Dr. Angela Collier plays the Binding of Isaac: Rebirth and talks at length about what went wrong with string theory, and how that affected science communication.
Found my new favorite science communicator, she did such an awesome job here! I’ll have to check out the rest of her videos because she seems to cover a lot of different science topics.
I’ve been watching a lot of her videos lately! I found the one on Gell-Mann amnesia to be really interesting and linked it here the other day; maybe a good one for a next watch if you haven’t picked yet.
Definitely, thanks for the suggestion! 😄
Her video on the most important material in science (spoiler: it’s glass) is my favourite video of hers so far. Another one is on robots doesn’t need to be in human form.
Fun fact, Michael Crichton (that one) coined that, Gell-Mann amnesia after Murray Gell-Mann, who had nothing to do with it.
Less fun fact, Micheal Crichton was an active climate change denialist.
In one public debate his team argued so convincingly that the audience went from 57% believing climate change was a global crisis down to 46% after the debate.
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Same. I really like the way she presents ideas.
I think she leaned a bit too heavily onto the notion that string theorists, as a whole, were lying. I think more likely they genuinely thought they were on to something. They may have been wrong but they didn’t think they were wrong. A lie is deliberate misinformation, not simply being mistaken.
Like, ok, at first? Sure, I can go with “it’s not a lie if you actually believe it,” in 1985 or even 1995. But by 2010? Come on. And then in 2020, to be like “Well, I mean, I never specifically said I believed in it, just that, you know, it was a thing…” is so gross. It’s like some shit my ex-wife would have said after a three-day-long running argument about some basic fact of the universe.
That’s 1 string theorist, Brian Greene. It is absurd to call all string theorists liars. Are all psychologists liars because they had a reproducibility crisis?
This was a half-cocked and not through rant that others and blames a whole group of hard working physicists just because they were wrong. This kind of rant has no place in the scientific process or science communication.
That’s 1 string theorist, Brian Greene. It is absurd to call all string theorists liars. Are all psychologists liars because they had a reproducibility crisis?
That’s like saying NDT is “one astrophysicist” or Freud is “one psychologist”. We’re talking about the guy who brought the entire concept to the public, and he’s sure as shit not the only guy who wrote fantastically optimistic treatises about a concept that real physicists didn’t bother with because it was inherently unfalsifiable due to being entirely untestable.
None of them wrote books that said “Yeah, this is a cool thought experiment that will never be able to do anything scientific hypotheses are supposed to be able to do”. Fuck, just make another thread asking “What do y’all think about the Many Worlds hypothesis?” and you’ll get a hundred comments talking about how cool it is as they walk straight out of the real of science and into the realm of crackpot woo-woo speculation. BECAUSE OF THESE PEOPLE.
Yeah, I agree with the video. After a certain point (I’ll be generous and say that point was 2000-2005), it was a lie. A scam. A con. No different from the guys who say the pyramids were alien landing markers and Stonehenge was built by fairies. It was a load of people saying nonsense stuff to sell books and speaking engagements.
science is a liar sometimes
@FaceDeer @interolivary What is this in relation to? I am still trying to figure out mastodon
@admin I’m viewing this thread from a kbin instance, not Mastodon. It’s a threaded discussion in the style of Reddit. https://kbin.social/m/science@beehaw.org/t/91867/string-theory-lied-to-us-and-now-science-communication-is should show it as I’m seeing it. The community is actually on beehaw.org, so it’s posted via Lemmy.
I know that Kbin and Mastodon interact, but honestly I’m a little unclear on the details myself. I thought I had to go to the “microblogging” tab for the Mastodon stuff.
https://kbin.social/m/science@beehaw.org/t/91867/string-theory-lied-to-us-and-now-science-communication-is
Back in the late-80s or early-90s, I remember OMNI Magazine ran an interview with a researcher of veracity in science publications as a topic, don’t remember anything but a whopper of a quote in which he said that around a third of science papers fudge the numbers, even if just a little bit, to make them fit the hypotheses.
Which is why the funding mechanism of science is so profoundly unscientific. Funding must be based on the quality of the experimental process, not positive results.
I’d go further, and say that most scientific papers are profoundly unscientific: without the data and analysis process they base their claims on, most papers are no different than just saying “believe me, I’m a scientist”.
There are some honorable exceptions, of papers which publish accompanying data and the tools they used to process it, but the vast majority don’t.
The fact that negative results don’t get published at all, is just disrespecting the word “science”. One of its basic premises is that of falsability, so proving a theory wrong, is just as valuable as proving a different one right.
One of my favourite videos I’ve watched recently. The sheer skill to beat Binding of Issac and explain an entire lecture’s worth of info about science communication is great.
She seems to know more about both physics and Binding of Isaac than I do.
“Science communication is hard so I’m going to play a game while explaining science, cuz that’s not distracting at all.”
It just wasn’t for me and I lost interest after a few minutes
I always had doubts about scientific theories on atomic particles and space but they were theory for a reason. Theory is what the word means, it is based on many assumptions. Like the big bang is a theory, It leads scientist to explore it from multiple angles through validation and verification (because science is hard). They are never put out as a fact. So I don’t even know what point she’s trying to make.
Theory in science generally means something much more stringent than it does in vernacular. From Wikipedia:
A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that can be (or a fortiori, that has been) repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results. Where possible, theories are tested under controlled conditions in an experiment.[1][2] In circumstances not amenable to experimental testing, theories are evaluated through principles of abductive reasoning. Established scientific theories have withstood rigorous scrutiny and embody scientific knowledge.
A scientific theory differs from a scientific fact or scientific law in that a theory explains “why” or “how”: a fact is a simple, basic observation, whereas a law is a statement (often a mathematical equation) about a relationship between facts and/or other laws.
So when something is being put forward as “A Scientific Theory” it is meant to be taken as the best possible explanation we can make of why the universe is the way it is, backed by exhaustive tests using the best methods currently available to us.
In science, when something is just a theory in the way you mean, it’s called a hypothesis.
@On @interolivary the point she was making was that her job is harder because some people are actively dishonest and that creates distrust towards her entire profession, not just the individuals.
Big focus on the how it happened for this case of string theory.
Like gravity is a theory.
Angela is great! Love her passion and how she phrases things.
Sure the videos could usually be half as long without losing much in the way of her argument but I enjoy her personality so I don’t mind.I watched her video about silicon-based life recently and thought it was very well explained and super interesting. She’s a good communicator.
Thanks for this, liked and subscribed immediately!
That was very interesting viewpoint and as a representative of the"Public" - some of the finer intricacies of academia have escaped me, but I largely agree with what she’s saying.
@interolivary she’s cool.
Interesting take, but super surprised to find it paired with an Isaac run!
Really? Lied to you?
I know fuck all about physics but that was interesting! She was great
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I don’t normal watch YouTube (especially for this long) and I especially don’t watch people play games, but… Ive been wondering why I don’t hear about String Theory any more… and I’ve owned Binding of Isaac and have yet to play it. So I thought, why not!?
I was actually surprised by how interesting I found this. Dr Collier communicated some things I’ve been curious about while also teaching me several new things. The game added a fun element, but I’m afraid it’s probably going to remain dormant on Steam for a long while longer now. 😁
Anyway, thanks for the share.
I didn’t watch this video but I suspect the sentiment is similar to Sabine’s (I highly recommend her channel)
I love Sabines channel. Fantastic communicator of advanced ideas and you wouldn’t necessarily expect it from the tone of her voice while she talks but her humor is top notch too
Then I regret to inform you that Sabine has some not so great views on trans issues
