _is no science_ about a topic. Just pretend it doesn't exist? Scientific data is _just one_ signal a politician has to listen to. You act like we know everything already. We don't.
I certainly can't be the only one who gets creationist argument vibes from social constructionists
They do seem to use the same tactics.
This Kristi seems to never have met an actual scientist.
And certainly NEVER done actual science.
She has been told at some institution, which gave her some official looking piece of paper, that she IS a scientist, so surely it must be true.
9:42 "This can cause this. This can cause this. And this can cause this." PERFECTION!!! THANK YOU FOR SAYING IT THIS BLUNTLY IN EXACTLY THIS WAY!!
War, war never changes.
Fellow Fallout fan? 😺
Wow. Finally!
Yes, also hi
It's gonna be an instant post-apo classic.
King! This series was incredible. Thank you for all the effort you went through to make these.
I love how how she got the story of pluto from the discovery down to the naming so far off historical fact that it almost feels intentional! Clyde was a poor farm boy. He spent years in the freezing cold in an attic sitting in front of a blink comparator swapping two photographic plates looking for anything that changed. He wasn't surrounded by a group of other spoiled white men. As for the naming it was put to the world for suggestions in naming it and a little girl came up with it. I can go on and on about this but I'm sure your viewers are educated enough to already know the general facts that KW seems to have completely missed.
Still, the question remains, why did Clyde look to the stars, and not, let's say, to studying every detail in his favourite rock? There is just as much "truth" to be found in either, just as many observations, yet our poor farm boy chose one over the other. Even if the scientific process is in ideal unbiased, which set of knowledge we are uncovering is colored by our human and social instincts, such as the one to look to the skies.
@@jandhi2043 Yes, a human has, as far as we can tell, free will to choose what to study. Therefore, what the resulting accumulated knowledge is will depend upon what humans choose to study.
If humans study X, Y they produce facts A, B, but if humans study Y, Z then they produce facts B, C,
where {A,B} and {B,C} are different sets.
However, what IS TOTALLY independent of human social construction crap, society, etc
is that if you study X, Y you get A, B, and if you study Y, Z you get B, C.
THOSE logical statements remain.
You DON'T get: if you study X, Y you get E, F.
THIS is exactly what REDUCTIONISM is: these sorts of formal explanations with letters as variables that can be replaced with any true statements.
@@theultimatereductionist7592 That is very well true, but we cannot pretend that our choices or somehow a roll of the dice or come from some independent "free will"- our choices are overwhelmingly molded by the society we are in, and as such, the direction that we study in is by in large socially determined. People will more often study subjects that are popular or considered socially important (e.g. Covid-19) over less socially important knowledge (e.g. the specific layout of my backyard over time).
@@jandhi2043 "our choices are overwhelmingly molded by the society we are in"
That is a circular statement. "Society" is just OTHER individuals, acting freely. You've just shifted the burden of ultimate cause.
@@theultimatereductionist7592 I'm not sure what the takeaway of that is supposed to be- its not terribly useful to consider choices as simply individuals "acting freely" when they can be predicted much better as the products of social forces. Of course every scientist makes an individual choice as what to study at the end of the day, but when that choice is extremely skewed by social forces (even if those other forces also come down to individual choices) then the actions can't really be described as that "free" can they?
The point is that science, even if we assume it not to be socially constructed as some ideal, is in action, creation, and application driven by social motivations that mean that the base of knowledge produces by science most certainly is based on social construction, at least in the sense of what is there and what is not, what is considered important and what is not, and what is remembered and what is not. A society that looks to the skies for meaning is more likely to do science about the skies. A society where a pandemic is raging will more likely study diseases. Any "scientific" knowledge base in either society will ultimately be shaped by the social forces therein, even if the "ideal" of science may not be.
Crocoduck is using the "ideal" of science (in the form of "the big 4") to argue away that such effects mean that science itself is socially constructed, but then him and Christie are arguing past each other. If he dismisses any scientific data tainted by social forces as "bad science", then of course he's going to conclude that science itself is pure of social construction, but in practice we do not know which data meets the ideal and which doesn't, so at any point in our history the body of knowledge that is considered by society as "scientific" is absolutely socially constructed, even if it is constructed imprecisely using the ideal as a blueprint.
