Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "No, Sabine, Science is Not Failing" video.

Fauci and the CDC did no such thing. Their communications were almost all immunology 101 textbook facts. Those facts are not convenient, for sure. Beats dying on the respirator, though, as millions of people could tell you if they were still alive. What "sexual books" did state boards add? Sexual books like Marquis de Sade's "Justine"? Desclos' "Story of O"? Nin's "Delta of Venus"? THESE are "sexual" books worth reading. I very much doubt you will find any of those in school libraries. You probably won't even find them in the fiction section of many actual libraries. I am delighted to report that mine has them, which I find surprising. Maybe the US is not quite as intellectually corrupt, yet, as I thought. ;-)
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No, Dude, she is not even in the same universe as "right". Even her best physics videos contain grossly false statements. So do her science papers, at least on the subject of quantum mechanics, and I am pretty sure that her high energy physics papers are close to irrelevant (at least at this point). In general the angle of her presentation is always designed to rile up the anti-science crowd. Her headlines are generally just troll content.
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Not only does she realize this, but she actually cultivates it. She would not get a tenth of the views if she would try to convey actual science.
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Dude, please get help from a good shrink. :-)
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But it makes good money for the grifting kind.
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Sabine was always a troll. Her best physics videos are just as bad as her physics papers.
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Yes, that was bullshit. ;-)
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That's total nonsense. The folks who are making decisions about science funding in government are the same scientists who are doing the work. Your proposals get judged by people who want to make just as much intellectual progress as you do. This is not a game of political chicken, no matter how opaque it must look for the average person who hasn't played it.
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Of course a high school dropout will feel that way. You are projecting to cover for your failure in school. ;-)
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The reason why she talks that way is because she is suffering from narcissistic personality disorder. She differs in nothing from your average priest/preacher/conservative politician at this point. Her entire being has been reduced to delivering the lines that make her money and that give her power over the idiots who are listening to her.
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And you ain't seen nothing, yet. There is stuff in the pipeline that will blow people's minds, especially in sensing applications. Not to mention that this is the year of the 116 inch tv. I remember that we grew up with 12 inch tvs...
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Social science and hard sciences like physics, chemistry and biology have very little in common. That doesn't invalidate social sciences, but if you think that there is even a shred of resemblance between these fields, then you have never had the stamina to sit through Magnetism 101. ;-)
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@ You can't lie in physics. At most you can be stupid enough to believe that nobody will catch you. ;-) As for social sciences... I really don't give a crap about the emotional reward behavior of the average college student. ;-)
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@ I am not sure the majority of mankind ever had any solid principles of either kind. I would not claim that we were better in the past, there are too many very serious examples in history that prove otherwise.
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@ I am a humanist by heart, but I have basically given up on humanism. We are getting too close to becoming transhumans now. Genetic alteration will probably become the norm within two or three generations and we might see direct brain interfaces even before that. It's either that or AI will steamroll us anyway. There is simply not enough time to execute a humanist improvement of most of mankind before either of these changes will take place. As to the question whether we are psychopathic by nature... yes, we had to be. There was no surviving the past without that trait.
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@ No, I won't bet my social security on that, either. I don't have a hound in this race anymore, anyway. It's getting late for me. I would like to see more of the future just out of curiosity, but I am not sure I want to live as a young person in the 21st century. Whatever transition may be coming might be anything less than smooth. But then, was my generation really safe? The second half of the 20th century wasn't exactly a safe place to be, either. It's not like we were acting smart and in the best interest of our children, were we?
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YouTube has only one interest: to increase ad revenue. You can't do that if you promote academically correct videos. They are boring like hell. Nobody wants to watch them.
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Well, the message they are sending to their "fans" is correct, though. The world will go to shit if these very people keep behaving the way they do. They do, indeed, not know anything and they are all wrong almost all the time. So, yes, the messages these folks like to hear are really just a reflection of their own failings.
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@ It's a fact. I have antivaxxers in my own family. I don't know how many times they have had COVID, already, must have been four or five by now. They never learn, no matter how crap they feel. They are more afraid of "the spikes" than they are of the disease. It's completely irrational.
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The common good doesn't work against the natural order. The only places worth living are those where people still value the common good. How do I know? I was born in one of those places where they don't. Thank god my parents got us out of that hellhole.
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@ I see. I can agree with some of that. Yes, at least half of mankind seem to be unable of logical thinking and a few percent are incapable of any kind of altruistic behavior. As to the problem of leadership in democracies... we will have to find structures that are resilient against ill-will. So far we have not.
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Real science is also drama free, apart from the deadlines which cause a lot of sleepless nights. Sabine is simply putting a drama queen performance. If you think that you can lie in science to get funding, think again. A typical proposal for a large experiment has to be validated by hundreds of people during multiple meetings and usually years of constant science communication. The amount of proper technical criticism that is being thrown at every single sentence of a proposal is unimaginable to the average person. It is not just "quite impossible" to dispute facts in physics, but it is entirely impossible. We are the people who were and are creating the observational evidence for your "engineering facts".