I just had to write an "personal epistemology essay" for a teacher who is clearly a social constructionist and expects us to be so as well. I'm glad to find we landed on the exact same "epistemology" and will take this very thorough argument as evidence that my hasty research on non crazy epistemologies was productive as we both landed on "evolutionary epistemology" as the best representation of the way in which one can "know" the world.
Oh my, I've waited so long.
Miss Fisty Splinters suffers from a bit of Dunning Kruger. Nothing she says is ground breaking like she seems to think. Every word is more evidence that she doesn't actually understand what she's talking about.
Well said!
I checked your channel for this just yesterday night!
49:05 That is terrifying. Poor kids, man.
On the first video, I was struggling to understand what you were getting at, but this final video really pulls it all together for me. Great stuff!
The notion that scientific truths change as time goes is remarkably shallow actually. In Physics at least, advances always proceed not by replacing one theory by a new one but by making the old theory a special case of the new one. The old theory is an approximation of the new one in a well-defined domain. Newtonian mechanics is an approximation of special relativity which is an approximation of general relativity. Etc. Since a theory is just a set of models fitting well a set of well-established observations, and since well-established observations never change, there is just no way a theory can suddenly become untrue. The only thing that can happen is for new observations to falsify it, which requires then to come with a more general theory. There is nothing socially constructed in that.
I've been awaiting this with bated breath. Fantastic.
From a purely emotional/social point of view, Kristi seems absolutely intolerable as a person. The way she speaks down to and insults everyone she disagrees with, dismisses entire swaths of people (her continuous framing of "natural scientists" as if they are all stupid children), the way she laughs and chuckles self-righteously any time she is trying to explain her detractors positions while also straw-manning or otherwise bastardizing said positions - my God.
Kristi is not arguing in good faith, and doesn't even seem to have the capacity. She doesn't even try - she is not interested in good faith dialogue whatsoever. She seems closer in mind to a religious zealot than a scientist... and that is very concerning. This person got a PhD?
She sounds like a generic stereotype of the New Aristocrat.
Yes
This whole reality is whatever I decide it is trend is a bit scary. Anti realism wtf
Solipsism is the ultimate level of narcissism :P
Oh it's not a recent trend. Ayn Rand has written several essays about it back in the 60s and 70s.
To Kristi, regarding her point about natsci arrogance and "Truthiness":
Kristi, respectfully, you haven't seen them. Those arrogant physicists you denegrate... you hadn't the humility to consider that they might've seen something of such a character. I really want you to grapple seriously with the insights of theoretical physics, and really get them, just to see if you could still call it arrogance.
I'm not trying to rub the insurmountability of physics in anyones face or anything -- I really do believe anyone can understand more or less anything. My reckoning is if you're gonna say the emperor has no clothes, you might want to actually see him first.
You're wrong. Not everyone can understand anything. It's actually very difficult for an intelligent person to accurately model the thought process of unintelligent people.
@@HenriFaust I'd figure if anything, the converse'd be more true, but I really hope neither is the case :)
It's about to get real.
I'm so excited for this
Return of the king.
This is such a beautiful and rigorous takedown. Bring tears to a grown man eyes 🥲
I wonder if kristi responded to any of these in the meanwhile. Also anxious for this last chapter on the series.
That Pluto point was such a "Finger pointing to the moon" moment.
Thank You KC!!!! This was a lot of work and it shows. You did very well at being accurate and understood by those of us with lesser education. It means a lot that you take the time.
Whether we label Pluto a planet or a dwarf planet. It exists. We can measure its volume. That is mathematically quantifiable, not a social construct.
The system of categorization and certain specific conventions ARE social constructs. For example the official limit of outer space has been defined differently. But these are just organizing principles of the facts, not the facts themselves, and even these conventions are usually rooted in something objective (like a definition of mammal being contingent on the presence of mammary glands), even if there are some edge cases where classification breaks down or has to be revamped.
Well well well, look who slithered out of the primordial ooze
You should write a book on this. And call it "how to build a naturalist nuke".
Ok, so Kristi criticises someone having a different opinion, by citing others with opinions that are an extreme minority?
Not that I place too much faith in ones percieved qualifications or dismiss just because they don't align with my personal politics, but by what metric is a biologist qualified to claim science is a social construction beyond the brite fact that it was developed through a communal effort? If I'm reading that tweet correctly, then her argument implies that literally everything from technology to currency to language are all false narratives to be be taken with a grain of salt. So I can just tell the government that taxes are theft and oppressive and not actually real because they are purely a social construction, and they would have no power to prosecute me for not paying...
She sounds like a bloody sovereign citizen with that crap.
Finally! Seeing a new video from my favorite avian reptile brought a tear to my eye.
You are doing great man, can't wait for the next one!
"Scientists, this elite cadra. Certain people in the world have the credentials here to make these kinds of decisions." -Kristy (Paraphrased) She see herself amongst this "elite cadra"
THANK you for asserting what *I* have screamed for decades: that it is NOT ONLY HUMANS who do science and mathematics!
I really hope you have a future video that I can easily show to people to explain the naturalistic nuke (like my parents). Since most people outside your viewers demographics wouldn't be interested in a reaction video and want something more concise and to the point.
Hi. I also think that would be cool
Yes. It has been a while since the last video and I already forgot what exactly the nuke is supposed to represent. I only remember the teaser: NEXT time I'll finish explaining the concept that is so explosive and devestating muahahahahahahah.... years later.... the next part comes out and I have already forgotten most (it's not easy to memorize incomplete info). So not even interested viewers like me have an easy time here.
One shorter cut containing complete information would be very much appreciated.
@@thulyblu5486 what if I downloaded the 3 videos, merged them together, cut out redundancies, gave credit to K9ng Crocoduck in the title, description and the top comment, which would be pinned, linked to his channel in said comment pin and description, as well as mentionining King Crocoduck at the beginning and end of the video? King Crocoduck, would you be ok with something like this? If not, say so.
Edit: We could each make videos and link them in this thread, compare and contrast, or maybe I should just attempt a summarization instead of just merging the videos together
It would be very convenient if you edited together a video like that. Though of course it would even better if King Crocoduck made a dedicated video himself.
@@naturegirl1999 I'd like that. KC needs to approve for copyright reasons of course.
It's finally here!
The life of Évariste Galois and his work on the solubility of equations by radicals is another example of how irrelevant credentials are for contributions to science.
Great video.
Holy fucking crap is this something almost everyone needs to hear.
The 5 arguments for social constructionism on screen at 6:12 all strike me as flowing from Foucault's definition of "Truth".
“Truth” is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the
production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements."
(Foucault 1972, Truth and Knowledge, 132)
Only difference is that he speaks of truth rather than science.
Imagine thinking truth is a system, rather than the input into a system!
Now apply the same criticism to social constructs and science. This redefinition from Foucault (and no doubt many of his contemporaries) have confused a disturbing portion of academia.
Kristi Winters is a social construct.
rewatching this series makes me so sad... so many "future videos" that never happened T_T
Goddam. This is as brutal a pwning as has ever been handed down on you tube. Nuclear is right.
Can't wait for this!
Here's a comment for the algorithm. Would be nice to see you back on Benjamin Boyce's channel, he tends to get lost in cognitive relativism. Keep up the good work !
Delightfully vicious, KC. Good to have you back.
Great video! Certainly clarifies a lot and I can't wait to see your videos on the "real targets" as you say since that seems to be where I fall. I don't know when you plan to make your video on foundherentism, so if I may, I figure I'll say this now since I'd like to see it addressed eventually.
I think it needs to be said that every foundational epistemology, and this is in fact what you are engaged in, presupposes a content. Evolutionary epistemology, for instance, is itself claimed to be true, and what counts as true is determined by evolutionary epistemology.
Thus, the critique of foundationalism is a critique of all epistemology as normally defined as what fundamentally confers validity to truth claims.
This is why, so far, your arguments concerning philisophy as primarily a mere facilitator of natural scientific practice wouldn't convince a Hegelian who's conception of truth and objectivity in thought is based on an immanent critique of epistemology and a claim to presuppositionlessness and immanence in a pure logic. The Hegelian approach, in this way, would stand both against the analytic approach of epistemology as well as even the late continental approach of quasi-transcendentalism which assumes that seeking for conditions of possibility is the fundamental way to proceed.