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@solaire7046 Material science is more chemistry than physics. It usually tries to solve a practical problem with commercial value. That has absolutely nothing to do with the question what spectrum the physical vacuum has. Knowing that has ZERO practical and economic value. That's why you have to beg the government for money. You will surely not get any from a venture capitalist for the question what the mass of the lightest supersymmetric partner is. :-)
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Yes, but an intelligent person might consider that while Elon Musk talks about Mars a lot, maybe that is not exactly where SpaceX is really going. Not everything a person says has to be taken for granted. One can be skeptical about these kinds of statements. That doesn't mean Elon Musk doesn't know exactly what he is doing there... it's just not "going to Mars". That's just a front for something far more sinister. The world is currently in a new cold war and a new nuclear arms race which will include nuclear weapons in space as a fourth element in addition to the classical nuclear triad. If you think about it... Musk doesn't even hide that, he just tells you indirectly by talking about the fact that Earth won't be a safe place any longer (and it basically hasn't been since the 1950s!)... exactly because of the things that he is doing for the US government.
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And that's fine. Science is a story. It's a very particular kind of story which tries to get as many details right as possible, but it is still a story. The problem with stories is that they have to be evaluated for their truth content and most people are either too busy or not intelligent enough to do that bit. They take stories the like at face value, which invites some storytellers to abandon the truth in their stories and to make them all about self-promotion and ultimately economic gain. Sabine is one of those who fell for that kind of storytelling.
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@AJ_Meyers There is nothing wrong with clicking on these videos. The more trash content you click on, the less effective YouTube advertising becomes. While Google is making short term money with these ads, the advertisers will, eventually, learn that they are wasting their money on online advertising. Indeed, If you have the bandwidth, run a thousand YouTube videos on your computer daily by random clicking. You will cause significant economic damage to the people who are funding all of this bullshit.
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@ The two of you are fighting over what to do with a grifter like Sabine. The best cause of action would be to completely ignore her, which is what I do. I am only here to tell folks who are wasting their time on her that they are engaged in an idiotic waste of time. ;-)
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@ You could also read Sabine's physics papers and you would notice right away that there is no there there. ;-)
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@ There is no here here, either. ;-)
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Trump has very little interest in science and it's unlikely that he will meddle much with the science budget except for red meat topics concerning race and sexuality. You won't see much of a change in fundamental areas like high energy physics. I kind of doubt they will touch the healthcare related R&D, either. Too many of their donors in the pharmaceutical industry depend on that research. :-)
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Best one on YouTube as far as I can tell is probably Dr. Becky. She is giving a good example on how science should be communicated. Admittedly, astronomy is, to some extent, easier to explain and to understand than high energy physics and relativistic field theory. Everybody can, to some extent, understand that stars are large spherical arrangements of gas and plasma and that they are moving according to the laws of physics. Stay away from anybody who tries to explain quantum mechanics to you on the internet. Almost all of them are almost entirely wrong. They are simply repeating a bunch of old misconceptions over and over again.
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She knows that as well, she just doesn't care.
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That's the problem. Sabine is only listening to her own words and she generally thinks that they are awesome. ;-)
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Yes, but that is not what Sabine is saying. She is telling everybody to stop the presses completely, including experiments to "rethink" what we are doing. That's not how it works. We are "rethinking" what we are doing every day eighteen times. It just so happens that "rethinking" doesn't get you new data in experimental physics. Only a bigger machine gets you new data. She knows this. Anybody who believes that she is just naive is naive themselves. Sabine is a person with a serious narcissistic personality who only thrives on one thing: the manipulation of people. She has no interest in physics whatsoever.
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Stepping up the public education system won't help. All you are creating that way are even more students who will fail in school and who will hate everything intellectual. Imagine being called a loser for 12 years in a row. That leaves a mark and a distaste for everything related to learning. So what's the solution? There isn't one. We can simply not run democracies with the person of average (i.e. insufficient) intelligence. We will either have to wait for a genetic or technological brain update (human 2.0) or we will have to get used to totalitarian governments all over the world (which will probably lead to a nuclear war in the end and a reboot of human civilization).
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Why did you ever? Did it never occur to you that you are simply watching a person with a grudge against scientific institutions for not giving her tenure for her sub-par work? It was totally obvious.
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@jeffafa3096 It was to the folks with a physics education and especially to those of us who were in the field of high energy physics. The field had the very discussion she accused it of not having like 40 years ago. She consistently tried to make some of the most intelligent people in the world look like doofuses. That's the sign of a person with narcissistic personality disorder. Sabine's case belongs in the psychology and not in the physics department. Physicists can't help her. We are neither qualified nor certified to do that.
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@jeffafa3096 The problem with physics on the internet is not restricted to Sabine. Most YouTubers either oversimplify the actual facts to the point where they present a completely false mental model (this is especially the case for everything related to quantum mechanics) or they are completely uneducated about the subject matter to begin with and they basically just regurgitate hearsay in a game of telephone. Either way you are not getting useful information. This, by the way, is not even restricted to the internet. I would make the same statement about most layman books (Hawking in particular wrote some horrible mental models into his layman books that the physics world is still trying to exorcise from the public's memory... with little success.) I only know a few domains well enough to talk about them. Physics is one, electrical engineering (at the circuit board level) another. I do not talk about chemistry, biology and ice fishing in any level of detail. I simply don't know enough about them. What I can tell you is that Sabine often enough misrepresents physics badly enough to disqualify her from being a good source. Of course some of what she says is correct, but the context in which she puts those snippets is designed to garner attention and to increase her view count. So where do you find "the truth"? In the physics library and the laboratory... in form of a full time 24/7/365 physics career. I hate to break it to you, but physics is no different from playing the piano. Either you can play the piano or you can't. No pianist in the world can tell you how one plays a Chopin piano concerto in Royal Albert Hall. Either you do or you don't. There is no trying and there definitely is no "peeking in".
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