The reason we don't want unnecessary presuppositions in our drive toward truth, assuming we are relentless in seeking it, is not because there is no truth at all to them. To say this would be just as presuppositional. Our beliefs must instead be suspended. The point is to not treat the truth of evolutionary conceptions of knowledge as absolute, for doing so may demarcate too much or too little in terms of what it can be said we know and how it can be said we know it. Since I want the truth, and I too wish like you for philosophical robustness and conceptual rigor, I'm simply not convinced of what you claim to be the ultimate status of philosophy.
In the end, the problem with any and all epistemological pursuits is, and has always been, that we're simply incapable of achieving Truth. At best, all we've managed to do is approach Truth, and common to all progress has been the use of axiomatic claims. The desire for Truth is born in evolution, as Crocoduck presents (axiomatically) but at its core is nonsensical when we've no means of obtaining Truth. IMO epistemological efforts should be properly understood as a valuable yet ultimately unachievable effort to seek Truth made by profoundly limited beings (us). It will forever be incomplete with the best efforts being of asymptotic nature (forever approaching yet never reaching the knowingly unachievable goal). In this view, axiomatic claims have utility in that they may move us closer, though the fewer the better.
We need understand that the inability (by limited creatures) to obtain Truth should not discourage the pursuit (as Kristy's arguments do) as there is utility in the pursuit, but neither should we allow the desire for Truth feed the delusion that such is achievable. We need pursue Truth in full understanding and humility of our inability to ever obtain it, which we too often fail to do.
@@gnosgrajab2468 Your view is a common one, but it remains necessarily contradictory. You claim that we can't know the truth, and yet you surely believe that this claim is true. If this claim of yours is not the truth, then you have no basis for saying there we cannot attain truth. If what you claim is true, then you are equally baseless for you have just discovered the truth we apparently can't attain. It does not matter what you do, thought finds a way to justify and validate itself. Any attempt to invalidate thought's ability to attain truth and objectivity undermines itself.
The attainment of truth is possible. The only way to fully explicate what this means is to let go of the very axioms you treat as necessary and to think thought as such. But this is to start with the very indeterminate immediacy, the utter lack of determinate content, with which Hegelian logic begins.
The epistemological approach works within what Hegel would call the opposition of consciousness where the object of knowledge is concieved of lying outside the knowing subject. In this mode, we are forever blocked from absolute knowledge for the object will only ever be an object for a subject and never the object in and through itself. Logic, a thinking of thinking, is a unique mode of investigation where the object, thinking, is the same as the subject, thinking. Logic in its most concrete form, or purely immanent thinking, need not worry about absolute skepticism for it is necessarily in possesion of itself. The mind is not limited or finite, like you would believe (this is itself an unwarranted claim), but rather infinite in the sense that the mind is thought that relates purely to itself. Hegel then, I think, sufficiently subverts epistemology and proposes a safe alternative form of first philosophy that grants genuine truth.
@@thall77795 Your first argument regarding the paradox of a truth claim defying ability to obtain truth is just a linguistic game. Of course, that claim may be false, but our language doesn't provide convenient ways to express ideas it wasn't constructed to communicate. Should I have said I hold as true the idea that truth is not achievable, but I could be wrong, or should I just use common language and expect my readers to not play linguistic games?
Hegel and I are saying the same thing in many ways but in different terms. He's correct about systems of logic being True, but has no means of connecting them with reality, that mapping we do for the utility of logical systems, but the logical systems themselves can make no claim on what's true within reality. Basically, logic lives in it's own domain consisting only of the logical building blocks. It's in a sense imaginary, or even fantastic. 2 + 2 = 4, and 2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples, but 2 apples + 2 apples can also = applesauce. We apply the logical mappings when they aid our understanding of reality and ignore them when they don't, but again, logical systems can say nothing about reality. Presuming reality is logically consistent or follows any of the properties of logic is as much an axiomatic claim as the prime mover.
As far as the unlimited nature of thought and mind, well to be honest, I like Hegel, but in this I think he simply jumped the shark. Hegel had an extreme analytical aptitude and was in love with logical systems, and that is all to his credit, but you must concede, it didn't lend to a strong grasp of reality. He lived most of his life in the pristine beauty of the rational ideas in his head and most of the outside world was just white noise to him.
@@gnosgrajab2468 Not much to do with language here. Just think what it is you were trying to communicate, and you'll see that the issues I outlined still hold.
Your conception of logic as being merely formal and not itself containing truth content is taken care of in the introductory passages of his Science of Logic. If logic is a thinking of thinking, it is thought that becomes its own content as a self-developing science. It is not empty and waiting for content, it provides its own. Categories are immanently derived such as becoming, determinateness, quality, quantity, and so on. Insofar as the world itself contains these thought determinations in its intelligble structure (the world is determinate, qualitative, quantitative, etc.), logic coincides with metaphysics in the broadest sense. If one does not believe the world contains such an intelligible structure, this can only be because they've made a presupposition concerning a noumenal mystery outside, an absolute object apart from the absolute subject. This appears when we still assume the standpoint of modern epistemology. However, because Hegelian logic unravels what is implicit in the concept of being or immediacy as such, we need not worry about whether the object in front of us is intelligible. Insofar as it is at all, it is intelligible in terms of categories derived by an immanent logic that unfolds the "is" itself.
I don't really understand your last paragraph. Hegel spent a large amount of his mature philosophical enterprise arguing against the traditional metaphysicians and the transcendental idealists with their "fear of the object." He also believed in the necessity of the empirical sciences given the contingincies of nature. What he showed better than anyone else is that the world is inherently graspable. For you, this amounts to nothing but an "analytical aptitude" and a love for logical systems. But in truth, it was a self-critical drive carried over from the enlightenment--an attempt to not presuppose anything and stay immanent to the content as it admitted its own determinations, something that contemporary thinkers can learn a lot from.
@@thall77795 bleh.. lost my reply twice, don't have it in me to try again atm. Will try again tomorrow. Sorry for delay.
A trenchant, polished, and comprehensive essay, and a disembowelment of your target. I felt her eyes roll. :-D
As an amateur astronomer myself, the example of Pluto's discovery as support to the argument that the ''truth'' of astronomers back in the early 1900s was flawed is so mindbogginly stupid and ridiculous I started laughing. No serious astronomer would have ever argued, even in those days, for the ''truth'' being that there were only 8 planets and that's it. The reason is that competent astronomers know the limitations of their apparatus in finding objects in the sky and know they can't observe every single parcel of the sky at any given time. Even previous astronomers could recognise that smaller objects would be hard if not impossible to see using their telescopes. Pluto was also theorized to exist more than 50 years before its actual discovery, giving even more support to social constructivism being bullshit. That's what happens when you trust a ''social scientist'' to tell you about how wrong you are in your field. They make complete fools of themselves.
Thanks again Professor K and Kristi, you were awesome.
I am very grateful for your research behind "the big four", and their natural origin. This has straightened out my conception of ontology and epistemology which I had previously placed in the too hard basket - in terms of integrating or discarding their various theories with my world view.
I am so impressed that at the age of 52 I am tempted to feature the big 4 as my first tattoo : ) I will certainly be using them to inspire some art.
However, I would beg your help regarding the inconsistency of quantum theory with the general theory of relativity. There are two of the most reliable scientific theories, I don't pretend to have more than a surface understanding of either of them, but I trust the scientists that tell me they are more reliable than any other scientific theory yet devised. On the surface they do not meet the big four conditions, the second to be precise.
My thoughts are that they are, nevertheless, the *best* models to explain the behaviour of the very large and the very small, therefore they are the most efficient, even if they are not consilient. I am aware that consilience of these two theories is the goal of theoretical physicists worldwide. So it is not necessary for a model to meet all the big four for it to be considered science. Am I on the right track?
Hi James, thanks for your comment. I would suggest that these criteria exist to facilitate the decision making process between competing representations of the world. Meaning that quantum theory and general relativity adhere to the Big 4 to a greater degree than any currently competing theories of subatomic and gravitational phenomena. In the future, that situation is liable to change; there might someday be a reformulation of quantum theory that is compatible with general relativity, or vice versa. When that happens, the theoretical paradigm will shift.
@@KingCrocoduck Thank you, you have put that more eloquently than I did.
Goodness! Makes me wish I'd been able to finish my biology courses some years ago. But...stress-related strokes do come with debilitating side effects.
Nice to see you're still at it, Crocoduck. Well worth the watch.
I'm sure commenters have said it already, but this would be a magnificent book.
Return of the King
The smart quantum man taught me the way of the three tubes:
Red tube is most important tube.
if red tube turns into black tube thats bad, have to throw all tubes away and start over.
ill make totem of tube, its god now.
#TeamRedTube
@@CyberChrist now we know that Crocoduck likes redtube
@@ianduarte1992 Who doesn't ? :P
She’s the most smug person I have ever heard with nothing but manipulation behind her for her own social framing.
Science is social, at least for social creatures, because all social creatures share some form or style of living, and a certain way of doing things. Humans are the for most experts of this sharing and pass on massive amount of knowledge to others. Yet having social interaction and being furthered it does not mean that it is a social construct, at least not in the way social scientist usually say. The world is to complex and dangerous to not pass on models, but it is more like passing down a familial heirloom, than a social organization.
The fifth criterion is replicability.
32:00 THANK you for bringing up ethics, KC!
Welcome back feathered lizard person.
Hey KC, I just discovered your content after listening to you talk with Benjamin Boyce and James Lindsay. Great stuff, I'm looking forward what you make next!
Well, I wrote about three long comments disagreeing with some small aspect of KC's video. But having heard him out, ... yep. I'm on board. He's right.
Hey. Phrenology. Cool. My favorite pseudoscience.
Meh... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumpology FTW ;)
@@CyberChrist Lol. That is a lot of fun you're right. But I really meant that phrenology was my favorite symbol for pseudoscience. It's a thing that universally accepted as pseudoscience and so much effort went into it. We have all these little charts and ceramic heads and such. People really got into it. Lol.
Isn't Sylvester Stallone's mother into that? I heard that she reads people's asses.
Welcome aboard
@@PaulTheSkeptic I predict fat asses have trouble restraining themselves. Damn, it's working !
22:33 FINALLY! The ONE time I have EVER heard of an HONORARY DOCTORATE being TRULY EARNED!
Hold on, first Christy asserts that having science done by people with Degrees & PhDs is bad, because it creates a cabal of "priests" gatekeeping science (rather that demonstrating necessary skillsets).
Then she appears to assert that it's acceptable for etymologists & linguists assembling dictionaries to have the authority to define the meanings of words by fiat (⊚).
Could this be her personal bias towards occupations related to the social sciences...? Or is she just being a hypocrite..?
⊚ - Which they don't, btw. Dictionaries are lists of what a culture, which uses specific words, actually defines them to mean & how those meanings shift over time.
Are you saying that the thing she was trying to use to show that science is socially constructed is, itself, socially constructed? How meta 😁
It's so utterly painful to listen to her pedestrian ramblings. And she earns a salary for that "work".
A small criticism I have is about when you talk about pluto, I'd say that the change in classification doesn't show that science isn't a social construct not because the way we classify things isn't affected by society, but because the change is irrelevant to the bigger understanding of the model.
If one person calls a certain electromagnetic wave infrared or heat wave is irrelevant if the model describes it's effects correctly.
Also, another thing I have to say is that having people with different views cam help to identify biases, someone who is anti-racist might be more able to see when someone is distorting science in order to confirm racist biases, among other possible examples.
No. This wouldn’t help. Someone who is anti racist will not help to identify a racist bias in a scientific project in the same way that someone who fills your colour by numbers painting with a uniform Purple 34 does not ‘help’ in the production of the intended piece of art simply because they painted over a 34 spot you had previously either missed or incorrectly coloured with 36.
@@LAZARUSL0NG, I don't see how your analogy works.
But if someone wants to go against your ideas, that person is probably going to do all they can to find flaws in your ideas.
@@thomasfplm I just mean that an “anti-racist” is not just someone with a heightened sensitivity to racial bias; they would not be helpful in the project of identifying where in the body of science such biases exist as opposed to where they do not.
An anti racist believes that the teleology of all institutions, including scientific institutions, have fundamentally always been the creation and maintenance of a social order of white racial supremacy. Such a one’s involvement in the detection of biases in historic or ongoing scientific work would be as counter productive as the purple enthusiast in my previous analogy.
Moreover, the anti racist is not interested in the project of eliminating bias. They view bias as inevitable and fundamental; objectivity as not only perfectly unattainable, but functionally unapproachable, and they are only concerned with the deliberate conscious introduction of their own bias/agenda into all projects in order to redress (in terms of real world outcomes) the
‘racial injustices’ they claim to have resulted from the de facto racism of legacy institutions.
They should be kept away from science with a high thick wall, not invited in to help you tidy up.
@@LAZARUSL0NG, every group can have extremists, and not every single person who is anti racist is necessarily trying to find racism in everything.
@@thomasfplm You are confounding ‘anti racist’ with ‘not racist’ or ‘against racism’. This is to be forgiven, as it is very much the intent of anti racists that you should do so. For clarity, refer in future to those who you are hopeful might be employed in the effort to rout racist bias from science as ‘not racist’ or ‘against racism’ or ‘good scientists’. When you specifically envoke the ‘anti racist’ what you convey to the informed with that term is ‘those who are very deeply racist indeed’.
While it may be the case that many groups have their extremists, when it comes to ‘anti racism’, the extremism of that group does not solely refer to ‘what lengths an individual ardent acolyte might go to for their cause’ but is also an accurate descriptor of the nature of the departure that the fundamental philosophy of the group has made from the longstanding precepts of common sense making that underpin the very fabric of human civilisation. As such the term ‘extreme’ applies to all ‘anti racists’ perfectly equally, which no doubt gratifies them greatly.
Long live the King!
Great conclusion, thanks. I hope to someday read up some science philosophy, but for now, I am properly armed against this big gateway to pseudoscience.
Here is where I will fully agree with you that your big 4 are the necessary objectives for anyone to actually do science.
The question I have, is if for two of the areas you cite, climate change and recent emergency virus mitigation efforts, are those actually the objectives being sought?
Could it be that that those very anti-science people you are lumping in with Kristi Winters, are not complaining because we just disagree with science, or because we do not believe science has actually been happening in those spaces? Or that the science that has happened there, and the claims about the science that has happened there has been so warped and co-opted that anything that is scientific is ignored and just replaced with the dogmas.
Case in point, you point to a graph showing how low the infection rate of vaccinated people for covid is. Can that be true, and also true that Israel with an over 90% vaccination rate of it's population in 2021 experienced an even larger wave than it did in 2020 with no vaccine?
Or on the climate change front, when we have politicians saying the world will literally end in 12 years, and they don't stop and ask, well what model is predicting that one? And just use some vague notion that something must be done as their rational, and every time they make a concrete prediction, their model ends up wildly off.
So while you are correct that science should be socially agnostic, Kristi is actually more correct on what people call science. Especially anyone invoking science as the clear and unambiguous reason to take a specific course of action.
If the science behind the iron dome was as loosey goosey as the science around either medical research or climate change, we'd not have any question if it was working or not.
Even the flat earthers who I find to be ridiculous are right about at least one thing. Most people believe the earth is round, not because they've thought it through, but because they have been told to think it. And if you asked someone how to demonstrate that the earth is round would have no way without relying on an intuition's words or pictures.
I wonder what to make out of this as a climate skeptic, that is to say as a person who firmly believes that in the question of climate change has mainstream science become fundamentally unscientific. A phenomenon like this can in one way be framed through the notion of science as a social construct. Funding bias and other outward incentives promote one way of understanding and interpreting climatic change on the cost of all other ways of understanding it. One way of drawing the line between the dots on the cost of all other ways of doing it.
On the other hand, I can not take it as far as embracing radical social constructivism in its full extent, because that would imply that there is no objective truth about the climate, which I think there is, even though the climate system in all its complexity is somewhat poorly understood yet. It would also imply a rejection of the possibilty of saying that some the popular claims about climate changes are objectively false or at leat taken out of context, exaggereted etc. And of course embracing social contructivism would imply embracing all the other horrors mentioned in this series of videos.
But still, science can be led astray, and has many times been led astray, by societal and social forces. That is also a truth and reflects the fact that scientists are failable humans like everybody else. Lysenko, as you mention in another video, as a good example of this.
And therefrom we enter the interesting question: Are the ideas of social constructivism applicable to social constructivism itself? Is it an objective truth that scientific theories are socially constructed - or is this claim a social construction, resulting from the social conditions under which it arose?
Here, I think radical constructivists will have a hard time not ending up contradicting themselves in one way or another. But since they are a part of academia, and hence of science in broader terms, your dismanteling of social constructivism is also in a way in itself an example of the use of a social constructivist analysis of science and you are therefore also in that way contradicting yourself. Or so it could be claimed, at least.
this is good content
I'm engaging the algorithm
57:15 It's funny though how you will never convince this lady. When you state that processes are a subset of (the "set of") ideas, then you of course imply that it still exist in (natural) reality.
For her though reality basically doesn't exist, there's only ideas and socially agreed upon ideas. For her a process must also be in the domain of ideas, for example, how ideas evolve in discourse or in thinking. So she will simply reject your statement that a processes are not in the set of ideas. Well, you did your best, but she's just really hopeless.
Besides, it's not at all clear if a "set of ideas" is well defined in such generality, and what the heck would be a "set of social constructs"? I wouldn't crack my head about such b.s. too much though. Just press the red button.
I think a more fair criticism is that what we consider to be the scientific method, i.e. "the recipe", is a group of practices that recognizes that the naturalistic and evolutionary processes that allow for the "big four" are not sufficient to correctly predict all of the observed natural phenomena, in particular, the phenomena that are not local (in the temporal or spacial sense) to our biological state. The natural phenomena that have not contributed to our evolutionary success, tend to escape the pattern seeking models that nature tend to develop. Yet those phenomena are no less real, and it is that subset of phenomena that the scientific method has come to tackle.
I.e. phenomenon like quantum physics, to take an example, require non-intuitive calculus (intuition being the compiled encoding of the big four in our cognitive and reactive biological processes).
Hence we needed to devise a group of practices, built upon our understanding of our own biological "blind spots", that seek to eliminate those flaws. These groups of practices, like replicability, falsifiability, testability, logical causality have informed the creation of the scientific fields of math, physics, biology... et all, that are arguably only available to a species that has enough throughput of inter-generational knowledge transmission (ergo, I can haz language and library's).
Hence, the common definition of "science" that really refers to the scientific method, is as of the current date, only available to humans. Or to other alien intelligent races that we have yet to meet.
My argument still does not concede that the scientific method is "socially constructed", in fact, entire languages like math have been built parallel to spoken language for the very purpose of escaping social biases. But it does give it far more importance to the progress and success of our species that King Crocoduck seems to be willing to give it in this series by calling it "just a recipe".
Watching this video, i'm currently at min 24, i have to say that i'm confused.
Didn't Kristi Winters imply that it is bad if just a small elite groupe are allowed to contribute to a scientific discussion ? Why then, is she using the Argument from authority fallacy in her posts ?
by the way sorry for my bad english i'm not a naitive Speaker
@King Crocoduck so glad you are backon youtube!
Amazing series, I'm gonna have to watch it again to grasp everything but you're quite eloquent and I love how you carefully choose your words !
Have you seen president Sunday critique of the nuke :) ?
Science is done by social actors....
Do you:
A- Realise that proper methodology is supposed to *ELIMINATE* bias
B- Just be extra cautious or something
C- Make sure it's biased in favor of your ideology
D- Constantly do the same *** stupid bait and switch of "science is ideological" and "I'm only saying it's done by social actors".
E- Complain about how your opponents video is organised in a 6 hour unscripted rant
A) I note that "The Scientific Method" is a fiction, and that rather than a methodological "recipe" (i.e., "do x steps to do science,") there are actually only methodological criteria (i.e., "if you test/develop a theory with x properties, then you did science.")
B) extra care can and should be taken to prevent bias from contaminating your results. If bias contaminates your results, then your models fail to meet certain criteria, and your activity, as per A, is therefore not scientific.
C) see B
D) uh is this comment directed at me...?
E) considering that the person being addressed wasted time complaining about how I organized my video while having no organization to speak of with her's, I feel obliged to point out this hypocrisy so as to justify the aggressive tone taken in this video.
@@KingCrocoduck No why would I direct this at you?.. you're not the one who made a 6 hour unscripted rant, Winters is..
Speaking of scientific criteria. Can't parsimony just be seen as an extension of predictive capability if you regard each unnecessary assumption as an unfalsibiable claim.
The same goes for flexibility: too much of it leads to an unfalsifiable model but the reason why that is bad is because it can't make predictions if it is unfalsifiable.
Too little flexibility and you can't make accurate predictions that a flexible model could make.